This review contains spoilers
Crisis Core is a mess of a game, but I kind of love it. It's like the whole game is having an identity crisis (which I guess is kind of fitting for a FFVII prequel) but I don't think this is some kind of "oh MGSV is intentionally unfinished to make you feel Venom's loss Kojima is such a genius" thing, just that Square Enix didn't quite know what they wanted it to be. A bunch of its pieces don’t quite fit together, but it’s still a really enjoyable game and a solid action RPG.
The game has this whole mission system with like 300 unlockable missions that range from single battles to boss fights to little exploration missions. Some of them even have small storylines tied to them, like Yuffie’s whole treasure quest. Early on, a fellow SOLDIER member tells Zack to come back and check on a supply pod in the Shinra building between missions because it will randomly refill. These things make it seem like the Shinra building was meant to serve as a kind of hub between missions almost like a Monhun village and that the missions would be a core part of the game, but that's where things get weird. The missions are entirely divorced from the main story, and you just access them from any random save point. As far as I can tell, you never actually need to play a mission to finish the game since the main story is completely linear. Now you would probably end up terribly underleveled if you did that, but it seems doable at least. If you do what I did for most of the game, though, you'll end up way too strong for most of the story fights. At the start of each chapter, I would play through every mission that was one star level lower than the current chapter number (if I was on chapter 5, I would play up through the 4 star missions, for example) and doing this kind of turned Zack into an unstoppable killing machine, even on hard. I stopped playing missions once I beat the ever loving shit out of Sephiroth, but at that point Zack was already doing 99999 damage thanks to the brutal accessory and the defense-ignoring hammer punch materia, both of which I got as mission rewards, so the damage was done. Like half of the missions are in those last few star ranks that are harder than basically anything in the main story, though, so the missions almost seem like they're mostly meant to be post-game content instead of stuff that's meant to be played alongside the main story despite the fact that a lot of them unlock due to story progress. This is probably the most confusing part of the game to me outside of some narrative stuff. I just don't know how Square wanted you to approach the missions. It's like this whole system it just tacked on to pad out what would otherwise be a pretty short RPG, but the balance of the whole game is tuned around the player doing some of these missions while not spending a lot of time with them so they don't get too powerful. In a vacuum the mission system is pretty fun since the combat is enjoyable, but I honestly don't know what exactly Square was going for with it. I liked the system enough to do like half of the missions (I think my final count was 162 out of 300) but I still think it's implemented really strangely and could have been weaved into the main story much better, kind of like how 358/2 Days did it.
That's actually a good place to move over to talking about the combat, which is one thing that this game absolutely nails. Yeah it's kind of simple since you only have the one basic combo, but chaining your attacks together with abilities, spells, and once you unlock the buster sword the heavy style attack feels really good. The materia system is also implemented pretty well here thanks to an elaborate fusion mechanic. You can fuse any two materia to make a new one, or just to add items to an existing materia and make it stronger. A lot of your stats come from these materia bonuses, but you need to put a lot of time and effort into making something like a curaga that gives you +500% HP or a firaga blade that gives you +100 attack. It’s a system that you can break, but because the items you need to add major stat bonuses are kind of rare and since you probably want to max out the materia you’re going to use in the fusion since max level materia generally create stronger materia when fused, you need to put some effort in to really make something broken. There's a pretty decent amount of enemy variety, but the best approach to almost every battle is just to roll behind them and spam abilities since attacks are all critical hits if they hit the back side of an enemy. The DMW system is pretty weird, but it's actually nowhere near as intrusive as I was expecting it to be. Since it rolls automatically and does so all the time, basically every battle sees you getting some kind of bonus, be it leveling up a materia, activating a limit break or summon, or just getting a few seconds where your spells don't use any MP. It's chaotic, but kind of in a good way. The bonuses come up often enough that I would frequently change how I was fighting to make better use of whatever boon the RNG gods decided to give me, but not so frequently that I would be able to rely on them. The one weird thing about the system is that it will randomly play these little mini scenes between Zack and another character. Yeah they’re nice ways to break up spending five hours on missions and they do a good job of showing Zack’s relationships with the people around him, but it kind of feels like there were just all these extra scenes that Square didn’t know where to put in the story so they just slapped them into the DMW system and had them play randomly. Considering how there are other story events already tied to the mission system, I don’t really know why Square did things this way. Maybe it was a limit of originally being a PSP game and they really couldn’t fit anything more on the disc, but then it’s kind of weird that they put all these DMW scenes in in the first place instead of fleshing out the main story a bit more.
Before I get into all the things I found weird about the story, let me say the things I liked. Basically everything from going to Nibelheim on (with one big exception) was great. But that makes sense since it’s basically the one thing the whole game was building up to. Zack as a character is aggressively positive, but that actually makes him really likable and makes the ending hit harder than if he was just a generic SOLDIER operative. His relationship with Angeal in the first act is interesting, even if it’s laced with the cheesiness that runs through the entire game. It’s cool to see what Cloud was like before the original game, and getting to see Sephiroth before he went insane is also neat. For the most part, though, that’s expanding on things that were in the original game. When Crisis Core tries to do something completely original, it really misses the mark. The biggest example of this is Genesis, the main antagonist of the game. From a gameplay perspective I totally get why he and his army of copies exists since they add some much needed variety to the enemy and boss roster, and Square wanted a final boss that wasn’t just the Sephiroth fight in the Nibelheim reactor. The thing is, Genesis is stupid. His character can be summed up as “Quotes LOVELESS. Refuses to elaborate. Leaves.” for basically the entire game. Yeah I get that he’s angry at Shinra/society as a whole for having been a part of Project G and is trying to find a way to prevent his degradation, but when that’s mostly conveyed through quotes from a fake book/play/ancient epic/whatever LOVELESS actually is, it’s hard to find him interesting. The whole detour at the end of the game to go fight Genesis one last time also really breaks up the pacing of the finale. Again the game kind of needed a final boss and Genesis's giant form is a pretty fun fight, but Zack just leaving a braindead Cloud in a motorcycle sidecar while he goes to fight some dude with Gackt’s face was kind of weird. Like yeah Zack has unfinished business with Genesis, but when your friend is basically dying of mako poisoning, I would expect there to be some more pressing concerns. I also should say that the final scenes were really well done, even if they lost some of their impact because I could just spam drain aerial and outlast the endless Shinra troops so I had to just stand still and take damage to trigger the ending instead of actually struggling until Zack was overwhelmed. It didn’t really ruin the ending and you could probably get way too strong for that fight in the original release too, but it’s still worth mentioning.
There isn’t really a good place to put this stuff, but I want to talk about the presentation for a bit. I played the Switch version, and in general it looked really good. There was a weird issue where Zack would kind of ghost and leave afterimages of himself when I turned the camera, but that only happened in a few cave areas. Other than that, I never came across any real performance issues with the game. Granted it's basically just empty hallways where enemies spawn in randomly, but they're really pretty hallways that reuse a lot of assets from FFVIIR to great effect. The music remixes a lot of tracks from the original FFVII and does it pretty well, but it's pretty hard to look at Crisis Core's soundtrack as its own thing because of that. The game’s main theme and The Price of Freedom are both great tracks, but those are the only new ones that really stood out to me. Also they don't really matter but all the summons use FMV cutscenes that look sick, so they're worth mentioning. Some of the other FMVs look a little rough around the edges and it’s kind of hard to tell if that’s intentional or not. Like it looks like they redid the credits for Reunion, but all the names have a weird kind of blurriness to them that would only make sense if they were just ripped from the original release. They’re obviously not since it’s all new staff, but it’s still weird. Some of the FMVs in the actual game, especially ones near the end, also suffer the same issue despite looking like they were redid to use the VIIR design for the buster sword.
Despite all the weirdness, I really enjoyed my time with Crisis Core. It’s one of those games that’s not all that great objectively, but still something really special. I was surprised by how much I liked it since I’m not a big fan of the original FFVII, but I enjoyed this game so much that I plan to actually go back and replay the original in the near future to see if I was a little too harsh on it when I first played through that game a few years ago.
The game has this whole mission system with like 300 unlockable missions that range from single battles to boss fights to little exploration missions. Some of them even have small storylines tied to them, like Yuffie’s whole treasure quest. Early on, a fellow SOLDIER member tells Zack to come back and check on a supply pod in the Shinra building between missions because it will randomly refill. These things make it seem like the Shinra building was meant to serve as a kind of hub between missions almost like a Monhun village and that the missions would be a core part of the game, but that's where things get weird. The missions are entirely divorced from the main story, and you just access them from any random save point. As far as I can tell, you never actually need to play a mission to finish the game since the main story is completely linear. Now you would probably end up terribly underleveled if you did that, but it seems doable at least. If you do what I did for most of the game, though, you'll end up way too strong for most of the story fights. At the start of each chapter, I would play through every mission that was one star level lower than the current chapter number (if I was on chapter 5, I would play up through the 4 star missions, for example) and doing this kind of turned Zack into an unstoppable killing machine, even on hard. I stopped playing missions once I beat the ever loving shit out of Sephiroth, but at that point Zack was already doing 99999 damage thanks to the brutal accessory and the defense-ignoring hammer punch materia, both of which I got as mission rewards, so the damage was done. Like half of the missions are in those last few star ranks that are harder than basically anything in the main story, though, so the missions almost seem like they're mostly meant to be post-game content instead of stuff that's meant to be played alongside the main story despite the fact that a lot of them unlock due to story progress. This is probably the most confusing part of the game to me outside of some narrative stuff. I just don't know how Square wanted you to approach the missions. It's like this whole system it just tacked on to pad out what would otherwise be a pretty short RPG, but the balance of the whole game is tuned around the player doing some of these missions while not spending a lot of time with them so they don't get too powerful. In a vacuum the mission system is pretty fun since the combat is enjoyable, but I honestly don't know what exactly Square was going for with it. I liked the system enough to do like half of the missions (I think my final count was 162 out of 300) but I still think it's implemented really strangely and could have been weaved into the main story much better, kind of like how 358/2 Days did it.
That's actually a good place to move over to talking about the combat, which is one thing that this game absolutely nails. Yeah it's kind of simple since you only have the one basic combo, but chaining your attacks together with abilities, spells, and once you unlock the buster sword the heavy style attack feels really good. The materia system is also implemented pretty well here thanks to an elaborate fusion mechanic. You can fuse any two materia to make a new one, or just to add items to an existing materia and make it stronger. A lot of your stats come from these materia bonuses, but you need to put a lot of time and effort into making something like a curaga that gives you +500% HP or a firaga blade that gives you +100 attack. It’s a system that you can break, but because the items you need to add major stat bonuses are kind of rare and since you probably want to max out the materia you’re going to use in the fusion since max level materia generally create stronger materia when fused, you need to put some effort in to really make something broken. There's a pretty decent amount of enemy variety, but the best approach to almost every battle is just to roll behind them and spam abilities since attacks are all critical hits if they hit the back side of an enemy. The DMW system is pretty weird, but it's actually nowhere near as intrusive as I was expecting it to be. Since it rolls automatically and does so all the time, basically every battle sees you getting some kind of bonus, be it leveling up a materia, activating a limit break or summon, or just getting a few seconds where your spells don't use any MP. It's chaotic, but kind of in a good way. The bonuses come up often enough that I would frequently change how I was fighting to make better use of whatever boon the RNG gods decided to give me, but not so frequently that I would be able to rely on them. The one weird thing about the system is that it will randomly play these little mini scenes between Zack and another character. Yeah they’re nice ways to break up spending five hours on missions and they do a good job of showing Zack’s relationships with the people around him, but it kind of feels like there were just all these extra scenes that Square didn’t know where to put in the story so they just slapped them into the DMW system and had them play randomly. Considering how there are other story events already tied to the mission system, I don’t really know why Square did things this way. Maybe it was a limit of originally being a PSP game and they really couldn’t fit anything more on the disc, but then it’s kind of weird that they put all these DMW scenes in in the first place instead of fleshing out the main story a bit more.
Before I get into all the things I found weird about the story, let me say the things I liked. Basically everything from going to Nibelheim on (with one big exception) was great. But that makes sense since it’s basically the one thing the whole game was building up to. Zack as a character is aggressively positive, but that actually makes him really likable and makes the ending hit harder than if he was just a generic SOLDIER operative. His relationship with Angeal in the first act is interesting, even if it’s laced with the cheesiness that runs through the entire game. It’s cool to see what Cloud was like before the original game, and getting to see Sephiroth before he went insane is also neat. For the most part, though, that’s expanding on things that were in the original game. When Crisis Core tries to do something completely original, it really misses the mark. The biggest example of this is Genesis, the main antagonist of the game. From a gameplay perspective I totally get why he and his army of copies exists since they add some much needed variety to the enemy and boss roster, and Square wanted a final boss that wasn’t just the Sephiroth fight in the Nibelheim reactor. The thing is, Genesis is stupid. His character can be summed up as “Quotes LOVELESS. Refuses to elaborate. Leaves.” for basically the entire game. Yeah I get that he’s angry at Shinra/society as a whole for having been a part of Project G and is trying to find a way to prevent his degradation, but when that’s mostly conveyed through quotes from a fake book/play/ancient epic/whatever LOVELESS actually is, it’s hard to find him interesting. The whole detour at the end of the game to go fight Genesis one last time also really breaks up the pacing of the finale. Again the game kind of needed a final boss and Genesis's giant form is a pretty fun fight, but Zack just leaving a braindead Cloud in a motorcycle sidecar while he goes to fight some dude with Gackt’s face was kind of weird. Like yeah Zack has unfinished business with Genesis, but when your friend is basically dying of mako poisoning, I would expect there to be some more pressing concerns. I also should say that the final scenes were really well done, even if they lost some of their impact because I could just spam drain aerial and outlast the endless Shinra troops so I had to just stand still and take damage to trigger the ending instead of actually struggling until Zack was overwhelmed. It didn’t really ruin the ending and you could probably get way too strong for that fight in the original release too, but it’s still worth mentioning.
There isn’t really a good place to put this stuff, but I want to talk about the presentation for a bit. I played the Switch version, and in general it looked really good. There was a weird issue where Zack would kind of ghost and leave afterimages of himself when I turned the camera, but that only happened in a few cave areas. Other than that, I never came across any real performance issues with the game. Granted it's basically just empty hallways where enemies spawn in randomly, but they're really pretty hallways that reuse a lot of assets from FFVIIR to great effect. The music remixes a lot of tracks from the original FFVII and does it pretty well, but it's pretty hard to look at Crisis Core's soundtrack as its own thing because of that. The game’s main theme and The Price of Freedom are both great tracks, but those are the only new ones that really stood out to me. Also they don't really matter but all the summons use FMV cutscenes that look sick, so they're worth mentioning. Some of the other FMVs look a little rough around the edges and it’s kind of hard to tell if that’s intentional or not. Like it looks like they redid the credits for Reunion, but all the names have a weird kind of blurriness to them that would only make sense if they were just ripped from the original release. They’re obviously not since it’s all new staff, but it’s still weird. Some of the FMVs in the actual game, especially ones near the end, also suffer the same issue despite looking like they were redid to use the VIIR design for the buster sword.
Despite all the weirdness, I really enjoyed my time with Crisis Core. It’s one of those games that’s not all that great objectively, but still something really special. I was surprised by how much I liked it since I’m not a big fan of the original FFVII, but I enjoyed this game so much that I plan to actually go back and replay the original in the near future to see if I was a little too harsh on it when I first played through that game a few years ago.