Oh Crisis Core, how you ooze your time period throughout your entirety of your game. For better or for worse this game feels like a modern PSP game. Which can be both a blessing and a curse depending on how you look at it. While the combat is ok there’s not a lot of room for variation. Sure, you can use different materia for some different abilities, but considering how long it takes to upgrade materia it’s a lot more enticing to just find what you like and use it (along with whatever upgraded version you can get later on) throughout your play through. Most boss fights are pretty samey with little variation on how to approach. The DMV system is pretty neat albeit gimmicky. I think the biggest missed opportunity is not having the option for multiple loadouts while in combat to swap between. I know some people would probably find it would make the game too easy (which is a whole other conversation), but I think it would help spice up your encounters if you could swap between a mage style or an aggressive melee style. Grinding out missions is a pretty integral part of this game, and really dictates how easy or difficult it will be later on. A lot of the good materia along with just experience is locked behind the missions, so if you want to just play through the story it will be a real challenge. However, missions have a funny side effect where if you just hug the wall you can skip all of the extra encounters and just find chests/ fight the stage boss. Anyway, an above average game that really highlights who Zach is, but more importantly who Cloud is not.