Apex Legends' Final Fantasy 7 crossover starts on a sour note amid suspicions over AI art and total cosmetic costs as high as $360

A nessie plushie looks at the screen while Apex Legends characters dressed as Final Fantasy 7 favorites fight in the background
(Image credit: Respawn)

Apeಌx Legends' surp💖rise team-up with Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth isn't going down well with fans, w♔ith complaints over cosmetic prices🤡 and suspicions of AI artwork in promotional material rife online.

Set to launch tomorrow and run until January 13, the Final Fantasy 7 takeover introduces a Limit Break system and new items you can chance upon during a match, like 🐬the iconic Buster Sword or Hop-Up Materia that grant abilities. So it goes with events, though; what's catching the eye are the cosmetics involved.

The Final Fantasy 7-themed event features 36 new items you can obtain through event packs, including six 'Iconic' s♈kins you buy outright if you'd rather. 

That's not how things typically go in Apex, though. Events in the popular battle royale usually include an heirloom item that is unlockable once you get everything else on offer – something that fans reckon will set you back $160 on average per event. Here, though? The heirloom item is available in event packs, though the odds of getting one are so low that , at which point you'll likely have spent over $360 to get the Buste꧟r Sword heirloom, which is different to the one that can be picked up in-game. 

The event also comes with a One-Winged Angel-themed death box that o꧟nly unlocks once you've got everything else, which, as fans have worked out, likely means a hefty ဣinvestment. One player has , including an Xbox Series S, Nintendo Switch, and much more.

EA and Respawn are also over accusations that marketing material for the event leans on AI. As shared online, several images have some irregular💃ities that you often see when AI is involved, though what you see is a result of in-game capture being fed through an anime filter of some sort. 

AI has become an 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:increasingly 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:popular trend in the games industry over the past several months, as developers flock to adopt it while writers and artists fear what that could mean for their jobs. FPS of the moment and Apex Legends challenger, 澳洲幸运ꦏ5开奖号🍸码历史查询:The Finals is no stranger to those conversations, ꦬhaving openly leaned on AI for voice work. 

The general mood toward AI, 𒈔coupled with the lofty sums involved in getting Final Fantasy 7 skins in Apex Legends, means the sentiment around the popular battle royale isn't grand at the moment. At the time of writing, Respawn ✨hasn't acknowledged either pain points. 

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth’s marketing team jokingly takes credit for the green comet that passed Earth for the first time in 50,000 years.

Iain Harris
News Editor, Games

I joined GamesRadar+ in May 2022 following stints at PCGamesN and PocketGamer.Biz, with some freelance for Kotaku UK, RockPaperShotgun, and VG24/7 thrown in for good mea𝓀sure. When I'm not running the news team on the games side, you'll find me putting News Editor duties to one side to play the hottest🃏 JRPG of 20 years ago or pillaging the depths of Final Fantasy 14 for a swanky new cloak – the more colourful, the better.