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XGD > PSP > Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII
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 Information
Videos | Title | Views | Length | Date Added | | 244 | 4:43 | 9/18/2008 |
Reviews Bad poetry and a questionable military. So, THIS is what Midgar was all about..., August 5, 2008 Rating: 10.0/10 By Nineteen Seven It’s been more than a decade since Final Fantasy VII was released and influenced a generation with its stellar presentation, establishing a game that remains a milestone in the history of ‘dem vidya games’. I was never really a fan of the series and I didn’t have the same level of emotional intensity as many of my friends had experienced, but the game was fun to play and the story was cheesy enough to keep me entertained. Still, its impact was known and it came as somewhat of a surprise to see that no other Final Fantasy after it had captured that same level of fandom as VII did, regardless as to if they were good or not. After a few years of attempting to match, let alone surpass the success and even veering off its pattern of interchangeable stories with a direct sequel, indirect spin-offs and even an online entry, Square-Enix made a sensible call that they hoped would satisfy the industry: a prologue to FFVII.
Of course, the idea of complete satisfaction sounded good on paper, but there was criticism to be had when the end results presented themselves. A lackluster movie was made with a story seemingly written by someone with a passion for mediocre fan-fiction, a lackluster action game starring Vincent Valentine shooting people throughout nostalgic locations riddled with 'boring', and a lackluster anime revolving around the Turks were giving the sensible side of their fan base the suspicion that Square-Enix was merely milking their most successful franchise as opposed to giving their fans what they truly wanted. Not to say a good portion wasn’t satisfied, but it was a safe assumption to make when you measured the overall quality of their products. The idea of a prologue is to expand on a story’s foundation, and it seemed as if pivotal characters, like Cloud and Sephiroth, were getting the short end of the stick in regards to character development.
Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, however, was a move in the right direction.
Instead of getting that in-depth look of the main protagonist and his nemesis as fans had been asking for, we get to look at the prologue through the eyes of a not-so-trivial-but-trivial-enough character, Zack Fair, who was barely mentioned in FFVII but remained a pivotal character in Cloud’s past. Ten years is a good amount of time for the writers to overlook that trivial aspect that was Zack's identity and patch it up with a solid tale, and for the most part, it works. The story, revolving around Zack’s quest to become a 1st Class SOLDIER operative for Shin-Ra, is right in line with its predecessor; the story is elevated beyond an amateur status due to a stereotypical and easily approachable cast, a basic story that’s overcomplicated and stretched out through a variety of visually creative locales, and a healthy dose of generic plot twists in the right places at the right times. Given the material, this works well.
The first thing you’ll notice when you start the game is the fact that the presentation, from the cutscene direction to the music, is top-notch, more than good enough to keep players entertained from the main game. If a developer can pull you into their world and keep you from reflecting on mediocre circumstances and dialogue in the process, then they’ve succeeded. Square-Enix played the nostalgia card with perfection – they’ve certainly had the practice – with the opening mission almost mirroring the first five minutes of FFVII, walking around the picture-perfect Shin-Ra Headquarters, and even traversing through Nibelheim. Despite a handful of new and essential characters that take most of the spotlight in Zack’s story, there are a healthy amount of references to the past, such as appearances from the Turks, former party members and, yes, Cloud and Sephiroth who both play their roles as SOLDIER operatives well. While the story focuses more on new yet unreferred cast members such as Zack’s mentor Angeal and the main villain Genesis than on the characters you’ve come to see, Cloud had his moments in the spotlight when Zack’s missions allow it. Sephiroth's role was enjoyable to watch, seeing him as a sensible operative (well, as sensible as one can get when wearing a shirtless trench coat during field operations) and watching him lose his mind in an over-dramatic fashion throughout the course of the story. If you’re intending to play Crisis Core to get the stories of Cloud and Sephiroth, keep in mind that it’s not their show to run and save yourself the disappointment when they don’t show up every other second.
Things aren’t turn-based this time around, either. Instead, Square decided to take a page from Kingdom Hearts and Metal Gear Solid by turning the game into an action-RPG with an equal amount of cutscenes dividing said action. Of course, ‘action-RPG’ translates to ‘beat-em up with emphasis on stats’, and you be finding most of your time being spent manually attacking enemies and collecting items to make you stronger. Outside of combat, you can walk around town and talk to people, perform a fetch quest and maybe enter a building or two, just like any other RPG. However, walking into certain areas of a city or a pathway during a mission will trigger a fight with invisible barriers keeping you from leaving the battle. Despite the fact that you’ll usually be outnumbered by known characters and monsters from FFVII, you’ll be able to block and roll your way out of action, switching between targeted enemies, and kissing them to death with your sword. You’re given a basic pattern of four-hit sword strikes, only you have to wait for the first attack animation before you can follow up with the next slash. Button mashing will still work; it’ll just be slower this time around. Despite the fact that you’ll be switching through special attacks and magic spells in real-time, you’ll be relying on your basic sword combo for the most part.
Another interesting detail about combat is the DMW, the Digital Mind Wave. It’s basically the Limit Break for this title, acting like a roulette wheel that sits on the top corner of the screen. If certain combinations are reached, such as three Clouds’ or three Aeris’, results could include special summons, boosts in health and magic, and leveling up. For the most part, you probably won’t even notice it until something happens. While it introduces a new luck-based factor into battle and can generate excitement if you’re able to summon, say, a Bahamut when you’re low on health and you have eleven guys trying to kill you, it also brings that element of frustration. Sure, you don’t really need those special perks to win if you have perseverance and a will to avoid attacks, but it really does suck when your stats are at your current level’s peak and you’re entering battles for the sake of just waiting for the DMW to level up. It’s nothing game-breaking, but it’s a little aggravating to be given control over your character’s physical actions in a fight, being able to manually avoid attacks and deliver them on cue to a button press, only for luck to get in your way of being stronger. (Roulette machines suck, too. Always stealing my change…)
The game is divided into chapters, which means that backtracking in the story mode isn’t an option, which means you should expect the levels to be somewhat streamlined and linear. To make up for that, however, is the inclusion of arbitrary missions Shin-Ra delivers at each save point, up to two hundred of them! Then again, with a number like that, one should expect the game to eventually hit that wall of repetitiveness, and it does. Each mission consists of killing ‘x’ amount of enemies with ‘y’ requirements for at nostalgic location ‘z’ for whatever reasons Shin-Ra gives you to help you rationalize your tasks and make sleeping at night a little easier. Your reward for these trials are a good amount of items, including the return of Materia, which comes in different types and colors, just as they did inFFVII, and each can help increase a stat or add an effect for your disposal in battle. You can even fuse Materia to create even stronger abilities, and while the missions will get repetitive, it’s fun to enhance Zack early in the game and have him able to crush weaker enemies with a handful of blows.
While missions are entirely optional and take up a fair amount of time to complete, they can help you gain an advantage during the harder battles of the story mode and each mission lasts for a handful of minutes, perfect if you don’t have much time on your hands. Plus, it’s pretty fun to hunt down monsters and beat them into submission… until they overpower you, and therein lies another issue with the game, in which enemies can become extremely overpowered later in the game, forcing you to ‘grind’ in order to resist the amount of damage they can deliver. Not only that, but you’ll need to unlock and equip certain items that can resist the common RPG effects monsters can cast, such as “Stop” and “Death”, which have a much more severe effect in Crisis Core than in most RPGs. “Stop”, for example, slows down your movements dramatically, leaving you open to enemy attacks for a little longer than I hoped, while ‘Death” just… well, it just kills you regardless. Sometimes you can see these attacks coming, but due to the large numbers of enemies you’ll have to face, you won’t be able to do anything about it and unless you have that Top Hat and that Gold-Plated Wallet equipped, there’s nothing you can do about it. Again, it’s not enough to kill the experience, but expect to be annoyed a few times. The camera isn’t the greatest either, but it’s a third-person action game and the camera isn’t attached behind your back. It gets stuck in corners at times, and it doesn’t always give you a good view of the action. Go figure. (You can’t skip cutscenes, either.)
At the end of the day, Square-Enix finally delivers a spin-off with enough enjoyable gameplay to warrant a play, beyond the rationale of rekindling nostalgia from a new point of view. It’s a great, high-quality, solid action game with an amusing story and a great deal of combat to be had, albeit neither as deep as FFVII. It has its share of flaws, but if you’re a fan of its predecessor, you owe it to yourself to give this a shot because, really, this might be as good as it gets.
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