Secretly really cool. Presentationally lacking, but further fleshes out the history of many major players in significant ways while not being as offensive in design as many of the later works. Some of the other FFVII sequel content have their problems with making the conflict a bit too black-and-white in morality, but Before Crisis follows the Turks and is thus underpinned with the sense that, no matter how charismatic they may be, the protagonists here certainly aren't heroes. Nobody is right in this story - Shotgun may protect Aerith and protect mankind from Zirconiade, but she'll also kidnap civilians for the SOLDIER program without so much as a second thought. Though she does develop a moral conflict over the course of the game like Zack, she ultimately never rejects the company.

Before Crisis covers the largest span of time out of any entry in the Final Fantasy VII series. As a fan it's fascinating to be taken along to see events such as the rocket launch, razing of Corel or how Nanaki ended up in Hojo's lab. However, I'm split on the decision to transform AVALANCHE into such a huge organisation. They're debatably as intrusive to the plot as Remake's Whispers. It has storytelling issues with overfixating on its own narrative to make them have a hand in the backstory of every single character, and really, every single major narrative event pre-FFVII. The world is portrayed as revolving around Shotgun, it's still fanfictiony in that regard. But it's probably still a net positive, since the three leaders make for really cool antagonists that further populate Gaia. Elfe is a cool icon for this chapter, even if she doesn't actually do all that much, and Fuhito serves as an absolutely stellar villain for FFVII's setting. The moment in the finale where he's finally so far gone in his glorification of the Lifestream that he echoes Sephiroth in calling the protagonist "traitor" was chilling.