Crisis Core is majorly undermined by an antagonist in the running for series-worst. That said, it also quickly redeems itself by having our shonen himbo protagonist Zack tell the villain to shut up in the middle of one of his interminable cornball JRPG villain monologues. He just like me fr

In a sense, this conflict between Zack's indefatigable posi energy and big bad Genesis' indecipherable faux-intellectualism serves as a microcosm for CC at large. It's a snappy and energetic pick-up hack'n slash, while simultaneously bearing the overwrought baggage of needing to lend back-story to Final Fantasy VII's morose RPG saga. You can lose hours to 3-minute sidequests which are really just glorified (and fun) mob fights and inexplicable boss rematches. Meanwhile the main game's "sidequest" moments give you a day-pass for constrained, RPG Redux exploration that rarely rewards you with anything other than more sidequests. All of this is weighed down by a complicated materia system that is far too easy to break, leaving a big fat question mark on how the game was supposed to be paced.

The game's identity crisis is never more clear than when you hit an emotional peak at the end of the first act, before spending a solid 15 minutes in a gauntlet of dialogues and side quests and nearly zero combat all so you can... retrieve a few gil from a street rat kid. It doesn't truly succeed at either of its big design models, largely because of its insistence on having their cake and attaching an epic poem to the cake, too.

The combat is a real treat, literally feels like "What if FF7R but handheld." In a different era I could see myself gradually burning through the game's remaining 180 (I did like 120 on Hard) side missions. Much like The Phantom Pain though, these side missions constantly run up against the plot, both in mechanics and storytelling. Clear one too many side missions and you will absolutely steamroll the game. Spend too much time in a side mission K-hole and you'll either lose track or at best feel out of step with the big plot beats of the game's very short story. In spite of all this, though, Zack was able to warm even my icy heart. He is such a foil to Cloud's incessant cold shoulder, and the trajectory of his story makes you really rethink how you perceive That One Major Thing about Cloud. The ending is way more brutal than I ever would have anticipated from 2008 Squenix, and it lands with just the right level of gravity. Plotholes or no.

That is, at least until Cloud doing a guttural, bone-aching scream is abruptly cut off by a hilariously upbeat and funky Anime End Credits type theme song.

(The Sephiroth stuff is sick and it adds some real dimension to his character to watch him being a completely likable guy. But let's not kid ourselves: those big scenes in Nibelheim were already part of the story, and CC doesn't add anything beyond a higher polygon count here.)

Generic Sega Master System-esque platformer deliberately subverted by a very slight multiverse twist, which takes Link to the Past's white lodge / black lodge conceit and quadruples it. While the cute-thing-secretly-evil motif is done to death and usually obnoxiously edgy, I'll take a game that attempts to weave its scary elements into its design over the current interminable trend of walking-sim mascot horror or copy-paste low-poly Silent Hill knockoffs. Unreal Engine lighting templates don't create more interesting "creepypasta" games; thoughtful game design does.

Still, you can grasp that the aesthetic, while intentionally simplistic, lacks enough of an anchor to establish real personality. The movement doesn't feel great here, either, leading to more than a few needless game overs. Arguably worse, the puzzles are just not quite at the level of sophistication that may have elevated the game to an actually memorable status for its day. The last couple of stages — that is, the last proper level and then the bonus stage — were complicated enough that they had me scratching my head for about as long as I spent on the rest of the game to that point. I was just wanting to dig more out of the layered conceit, and then it ended. Probably right when it needed to, though.

Added a half star for the fact that this remarkably came out in 2008, amidst a burgeoning but largely by-the-numbers indie scene. Subtracted a half star because the music could be so, so much better.