This review contains spoilers
If you are at all interested in this game and you clicked "show spoilers" because you've played FFVII and you know about Aeris and viewed the optional cutscenes and know about Zack... I would implore you to go play the main game and only play optional missions if you're underleveled, which is a memorable and relatively compact (for an RPG) experience sitting at around 12 hours, and skip the next few paragraphs.
(SPOILERS!!!)
You see, I can't talk about this game without talking about how perfect its ending is. You know how some movies seem to have been written entirely around one scene? Not just that the scene is iconic, but it feels like the writers started with that scene and then used it as a scaffolding for everything else? (Children of Men is one such movie) Crisis Core's ending is like that. It was so well written and directed that even though I knew what was going to happen, it managed to subvert my expectations multiple times and hit me right in the feels.
I saw Zack draw his sword to charge at a literal army and prepared myself to watch a cutscene of the death of this guy who'd spent the last 20 or so hours endearing himself to m-"ACTIVATING COMBAT MODE"
dafuq?
The game forced me to play through his hopeless last stand, and even though I knew it would end in his death I fought as hard as I could (and being slightly overleveled I held out really long) in the vain hope that I would be able to cheat fate. And as the bullets rained down, the DMW slots metamorphosed from a needlessly-clunky RNG mechanic into the representation of Zack's life flashing before his eyes. And when, near death, the DMW rolled Aeris like it had so many times before, I thought I would at least be able to trigger the Healing Wave limit break and keep fighting for just a while more... but it was only Zack's nearly-gone consciousness focusing on who he most wanted to see in that moment, before finally shutting down.
I can't remember the last time a video game affected me so much.
(SPOILERS END HERE)
-----------------------------------------
Does Crisis Core have issues? Plenty! The action elements feel half-assed, in that everything takes place in real-time but the hit detection and physics feel slightly "off", never fully consistent or intuitive - if they wanted to do an action style, they missed an opportunity to make it handle like a musou game which would have been perfect for this! The side content is bloated beyond belief, and consists entirely of generic cutpaste missions with little variety to them. Genesis sits proudly at the top of the pile of my least favorite RPG villains thanks to his incessant and obnoxious quotations from a pompous and irrelevant text.
Those are all relevant criticisms of the game and can be dealbreaking for some, but they are not enough to eclipse how good an experience it was for me. Crisis Core adds nice worldbuilding and history to the FFVII timeline, introduces some (mostly) great side characters - Cissnei being a particular hit - and if you have any nostalgia for the original FFVII at all, it'll kick your feels in the balls.
I won't forget.
(SPOILERS!!!)
You see, I can't talk about this game without talking about how perfect its ending is. You know how some movies seem to have been written entirely around one scene? Not just that the scene is iconic, but it feels like the writers started with that scene and then used it as a scaffolding for everything else? (Children of Men is one such movie) Crisis Core's ending is like that. It was so well written and directed that even though I knew what was going to happen, it managed to subvert my expectations multiple times and hit me right in the feels.
I saw Zack draw his sword to charge at a literal army and prepared myself to watch a cutscene of the death of this guy who'd spent the last 20 or so hours endearing himself to m-"ACTIVATING COMBAT MODE"
dafuq?
The game forced me to play through his hopeless last stand, and even though I knew it would end in his death I fought as hard as I could (and being slightly overleveled I held out really long) in the vain hope that I would be able to cheat fate. And as the bullets rained down, the DMW slots metamorphosed from a needlessly-clunky RNG mechanic into the representation of Zack's life flashing before his eyes. And when, near death, the DMW rolled Aeris like it had so many times before, I thought I would at least be able to trigger the Healing Wave limit break and keep fighting for just a while more... but it was only Zack's nearly-gone consciousness focusing on who he most wanted to see in that moment, before finally shutting down.
I can't remember the last time a video game affected me so much.
(SPOILERS END HERE)
-----------------------------------------
Does Crisis Core have issues? Plenty! The action elements feel half-assed, in that everything takes place in real-time but the hit detection and physics feel slightly "off", never fully consistent or intuitive - if they wanted to do an action style, they missed an opportunity to make it handle like a musou game which would have been perfect for this! The side content is bloated beyond belief, and consists entirely of generic cutpaste missions with little variety to them. Genesis sits proudly at the top of the pile of my least favorite RPG villains thanks to his incessant and obnoxious quotations from a pompous and irrelevant text.
Those are all relevant criticisms of the game and can be dealbreaking for some, but they are not enough to eclipse how good an experience it was for me. Crisis Core adds nice worldbuilding and history to the FFVII timeline, introduces some (mostly) great side characters - Cissnei being a particular hit - and if you have any nostalgia for the original FFVII at all, it'll kick your feels in the balls.
I won't forget.
bougainvillea
2 years ago