Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII

I can't help but love how cheesy Genesis and Angeal are. Genesis is like a Shakespearean villain reciting prose and poem every time he does something muddied in allegory and symbolism but within a fantasy cyberpunk (dieselpunk? Victorian dieselpunk? Makopunk??) RPG world. He's more detached from reality than Sephiroth ever has been and he never even had a burning-down-the-village gamer moment.

It's so ridiculous in concept & simplified in execution, that I can't help but enjoy it.

Angeal on the other hand is just a gruff, stoic & heroic "MY HONOR!!!" kind of guy who really lends to the ambiguous nature of the FFVII plotline at large. He just sort of does what he does and there's no real explanation given besides he's friends with Genesis and thinks he's a "monster."

Other than that it's pretty much just a Final Fantasy THEMED hack n' slash. You attack stuff, dodge stuff, use materia that's not turned-based (who would have thought?), and go through a melodramatic cheesy yet charming storyline.

It's simple and repetitive, but I like it.

I'm in Chapter 4 of this game, and I figured I would try to write a bit about how I'm feeling about it.

I love Zack, he's likeable and upbeat, and he has a bit of depth to his character that I appreciate. He's naive, but not too naive.

I think the dialogue is slightly awkward in general, like they should have recorded more lines or something, but overall it's par for the course. The awkwardness between Zack and Aerith is actually a bit charming because they are just flirting and Aerith is kinda a weirdo, so that part works better than I would have imagined. I think the strangest dialogue is everything dealing with Genesis, Angeal, and Sephiroth whose intentions are all bewilderingly unclear at this point. Like, it almost feels like a fever dream, how poorly explained some of this is, making me feel like I missed out on an entire chapter of exposition or something. I'm hoping that eventually I find some clarity, especially on Sephiroth, who has always seemed like the definition of "cool bad guy with no depth." Admittedly, I haven't played FFVII in a long time, so maybe that's a reductive view, but I'm looking forward to advancing the story.

Gameplay-wise, this is clearly a prototype of FFVII Remake. They took some very obvious inspiration from Crisis Core for that game, both with the battles and the story parts. This means that I'm having a lot of fun with Crisis Core because I loved FFVIIR, but it also means I'm yearning for the depth of that game, which improved on this formula by a significant margin. Still, the battles are mostly enjoyable despite most missions being basically a corridor. I like the fact that the game incorporates minigames like FFVII, which was always very charming to me.

I'm playing it on Switch, but it does occasionally feel like a PSP game in its scope: Unlike FFVII, which made the most of its static backgrounds, and the Remake, where I felt like I was walking around in a real city with real people, I get the impression in Crisis Core that I'm playing a video game and that the world doesn't really exist much beyond what I'm shown. The attention to detail is really entertaining, though, with a lot of fun art (the Malboro posters in Midgar) and callbacks to other FF games (Tonberries!!).

Ultimately, I'm enjoying the game a lot, despite the cracks. I'm really stoked to be playing it after so many years and I'm excited to play through all of Zack's story.

Edit: I am at the last boss (I think), and the dialogue just feels so stilted. I don't know why these characters can't have normal conversations! The game has these rather compelling and likeable characters with literally zero motivation or interesting backstory. Genesis, Angeal, Hollander, even Zack and Sephiroth to some degree have no reason to act the ways that they do. It's frustrating, because I like the characters and I want to know more about them!

Compilation of Final Fantasy VII was revealed in 2003 as a project to expand the FFVII universe with a feature length CGI film sequel, a prequel, two mobile games (one of which was supposedly alright but never got a western release), and a spinoff featuring Vincent that nobody liked. Oh, we also got a tech demo for the PS3 that showed off what VII would look like in HD, but nothing ever came of that. The project was a huge disappointment by most accounts (excluding dumpy fujoshi/Hot Topic girls) and added a ton of bullshit to the lore. The VII remake everyone wanted wouldn't be announced until 2015. Needless to say, the Compilation ruined thousands of lives. Crisis Core is often cited as the best/only good thing to come out of the project. Best? Certainly. Good? That's open to debate. CC serves as the prequel to FFVII and stars Zack Fair, the SOLDIER operative that Cloud mixed his memories with. It also stars familiar characters like Sephiroth, Aerith, Cloud, etc while introducing new characters like Angeal, Genesis, and Cissnei. Chris del Chris and Hot Coldman also make a cameo.

Crisis Core begins with Zack as a second class SOLDIER, uh, soldier, and his squadmates Sephiroth, Angeal, and Genesis. Sephiroth is fairly amiable if a bit distanced, Genesis was modeled after the J-rock star Gackt (who also voiced and co-designed him), and Angeal is like Zack’s older brother figure and spouts comically hollow platitudes like “Heroes... must have honor… and dreams…” With Zack being a seldom-seen yet incredibly important character in FFVII proper, the pressure was on Square to make him a compelling character. In this regard they stumbled a little, but ultimately succeeded. At the beginning Zack is a boring wide-eyed protagonist that reminded a bit of Kingdom Hearts’ Sora (not a good thing), and serves more as a vehicle for the player to view the plot than a meaningful character. Eventually, after enduring a series of traumatic events, he starts to become more likeable and less of a faceless JRPG protagonist. The game’s ending in particular is what managed to (just barely) redeem it.

Yet the plot itself isn’t particularly interesting. The main antagonist, Genesis, discovers he was born of Jenova cells, but unlike Sephiroth he’s an imperfect copy that starts degrading over the course of the story. He turns against Shinra as he searches for a cure with his main motive being to surpass Sephiroth. Genesis’ arc is basically a retread of Sephiroth’s plotline in VII (with a few differences) and it’s a disappointing angle to take. Genesis himself is fairly dull. On top of being a first class SOLDIER, he’s a scholar of the play Loveless and like 70% of his dialog is him ominously reciting lines from it. He gets a redemption arc but it felt sloppy and poorly executed. The best part of the plot, for me at least, was getting to see Sephiroth as an actual person instead of a mind-broken demigod. He’s one of the most likeable characters in the game, and I think it would have been much better if Genesis was cut from the story altogether. Angeal, Sephiroth and Zack getting into SOLDIER antics, slowly having their relationship strained, and the story ending with the Nibelheim mission would have been great, but I’m assuming Square felt like it wasn’t epic enough and needed to muddy the plot.


The gameplay is… well, it’s serviceable with one huge, glaringly obvious flaw that kind of ruins it – I’ll cover that later. The combat isn’t as clever of an action conversion as Remake, but the core of it is alright. You can equip up to six Materia and each one acts as an ability or a passive upgrade much like VII proper. There’s a Materia Fusion to add further customization to the combat. It works as advertised – fuse two Materia to either power up one or get a brand new Materia. Discovering new Materia this way was exciting, but I don’t think it was utilized enough. The coolest result I got was “Dark Firaga” which is Firaga that also poisons enemies. Other than that it was mostly a means to upgrade your Materia with stat buffs (+1 STR, etc), which was much less exciting. It’s a neat idea but it could have been expanded into something much cooler, and the game ends up being so easy there isn’t much point to spending time fusing the best Materia.

I guess Square wasn’t confident in the core combat so they added this convoluted slot machine mechanic (called the DMW) that’s constantly spinning and stopping during battle. There’s a row for character portraits and a row for numbers. Getting certain number combinations will give you temporary buffs like increased defense or 0 MP cost, and I ended up enjoying that aspect. There’s a small amount of dynamism in suddenly getting an invincibility buff and running up to an enemy to wail on it, or spamming powerful magic when the cost is 0. What really pissed me off about the DMW is how it feels the need to stop the gameplay entirely whenever a character portraits lines up on both the left and right slot. When this happens the slot machine expands to take up the whole screen, all action is paused, and you have to watch the middle slot roll until you either get three in a row or a dud. If you do get three in a row, you get the privilege of watching an unskippable Limit Break or summon that, again, you have no control over. This happens so frequently is destroys the flow of battle. There were many instances where I was hoping the slots wouldn’t line up just so I could get on with it. There were also times when the slot machine popped up right before the end of the battle, turning something that would have ended in a single hit into a drawn out attack animation. Leveling up is also handled by the slot machine when you get a 777. This seemed too absurd to leave to chance, so I looked up how the mechanic worked and it turns out your chance of leveling up depends on what level you are and how high of a level you can be. In that case why not just stick with a normal experience system? You get SP from battles which is required to perform Materia fusion (with the higher level fusions requiring more) but there wasn’t a single point in the game where I didn’t have an insane amount of SP to spare. It’s just another layer of complication that’s meant to give the combat more “flavor”, but it ends up feeling pointless and annoying – like the DMW itself! Outside of the main plot, you can do side missions at save points for extra items, equipment, gil, etc. The more you beat the more you unlock, with 300 in total. I ended up doing around 25 but lost interest because they mostly followed the same structure (kill all the enemies in a boring nondescript map). There are a few points where you may want to grind missions for upcoming boss encounters, but there’s very little incentive to go beyond that.

Seeing Midgar rendered with new tech was probably cool in 2008 (the visuals are certainly impressive for the time), but the magic is lost in a post-Remake society, which goes to show how middling the game was in the first place. There also isn’t much done with the setting other than a few landmarks like the Sector 6 park and Aerith’s church. You don’t even get to see Wall Market for Christ’s sake! In that regard Crisis Core disappoints the most. I think it would have been much better on PS3 hardware as it feels decidedly cramped as a portable title. The game itself is only 15-18 hours long and feels very rushed. I guess that’s the most shocking thing about CC – for all the marketing and baggage it carried, it still feels unambitious. Crisis Core is far from the prequel FFVII the world deserved, but it holds up favorably compared to miserable train wrecks like Dirge of Cerberus and Advent Children. Ultimately I would recommend reading its plot synopsis on the Final Fantasy wiki or watching a cutscene compilation on Youtube instead of playing it. CC has its moments but doesn’t do much to flesh out VII’s (already fleshed-out) world or add any interesting lore beyond Zack’s character arc. Its biggest merit is being kind of mediocre instead of falling flat on its face.