Crisis Core - Final Fantasy (2007)

It's so hard to know what to say about this game. On the one hand it came out when I was 15 so obviously I was the prime target for it. On the other hand I was also a huge fan of the original game and have very strong opinions on how it treats the legacy of that game.

Let's just start with the good. This game is an absolute stunner. This is probably the game that made me think the PSP was a real platform for high-quality story driven experiences. Handheld gaming had never really had a reputation as a viable platform for what we'd call "Triple A games" (as much as I am loathe to use that term) but Crisis Core felt like a real attempt to put the time, effort and money into making that kind of game for a handheld system. Sure, we had the GBA and the DS and they had a lot of excellent games with some phenomenal stories but they were usually seen as secondary to consoles at the time.

The gameplay is really solid too. Turn-based was never really going to be viable on a handheld platform that touted itself as a device you can pick up and play when you have a few moments to spare, something like ATB was far too slow for that. Instead we get a really nice real time combat system based on ATB with seamless transitions into battles, it makes the whole thing feel snappy and fluid and never like the random encounters are taking up your precious time.

There's also the Digital Mind Wave, a continually running slot machine that can grant special effects such as free magic casting, temporary invincibility or guaranteed critical hits. It also has portraits of the characters you meet throughout the game, landing on three of these performs a limit break associated with that character. I'm gonna be honest and say that while I really like this system, it is deeply and utterly convoluted. There's an 'emotion gauge' which affects the probability of landing on certain characters on the reels and the things that effect it are still kind of a mystery to me. In addition to this, there's the 'Modulating Phase' which is activated when the left and right portraits match. During this, one of several things can happen. The game might display a flashback involving the character the reels have landed on, you may enter Summon Mode, Chocobo Mode or Genesis Mode. Also in this phase, the number reels spin and if they land on all 7s, Zack levels up.

There is a lot going on in this system and it has a lot of depth and complexity but maybe a little too much going on. It can be absolutely overwhelming for first time players and even going back to it when Reunion came out, I found myself having to do a fair amount of reading to remember how it worked.

The music is also stellar. Took time for it to grow on me but it ended up fitting the tone really well. I enjoy the contrast between the industrial soundtrack of the original and the kind of country sound they were going for here.

Now for the bad...

The story is a trainwreck frankly. It attempts to expand on the world of Final Fantasy VII in a way I felt was mostly unnecessary. Prequels always have that problem for me, I find that an incredibly well crafted story like Final Fantasy VII already has enough in it to make the narrative compelling and adding more onto it isn't going to make it better and in some cases, just detracts from it.

Take, for example, Genesis... A black sheep of a character portrayed by the ever enigmatic Gackt. I like Gackt, I have nothing against him. I enjoy his contributions to the Kamen Rider Decade soundtrack. Genesis, however, is the embodiment of everything wrong with the direction the Compilation took. A cocky, over-the-top mystery man with an obsession with the play LOVELESS, which is mentioned several times throughout the original game but is wholly unimportant to the story. He seems to have been added to be... I'm not entirely sure, he's kind of just a chaotic force. He also is a character I'd expect from a fanfic or a DeviantArt OC. He's cool, edgy, obsessed with one book that he constantly quotes, has a cool, unique sword, has a black wing just like Sephiroth. He's everything a 14 year old would love. And normally I wouldn't mind this. I was 15 at the time and now that I'm older, I have grown to appreciate this type of character more and enjoy the campiness.

But my problem is that he is such a detriment to the story that he drags the original down by association. It turns out that he was a major instigator in the reason Sephiroth became evil. He was even there when Sephiroth discovered how he was created and confirms this to him. It's a pretty huge retcon and one that really does not go down well. Part of the story of Final Fantasy VII is this huge tragedy that a man who, by all accounts, was a pleasant if distant man and an excellent fighter finding out that the large company he worked for and his father did unimaginably horrible things to produce him just to be a perfect SOLDIER and the obvious devastation this causes to him and his sense of self. After all this, you can kind of understand why he gravitated towards thinking himself to be JENOVA's son and the rightful ruler of the planet. Everything else about him was a lie and he needed something to hold on to and a story about how special he is was just the thing to soothe his damaged sense of self.

Sephiroth's story is a tragedy. Many often think of him as just an unimaginably evil guy who wields incredible power but the truth is that he isn't even the real villain of Final Fantasy VII. Shinra, the company that allowed and approved of the experiments that made him, are the villains. The inhumanity of a large corporation is responsible for everything Sephiroth became. It's upsetting because of how personal it is and his story is just one of millions of the lives destroyed by Shinra. His story was never going to be improved by having Genesis egg him on in his descent into madness by quoting LOVELESS at him.

And that right there is my major issue with this game. It doesn't need to exist. The story it tells isn't one that needs telling and to be honest, I think we'd better off without it. None of the additions make the original any better, nothing it adds makes you suddenly see an event in the original game in a new light, it's just a bunch of moments that make you go "Oh okay, I guess that's how this happened." It's lore for the sake of lore and I wouldn't mind that if it were just its own thing but it's not, it ties itself intricately into the original game and makes both that and itself seem worse by association.

And it's especially worse with how it treats most existing characters. Aerith in particularly is handled so badly that it makes me wonder if Hajime Tabata had even played Final Fantasy VII or if the wildly radical changes to her character was actually what Kazushige Nojima wrote. It didn't add to her character at all because she didn't even feel like the same character and nothing that happens over the course of the game explains how she became the character we know in FFVII.

I've often heard people debate over the merits of play order. Play this first and experience the shock of Zack's death firsthand even though it will spoil the twist in FFVII that Cloud isn't who he says or thinks he is. Or play the original first and learn that Zack dies before going into this, knowing how it will end. And honestly to me it's a no-brainer. Play the original first. You will not gain anything from playing this first and, in fact, might even harm your enjoyment of the original game. Especially if you go in expecting almost any of Crisis Core to be important to the original game. Even Zack, the main character of Crisis Core, barely appears in the game and when he does, it's to basically be a prop for Cloud's story.

Now originally I had a section here that was twice as long as the rest of the review and I cut it out entirely, saving it for another time. The gist of it is that I really don't like the ending, I think it undermines the original game and changing it to a big dramatic showdown with an army of Shinra troops is a change for the worse. I get that having three guards getting a lucky shot on him and finishing him off while he's down would be a deeply unsatisfying ending to the game but it also would be the most honest reflection of the original game's themes. I especially hate that Zack gets to say a few words to Cloud before he dies. The tragedy in the original is how brutal, pointless and pitiful his death was and here it's treated with all the ceremony that the original game seemed to be trying to avoid. From a huge showdown to a few dying words to his friend, it left me feeling disappointed for a lot of reasons.

I have a lot of fondness for this game. It came out around the perfect time for me to be the target demographic. Even still though, I have a lot of trouble seeing this as anything but a game that seems to have been made to appeal to nostalgia. A return to a well loved game from a better time during a period where Square's output seemed to be mostly re-releases and they were struggling with FFXIII's development. The exact opposite of the feeling Remake has with it's eschewing of tradition and bold story directions.

At one point in Crisis Core, Angeal says "No story, is not worth hearing." and I beg to differ. I'm hearing one right now.