Done With #3: Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion

After having purchased this at launch because I lack good financial judgement back in late 2023, I finally got around to playing one of my childhood's favourite game. Zack Fair is one hell of a guy, and his story always get me teary eyed.

But I'll be upfront here, this actually is way worse of a game then I remembered.😅

Of course the biggest difference between the PSP version and the overly long named remaster is the usage of Unreal Engine to bring the game up to par with modern graphic. The team did one hell of a job and it's pretty believable that this "remaster" is straight up a remake as everything is built from ground up, using FF7 Remake assets.

There're still things that are sadly not upgraded. The game reuses the 15 years old FMV for intro movies and some of the scenes which can be quite a whiplash when they come up as they look way worse than the in engage graphic. It's not too distracting, but it's something of note.

While I remembered Crisis Core story to be PEAK writing, it's pretty disappointed to realise, now that I'm 29, that it's rather... middling.

The game itself deals with Zack Fair, the newbie SOLDIER who recently got promoted, and the 3 legendary SOLDIERS: Genesis, Angeal and the beloved Sephiroth. There's a lot of jabs on corporate fascism, which is also the theme of FF7 as well, but in all honesty they didn't go as hard as the OG.

To be blunt, the first half straight up suck major ass. It felt like a very disjointed story where they just shoehorn things in. Not as much build up in terms of chemistry between Zack and his mentor, Angeal, as people remember to be honest, and the game heavily relies on you, the player, to eventually ship these four characters in a weird romantic non-romance mess that the game is. 😭

Honestly, everyone seems to collectively only remember the last four hours of the game, where Nibelheim happens. It's a retelling of the classic FF7 scene where Cloud finds out the truth, and in Crisis Core we get to play it out. While it is not an exactly 1:1 to the original game, nor does it follow the OAV Last Order, there's a lot of additional context that solves the plot hole that has been canonised in the FF7 universe at this point. The game does a great job making you feel for everyone, with an ending that's undeniably a tearjerker. However, getting to this "good part" was a pain in terms of narrative.

One of the main feature of this game, which is unfortunately one of the worst part of this game, is the side missions. They start off rather strong, allowing you to test your builds as you ramp up in power. However, the game reuses 4 same maps for these missions, and there are hundreds of them.

The difficulty scaling is also a nightmare as you eventually get to the point where you one shot the enemy, and vice versa so it becomes a matter of who presses what first. Even only completing half of these side missions also trivialize the main game as you will be three shotting the story bosses. The game has no scaling to combat this, and lacks new game plus for you to challenge yourself, so it does get real wonky.

You also get punished for ignoring these Side Mission as well, be it missing out on cool summons or basic features such as accessory slots. It becomes a weird ground of mandatory content that disguises itself as being optional, creating a weird rift within the game.

Regardless of that, I still think it's an entertaining 24 hours. While I don't like it as much as I remembered and don't think of it highly at all, I think it's still a decent exploration of the FF7 universe with great combat. I just wish it's something more, as the remastered had the chance to really amp this up to the new height.