Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core – Review
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Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core – Review
Final Fantasy VII is arguably the most popular of ALL Final Fantasy’s, as well as arguably the best as well. When Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children was announced in japan for BlueRay, you better believe it was a console seller and that was just the M O V I E. When a movie drives hardware sales above any games you know you have something special. The popularity of the series (Which I will note is my favorite of all of the FF series as well) has driven SquareEnix to create the 10 year anniversary series of FF7 games, Crisis Core being the only to appear on Sony’s PlayStation Portable Platform.
Story: Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core is a prequel to the 1997 PS1 Classic Final Fantasy VII (Im gonna just abreviate now…). The story begains with young Zack Fair, Cloud Strife’s Friend/Mentor, climbing the ropes of SOILDER visiting key plot locations in Wutai, Midgar, etc. Eventually shit hits the Fan and Zack must hunt a former member of SOILDER, 1st Class Genesis. You will learn more about created SOLDIER’s, meet Cloud before he was infused with Jenova Cells, you will completely relive the Nibelheim sequence, and at the end understand the connection between Cloud and Zack which was only hinted at in FFVII on the PS1. The games premise was based on a secret subplot/scene thats played out on Disc 3 of FFVII when you revisit Shinra Mansion in the Library.
First and formost this is a FAN game. Considering most of us have played through the original game first, and came back to this game years later may have conditioned my opinion, but I believe newcommers to the series should play the original game first. If you own an PS3 or a PSP and have a internet connection, FFVII is available for download on PSN, and is totally worth the cost of entry. I say newcommers should start with the original game, as I feel the Prequel references to many scattered details of the original game that someone not totally dedicated to playing both games or does not have a definitive memory may miss the connections that play out later in the story.
Presentation: This easily is about the best looking game on the PSP to date. Ingame sequences are well animated, the character models are fairly sharp and clean looking. There is almost a Kingdom Hearts style to the overall ingame engine look and feel. The environments are the biggest shortcoming with the least attention to detail in comparison to the character models, however considering the limitations of the platform this can be easily forgiven and should be. The CGI Cutscenes are by far the biggest show stoppers, as they should be. FFVII was the first game to incorporate CGI cutscenes into the story arch, which led to all future Final Fantasy’s following suit. SquareEnix’s legendary CGI sequences thankfully hold true here as well. Most of the CGI scenes within the game could have easily been ripped out of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, which in itself is one long ass CGI movie. Most noteworthy in my opinion would entail the Sephiroth vs Genesis battle toward the beginning of the game, as Sephiroth cuts up the Junon Cannon with ease.
Gameplay: Considering how much Fan Service this game attempts to cram in, the battle system is far different from the original game, and in my opinion is for the better. I would happily accept this system for a FFVII remake, albeit without the enclosed barriers of entry and escape that appear for every encounter. The game takes queue’s from Enix’s title StarOcean, by allowing the player to directly control Zack in battle with the thumb numb, and controlling attacks and spells on the fly. Item and Materia in battle are accessed by using the shoulder buttons. Selecting items while in the middle of a heated battle however can be quite challenging, especially if your foe moves quickly. Youll find that you also may button mash wildly and accidentally use an item that you didn’t mean to use, which often means Zack stops in his tracks, performs the animation, and is easily struck. During battle its required you learn to dodge, as Zack cant seem to take a hit very well. In some of the bonus stages, even a high level nearly maxed out Zack can only take one maybe two direct hits. Needless to say you will die more often than your Average RPG.
A very unusual design choice resides in the slot machine battle engine, or as its known in Crisis Core as the DMW. Every so often the slot machine that continues to spin in the top left hand corner will show specific characters from the game. Combination’s of these characters give you multiple status effects, level up your Materia, level up Zack, enable limit breaks, and completely randomly use Summoms. It is a controlled chaos at best, as it seems to enable the right combination’s when necessary with the look of it all being randomized. I can understand where this was necessary for summoning as its an Action RPG, you would not want to give the player the ability to summon to often or it would break the game, but the idea of the slot machine determining when Zack Levels up is a curse and a blessing. For a time you may be leveling one to three times in one battle, and then you may go for a long period of time where Zack doesn’t level no matter how many battles you fight. As random as leveling seems, you get the sense the computer changes the values in the slot machine in your favor when certain conditions are met.
Overall walking around most of the world environments is bland. There are not alot of NPC’s to talk to in most locations, and there are not many secrets to find when you are given free reign in any given area. Not that there are many moments where you have room to explore, the game is extremely linear which the game is better for. You will run into random battles in every zone, each part of the level geometry is a zone. However if you hug Zack against the walls your chance of a random battle decreases significantly. Due to some odd difficulty spikes in enemy strength you may find yourself attempting to get through levels against the walls at all times, especially in the latter half of the bonus stages.
Special: The game can be played in chunks and thankfully save spots are plentiful. Another very very useful feature is the ability to pause the game at any time, and I do mean at ANY time. The ability to pause at any moment should be a standard for any mobile game period, it should be a requirement before publication, its that useful. A large chunk of the mobile game play resides in the bonus stages which can be accessed at any save point. These Bonus stages are short missions that help you level, find rare and powerful materia, and even at times extend the supporting cast’s storyline. You will find a young Yuffie along the materia missions in which she gets herself in too deep and you must go rescue her. These missions can last from 2 to 15 minutes and are usually very straight forward get from point A to B and beat the Boss. I will mention that eventually these missions become extremely difficult, and without the right upgrades and leveling damn near impossible. You do not have to play these bonus missions to complete the game, however they will give you access to the more interesting materia and items, not to mention bring you level up to deal with the bosses of the main quest. The ability to fight the summons through the Prof. Hojo bonus missions was my particular favorite portion.
Conclusion: Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core is a worthwhile experience and a worthy prequel to my favorite game of all time, and what is considered by many one of the greatest stories ever told. It has a few flaws due to platform limitations, and the battle system takes a little getting used to but in the end you can easily sink 100 hours out of this game if you attempt to see and complete all of the bonus quests. The pacing is just right and the ending wil move you.
A note on the ending, not a spoiler but, id suggest not playing it in a public place. For better or worse its a meaningful part of the entire story, but its difficult to witness all the same and I am not ashamed to say even though I knew it was coming, I wasnt ready for it when it happened.
Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core is a ***** out of 5
