Crisis Core

Overall, it was a great game and I’m glad I played it, but it had some major flaws. I’ll play it through again with a guide this time, but probably not for a while yet. Definitely more enjoyable playing a game with no spoilers, but perhaps I’d’ve benefited from a guide when unwinnable battles came along and I spent way too long struggling to survive. There’s a lot I haven’t seen, but playing it again is the best way to level up, since you can start a new game with stats intact.

Crisis Core is a prequel to Final Fantasy VII, which made a deep impression on me. Of course, I won’t be putting in the same hours as I did as a bewitched 13-year-old awed by the power of Playstation, but the fan in me was very happy with the fanservice here. It’s bizarre to think just how many of the current generation of gamers simply won’t have played FFVII, and never will until there’s a remake that isn’t so dated, and just won’t see how much of the game is replicated here, from the intro to several memorable locales. It’s a familiar world to me, one I’m fond of, and little in-jokes like mentions of Don Kanonji and the missions with a very young Yuffie make me smile. We finally see Zack’s story, elevating him from the plot function of the main game to a fleshed-out character. He’s given a typical happy-go-lucky Shounen personality, which surprised me at first but which I soon grew to find quite agreeable. His development as he learns about his fellow SOLDIER members and the world he lives in is a pleasure, and though the inevitability of the ending seems almost tacked-on and bizarre, it still has a sting. Nice, also, to give Tseng a bigger role than the more appreciated Reno/Rude duo.

Other parts of the plot aren’t so great. Sure, Cloud and Tifa’s memories are a big plot point of the main game, so what happens here make sense (even if Cloud has to be unconscious for some half of his screentime), but why Aerith never mentions any of what happens here, or no-one from Shin-ra who knew Cloud and Zack seem to say anything, or why Hojo reacts to Cloud quite like he does in the main game doesn’t seem to hang well with events here. Oh well, there’ll always be a bit of retcon in a prequel like this, and by and large, those quibbles are minor. Angeal works, too, but the weird monster things that soon appear with his characteristics are mostly really goofy and attempts to make them sympathetic at the end don’t really work. Genesis, apparently a Dirge of Cerberus character (I should play that sometime, really), mostly doesn’t work very well as an antagonist, much like Sephiroth towards the very end of FFVII, being too loopy to really seem threatening or to be understood. I can kind of see how it worked in Japan, with someone with the stature of Gackt hamming up the pastiche poetry of ‘Loveless’, an in-game prophetic text, but I don’t like that something like that should be necessary, and I definitely don’t think that it works in the English version, let alone being pivotal to a character’s motives. This is largely why the final third of the game or so is so unsatisfying.

Gameplay is good, though, much more influenced by Kingdom Hearts than other FF games, albeit less frenetic and slicker. Sometimes the targeting system was very frustrating, and it was daft that so many enemies can be killed just by mashing X, but there was a good bit of strategy towards the end and I got very used to dodge-rolling. On the other hand, there were some real frustrations. I made the mistake of choosing ‘Hard’ at the beginning, remembering how Kingdom Hearts II was just way too easy on normal, and regretted it. Hard mode doesn’t seem to make a better challenge, or require more skill or adapt itself to a decent learning curve. It just cranks up damage, I think. So you get hugely frustrating scenarios where you can beat the ordinary grunts very easily and then a boss comes who on normal mode would be a slight jump up and a fun challenge, but in hard just wipes you out with one attack. It made things much more frustrating, not fun. Then there’s the badly-thought-out limit break/levelling system, based on chance and infuriating, sometimes totally overloading you with power, sometimes never registering its presence at all. And it may be hard mode, but I ended up just having to always equip items preventing stun, stop and death, because against any powerful enemies, getting any one of these usually meant game over. Death in particular was just stupid.

The missions idea isn’t bad per se, but there was just way, way too much of the same things, over and over. I feel like I did endless stupid missions, but have barely limped over half of the total…

I’ll say this, though – he may be a solid everyman in FFVII and quite badass in Advent Crisis, but in Crisis Core, wow, they make Cloud a cute, rather hapless uke. Somehow I like him a whole lot more…