Shin-ra is experimenting on hunks to make them hunkier-- somebody do something!!!

I skipped Crisis Core when it first released, having already decided to pass on the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII after "dilly-dally shilly-shally" entered my mind like a leucotome to carve out the part of my brain capable of giving a shit. I loved Final Fantasy VII but expanding on that story felt somehow wrong to me. It was fine as-is, I didn't need to see where the characters went after Meteor fell (I prefer the ambiguity and mystery of FFVII's ending), and I definitely didn't need to learn more about Zack beyond what the optional Nibelheim flashback provided.

But something is going on at Square, and it seems to me like their physical releases go out of print faster than any other publisher still pressing discs. I only wanted Crisis Core: Reunion for completionists sake, as a collector, but if I buy something then I'm also going to play it. So, fear of missing out made me finally take the plunge, and I gotta say... Think Zack might be my new favorite FFVII character. I've become Zackpilled and an Angealcel, it's fucking over for me. Throw my body in a pyre so the disease cannot spread.

Crisis Core did not make such a positive impression on me at first, however. The initial few hours feel pretty lacking mechanically, offering a combat system that's perfectly competent but somewhat weightless and dated. A roulette wheel constantly spins between character portraits depicting the people in Zack's life who are important to him, and while the game tries to convey what each possible combination will result in, it was way too much information for me to commit to memory. I gave up trying to understand it immediately. In the words of David Clayton-Thomas, sometimes you gotta just "let the spinning wheel spin."

Likewise, I opted to ride the painted pony through the rest of Crisis Core's ho-hum mechanics, its lackluster shops and Materia fusion system, and tedious missions that are clearly designed around playing the game on a mobile device. A lot of Crisis Core: Reunion reminds me of Peace Walker HD, you don't need to be told it was a seventh-generation handheld game. However, in Crisis Core's case I wouldn't call any of it bad, just dated.

The story, which focuses on Zack's favorite boy band breaking up and how that eventually leads to his death, takes a while to get going and at times feels disassociated from where it's headed. More than once I started the game up after taking a little break and felt like I was missing time. Why is Zack here now? I don't know. Either I failed to retain what literally just happened the last time I played or the story has leapt ahead by an indeterminate amount of time. Whenever something important happens, the story is quick to drop it and move to the next thing, with the in-world time between beats feeling at once prolonged yet brief. It lacks the presence of time and as such left me with this gnawing sense that none of this new material would matter, that it exists only to justify having a game based on a thin strip of plot from a 1997 RPG.

In a lot of ways, Crisis Core feels like it's trapped in an endless cycle of getting started. But then you finally get to Nibelheim...

SPOILERS FOR THE LAST ACT OF CRISIS CORE AHEAD:

Crisis Core isn't the Final Fantasy Remake, none of these characters are going to escape their fate, Nibelheim is as inevitable as Zack's final stand outside of Midgar. The assignment then is to make this climax as impactful a decade removed from the original game, and it accomplishes this by building upon Zack's character and getting the player more emotionally invested in his journey.

Through much of Crisis Core, Zack is portrayed as a try-hard goofball with an appropriately grating voice who views this whole SOLDIER thing as some kind of game. He wants to be a hero like his best bud Angeal or Sephiroth, but maybe not like Genesis because that nerd reads shitty poetry and is literally falling apart. Angeal's supposed betrayal and the revelation of Shin-ra's experiments shakes Zack, but he never completely loses faith that things will turn out ok. That he won't be a hero. By the time he sets foot in Nibelheim, he's still impetuous but has largely mellowed out. He's got a girlfriend back in Midgar (Aerith), has formed a tight bond with Cloud, and has befriended Tseng and Cissnei of the Turks. He has people to fight for, it's not just about his own glory. And then everything starts to rapidly fall apart.

Zack limps back home with a near comatose Cloud in tow, much as he does in Final Fantasy VII, only with a couple of detours to tie up loose ends with Genesis and Angeal. Closing the loop on these plot threads is not something I expected myself to become so invested in. By the time Genesis is nearing the last few passages of Loveless, my opinion of his character had mostly turned around, and the final scene shared between each of these characters is very touching. Despite being injected into the middle of an existing story, it doesn't feel out of place, and it makes good on some of the earlier moments in Crisis Core that I felt were listless.

This trek back to Midgar also feels more emotionally significant. In the original game, you got the sense that Zack was just trying to do the right thing. He's in SOLDIER, after all, he's not just going to leave someone behind. In Crisis Core, the context of Zack and Cloud's friendship is different. It's deeper. Zack begs Cloud to finish off Sephiroth, they nearly died together, they share something deeper than just being a subordinate and superior who had a handful of friendly conversations while on the job. Likewise, the deeper context of Zack's relationship with Aerith makes this journey more painful. The guy really has nothing left except her and his honor.

Even mechanically, any shortcomings Crisis Core has are made up by those last stretches of combat, where Zack struggles to lift his sword and the roulette wheel constantly glitches out on Aerith's portrait. It almost feels like someone had the idea in mind for that one moment and built everything backwards, for better and worse.

Zack never gets to revel in the popularity his heroic deeds bring, but that's not really what being a hero is about. Being a hero is really about getting filled with the most bullets to ever enter into the human body in recorded history It's about protecting and doing right by others, even at great personal cost. He doesn't get to see Aerith again, but he saves Cloud and preserves his legacy, and that at least brings him some comfort.

So, congrats Square, you got me incredibly invested in a character who was to me just a clump of ugly early-PS1 polygons as of a week ago. Was not expecting to feel "Big Boss saluting The Boss' grave" levels of fucked up over a game that starts with characters repeatedly asking if Zack's heard of "dumbapples," or that has a main villain that would unironically refer to himself as a thespian. Granted, a lot of Crisis Core is saved in its last act and it's far, far from perfect, but I had a great time with it and it's no doubt my best panic-buy of 2023.