Crisis Core Review
Posted by TimothyJul 6
Ok so I finally played through Crisis Core. There are some good things and bad things but overall it was enjoyable.
The story! First of all, it’s cool to see this person that’s mentioned very briefly in FFVII and how his story plays out. Zack also makes a super brief cameo in Advent Children. This whole situation revolving around Cloud kind of made no sense in FFVII. All these years later the bulk of what I can even remember from FFVII is a haze and playing through Crisis Core actually does fill in the gaps pretty nicely. Overall though, I’m not sure if it’s due to the portable nature of the game, but it felt like I was moving from event to event and there wasn’t a strong connection between the events that were unfolding. Some elements of the story were a lot weaker than I expected them to be such as relationships between Aerith and himself. I also played this over the span of about 1.5 months even though the actual playtime was under 20 hours, so maybe I didn’t feel as strongly due to the gaps in my personal play. The end is where everything wraps up and feels really strongly connected to FFVII, enough so that I’m very compelled to load it up on the Playstation and give it a run through.
The gameplay is totally monotonous. Combat is super simple X button spam and minor tweaks in equipment and materia make it so that never really changes much, but hey, is that so different than usual Final Fantasy games? You can cast spells and only in maybe 2 fights do I feel that even mattered. In those fights you can’t reach the flying opponent so you’re forced to deal with the problem at range. Leveling up and limit breaks are handled through a random roulette wheel. I suspect that there’s an actual experience counter and that once you reach certain points it levels you up, but then again it may just be totally random. That aspect really irked me since the very very few times I was stuck I didn’t actually know how to deal with the situation. Typically I’d just go kill monsters, get a few levels, but in this game it’s erratic. You feel less in control of that.
On the flip side, you are a Soldier 1st class. You feel very powerful throughout the game. It would be strange to see Zack struggling even though he’s this very elite mercenary. So maybe I can forgive that element just due to the strangeness if he were in fact weak.
Only much much later did it even occur to me to run through missions to power up. What they’ve devised is a sort of side-mission setup where you go into the menu and you can look up all these missions that get unlocked through the course of the game. Though the missions you can gain new summons and various other items, however only 2 of the mission types are so overtly named. The rest have more storytelling elements. I completed about 25% of them as of now and feel foolish since one of them is called something like Valuable Treasure Hunter and with the first 2 sets of those missions I was able to equip 2 more items which made a huge difference in the end. The missions are very repetitive though. They’re practically all identical (search for the unique monster and kill him) but I think it’s made for the portable nature of the system.
My major grievances with the game are the horrible camera angles. Some fights would start and the camera would just jam up in a horrendous spot. This ends up tweaking your directions and most importantly your ability to target monsters to attack. That was a separate problem of it’s own for a few fights where I’m hacking away at the wrong monster because of the way the auto-targeting works.
While I didn’t get stuck too many times, the times I did get stuck were typically on bosses. Bosses that required you to sit through 2-3 minutes of UNSKIPPABLE dialogue. The game even has a new game+ mode where I imagine you simply don’t care anymore about what’s going on and you want to zoom past this stuff but sorry, you have to watch it.
The soundtrack is very off. There are a few tunes that are remixed versions of songs from FFVII but the original stuff isn’t memorable at all.
Anyway, despite that stuff, which isn’t so bad if you play smarter, the game is enjoyable. I’m resisting the urge to plop in FFVII and continue trudging through my uncompleted game library.
