Pros:
- Good opportunities for the player to customize loadouts and play differently if they choose.
- A few characters have some nice moments here and there (namely Zack, Cloud, and Sephiroth).
- Pacing does not drag on if you don’t want it to (optional content is easy to skip).
- Decent art direction as well as good character designs.
- Good music.
- The famous ending sequence is indeed pretty good.
Cons:
- The game doesn’t encourage you to experiment with loadouts and playstyles very much, as spamming weaknesses or some strong abilities will cheese most enemies (besides a select few bosses).
- Optional content is incredibly vapid and mostly pointless. The content itself is boring, and the rewards you get don’t matter very much when the main story gives you more than enough tools to easily defeat all foes.
- Level design is incredibly boring.
- The UI is annoying to navigate when it comes to items in combat, as there are no item hotkeys, and you’ll have to scroll manually while real-time combat is happening.
- The plot and characters are very much half-baked at best, with character backgrounds/motivations not given time to be properly explored. Even the characters with a lot of clear potential like Zack and Sephiroth—while better than the rest—are still disappointing as the plot moves faster than we can grow to appreciate them.
- Even though vocal performances are mostly an improvement from the original Crisis Core (except, oddly, Zack by a slight margin), the voice actors cannot save the game from its cringey 2000s-era Square nature, what with the bad script and direction.
- Despite good music tracks in a vacuum, there is a somewhat odd combination of different genres that clash. It doesn’t help that transitions between music tracks are overly abrupt.
Score: 3/10, closer to a 2 than a 4.
- Good opportunities for the player to customize loadouts and play differently if they choose.
- A few characters have some nice moments here and there (namely Zack, Cloud, and Sephiroth).
- Pacing does not drag on if you don’t want it to (optional content is easy to skip).
- Decent art direction as well as good character designs.
- Good music.
- The famous ending sequence is indeed pretty good.
Cons:
- The game doesn’t encourage you to experiment with loadouts and playstyles very much, as spamming weaknesses or some strong abilities will cheese most enemies (besides a select few bosses).
- Optional content is incredibly vapid and mostly pointless. The content itself is boring, and the rewards you get don’t matter very much when the main story gives you more than enough tools to easily defeat all foes.
- Level design is incredibly boring.
- The UI is annoying to navigate when it comes to items in combat, as there are no item hotkeys, and you’ll have to scroll manually while real-time combat is happening.
- The plot and characters are very much half-baked at best, with character backgrounds/motivations not given time to be properly explored. Even the characters with a lot of clear potential like Zack and Sephiroth—while better than the rest—are still disappointing as the plot moves faster than we can grow to appreciate them.
- Even though vocal performances are mostly an improvement from the original Crisis Core (except, oddly, Zack by a slight margin), the voice actors cannot save the game from its cringey 2000s-era Square nature, what with the bad script and direction.
- Despite good music tracks in a vacuum, there is a somewhat odd combination of different genres that clash. It doesn’t help that transitions between music tracks are overly abrupt.
Score: 3/10, closer to a 2 than a 4.