Game: Crisis Core Reunion
Spoilers: NONE
Platinum number: 169 (nice)
I've never played the orginal Final Fantasy VII but I've seen Advent Children, I've played Remake, I've played Dirge of Cerberus and I have spoiler cast myself to hell and back with FF7.
So I may not have the RAW history of this particular FF series but I didn't go all in blind.
How did I think Crisis Core go as a remaster and as my first experience with the game?
Gameplay:
If you have played Remake, this combat system is instantly familar to you. It still has the core mechanic of the slot machines which roll mid combat and give you benefits as well as summons/limit breaks. However the combat is exactly like Remake and feels fantastic. A very easy straight forward hack n slash type button mentality with spells to kick ass with.
You can feel the PSP in this game where combat arenas is very simple. Move into a big open area on a straight narrow path and you'll be in a combat arena. Kill enemies. Keep going.
It's very basic and simplistic BUT it never gets tiring or boring. It's so quick that you feel like you just smashed out some enemies within seconds.
The gameplay is VERY straight forward and again, if you have played Remake, you'll be at home here.
Story:
What in the Shakespeare fuck is this insane yet interesting good plot? I swear Zack and the main villian have scenes that could be pulled from a play. The dialouge is so ridiculous yet so enthralling that it hits this fantastic middle point that manages to keep itself so entertaining.
It isn't the most convulted of plots at first but my god does it become some Kingdom Hearts level of insanity and it works so well. It had enough mystery and theories for me and Pumkin to sink our teeth into that we couldn't put it down. It was on our mind every single day.
Ultimately, the plot is basic at first and keeps you going until the very end where the flood gates open and you are handed metaphorical nonsense.
Music:
BEST OST. BASED OST. FANTASTIC OST. Hooooooly fuck. This music pops off in every single way. There is no bad track that I heard in game. It is so good. The main combat song slaps beyond a shadow of a doubt and may be one of the best combat songs I've heard in a long time
Voice acting:
Look people hate on Zack's new VA. I've never heard the original but this game has the most insane dialouge that I don't think anyone can sound good saying any of it. It's amazing how these VA's can deliver ridiculous lines and manage to make it work. I personally liked it.
Negatives:
The biggest issue I have with Crisis Core is just seeing the limitations it has. It's still that PSP game at heart and I know that cannot be helped. I love it in fact but the side missions are just very basic. They're the same maps over and over again with no changes at all. It does get repetitive and it's purely because of the level restrictions they had for the PSP.
It's not a fault of the game but a fault of the era it came from being ported and remastered into a modern era.
Conclusion:
I fucking love Crisis Core. It has Stranger of Paradise energy dialouge with fantastic music, a wonderful plot and genuine feeling characters.
I left crying, happy, angry and excited for whatever Rebirth will do

CISSNEI MARRY ME ❤

Crisis Core is majorly undermined by an antagonist in the running for series-worst. That said, it also quickly redeems itself by having our shonen himbo protagonist Zack tell the villain to shut up in the middle of one of his interminable cornball JRPG villain monologues. He just like me fr

In a sense, this conflict between Zack's indefatigable posi energy and big bad Genesis' indecipherable faux-intellectualism serves as a microcosm for CC at large. It's a snappy and energetic pick-up hack'n slash, while simultaneously bearing the overwrought baggage of needing to lend back-story to Final Fantasy VII's morose RPG saga. You can lose hours to 3-minute sidequests which are really just glorified (and fun) mob fights and inexplicable boss rematches. Meanwhile the main game's "sidequest" moments give you a day-pass for constrained, RPG Redux exploration that rarely rewards you with anything other than more sidequests. All of this is weighed down by a complicated materia system that is far too easy to break, leaving a big fat question mark on how the game was supposed to be paced.

The game's identity crisis is never more clear than when you hit an emotional peak at the end of the first act, before spending a solid 15 minutes in a gauntlet of dialogues and side quests and nearly zero combat all so you can... retrieve a few gil from a street rat kid. It doesn't truly succeed at either of its big design models, largely because of its insistence on having their cake and attaching an epic poem to the cake, too.

The combat is a real treat, literally feels like "What if FF7R but handheld." In a different era I could see myself gradually burning through the game's remaining 180 (I did like 120 on Hard) side missions. Much like The Phantom Pain though, these side missions constantly run up against the plot, both in mechanics and storytelling. Clear one too many side missions and you will absolutely steamroll the game. Spend too much time in a side mission K-hole and you'll either lose track or at best feel out of step with the big plot beats of the game's very short story. In spite of all this, though, Zack was able to warm even my icy heart. He is such a foil to Cloud's incessant cold shoulder, and the trajectory of his story makes you really rethink how you perceive That One Major Thing about Cloud. The ending is way more brutal than I ever would have anticipated from 2008 Squenix, and it lands with just the right level of gravity. Plotholes or no.

That is, at least until Cloud doing a guttural, bone-aching scream is abruptly cut off by a hilariously upbeat and funky Anime End Credits type theme song.

(The Sephiroth stuff is sick and it adds some real dimension to his character to watch him being a completely likable guy. But let's not kid ourselves: those big scenes in Nibelheim were already part of the story, and CC doesn't add anything beyond a higher polygon count here.)

Played the original back in 2020 and seriously fell in love with it, as much as the dialogue is very cheesy and some would say badly written, I loved it so much. Zach is personally one of my favourite protagonists in any story i've read and the ending truly left me so upset for weeks. I genuinely felt i had lost someone close to me i grew up playing the OG ff7 and loved it story and knowing how Zack's journey would end and having to play through it was genuinely heartbreaking to know it would have to end the same way. Seriously one of my favourite games of all time

Being a PSP game this thing has a lot of stuff going wrong and right with it. Combat encounters have a silly rate of happening, the story is iffy in some parts, and man i hate genesis.

But with the bad, there’s always good. The OST, characters and story kept me gripped and i swear Zack has to be one of the best FF characters.

Overall 7/10, pick it up on sale if you can

What a piss poor cash in on an incredible game. Unfortunately my Final Fantasy 7 fandom dictates that I force my way through this.

It's not totally without merit, the ending in particular is very affecting and there's some characterisation throughout that is very good.

However, the vast majority of the gameplay is cookie cutter low effort content that exists mostly to pad out the game time. Combined with two of the most obnoxious, tedious, down right terrible characters (Angeal and Genesis) in the entire Final Fantasy mythos.

This game is entirely carried by its likeable protagonist and iconic ending. The story is an underdeveloped mess. It's paced terribly. The story jumps from one plot point to the next. The game never really slows down long enough for you to get to know any of the characters. Their motivations are kind of waved away. The game has all these new characters and I feel like I don't know anything about them. I feel like the game needed to be twice as long and have a much slower pace. They should have really focused on fleshing out Zacks relationships.

I was interested in getting some more backstory in the FFVII universe, and decided to jump into Crisis Core right after finishing the recently released Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. While this game was extremely underwhelming in a lot of ways (I give most of it a pass being a remake to a PSP exclusive), it was extremely additive to understanding characters in the series' universe.

Bullet points: Combat is fine, story is pretty overcomplicated, but the final moments of the game are absolutely ACE. I really like Zack and really get his importance being highlighted in the new Remake series now, so overall, I'm glad I burned through this, even if it wasn't the hottest gaming experience I've had recently.

Agressively mediocre fanservice schlock. 23 hours felt like 40. Makes you stupider the longer you think about it. I made a point to play through as many of the optional missions I could before finally giving up and admitting that 1) they are all essentially the same and 2) none of it really matters. Excruciatingly repetitive butt-rock permeates the musical score, though the barebones piano tracks and echoes of old FFVII themes are alright. Plot-wise it presents a handful of interesting character moments and mysteries that could certainly be elaborated upon, but are not. It is absolutely baffling how quickly the last act of the game wraps up without exploring the multitude of its threads in any real depth. You fight the boss and a 30 minute clipshow puts all the characters where they have to be by the end before and post credits trailer shouts "PLEASE PLAY FINAL FANTASY VII AGAIN."

On the upside:
Zack and Cloud's relationship. Genesis is hilarious. It is physically impossible not to crack a smile while watching the most well known RPG villain of all time answer a flip phone to say "Sephiroth here".

So I played this game on the PSP for the first time a few months before Remake came out. I was a relatively new FF7 fan at the time and was getting into the Compilation Material. With each piece of media that I played/watched/read, I slowly came to the realization that the Compilation was a really bad project that failed to live up to original game in terms of quality and story. So much of it engages in blatant fan service and poor writing (both in plot and characters) that I began to understand why it was so controversial among the fan base. However, there was one exception that often came up that was described to me as the only thing from the compilation worth playing, and that was Crisis Core. I went into the PSP game with high hopes that there would be at least something redeemable from the compilation, but unfortunately for me, what I found was basically more of the same, with a couple of exceptions.

Writing this review is a bit difficult because I can review the game based on how good of a remake/remaster it is, or I can review based on the game itself. I'll attempt to do both.

Just to get this right off the bat, this is basically the definitive way to play the original game. The improved graphics, overall better voice cast, and the reworked combat basically makes this a significantly better experience. The graphical overhaul looks pretty nice and I think was a good way of bringing this game up to modern standards. This version just feels like a much snappier game to play, and that's thanks to the combat's much faster pace that's more in line with what you see in the Remake Trilogy. There's this satisfying feel to the combat that kept me coming back even during this game's worst moments. In fact much of this game was redone to have closer continuity with the Remake Trilogy. I already mentioned the combat, but the new VA cast from the remake trilogy comes back to voice most of the roles, which leads to less cringey experience. Even the UI has been reworked to be more in line the Remake Trilogy.

Unfortunately, these improvements can't save the deeper flaws this game has. The story is nonsensical mess, with writing that feels like was written by a madman. Things just happen in the plot with seemingly no explanation and much of dialogue is unintentionally hilarious to the point where a number of memes have spawned out of this game. Some of the worst elements of this story come from the stuff that has nothing to do with the original story of the PS1 game. Genesis as a character is dumb addition to this story and every time he is on screen, he is hard to take seriously. To this day, I still don't fully understand what Genesis was trying to accomplish and it feels like he was hamfisted in a story that really didn't need a character like him. I genuinely believe that the only reason why this game is beloved by the fan base is because of Zack, whose original VA Rick Gomez does a lot of heavy lifting in making the character as likeable as he is. Gomez's absence is definitely felt in this remaster, though his replacement does a decent job. I think the final battle in this game is so well executed that it almost makes you forget that this game narrative was largely bad.

On the gameplay aspect, not much as been improved besides the combat. The game's mission structure is really repetitive and is even more glaring now that its on consoles instead of only handhelds. That might have worked back in 2007/2008 when PSP tech was impressive, but nowadays, it just feels like a slog to get through. Most of the side quests are pretty meaningless and don't do much to help expand the lore or add more texture to the world. The mini games are also really clunky and feel random at times. I get trying to mix up the gameplay to keep things fresh, but the implementation feels unpolished.

In the end, when I think about the original, while this isn't the worst gaming experience I've ever had, I can't help but feel disappointed about the final product. It shares many of same problems with other Compilation titles and is an overall mediocre experience. As a remaster, I think this is the definitive way to play the original game. It has some drawbacks here and there, but if you're looking to play Crisis Core for the first time, this is the place to start.