Rant time again - Crisis Core
A while before we moved out - possibly against her better judgement - my sister picked up a copy of Crisis Core, the latest instalment in the neverending Final Fantasy VII compilation. I would call the below a review of the game, but it’s probably more like me taking the chance to vent a whole lot of frustration I’ve had building up over all the assorted sequels they’ve released in the last few years in one go. Those of you who actually liked the game, or any of the other new material they’ve released since Advent Children may prefer not to read any further, because this bitter former fan is bitter.
The big disclaimer I need to make before starting is to admit I’ve hardly actually played the game myself. Most of these impressions come second-hand from watching over a shoulder while my sister did all the dirty work, and from what I heard from her (and sometimes the greater Internet) about the scenes I’d missed. So I can’t rule out the possibility I’ve gotten the wrong idea about a few of the details I talk about below (and can only welcome corrections if I have), but the basic problem remains that the impressions I did get left me with no inclination to look into the game in any more detail. I would have played it through myself once pinneagig was done if what I’d seen had left me with any desire to touch the thing again with a ten foot pole. It didn’t.
For me, the whole FFVII compilation has been one long disappointment. It’s been a long time since ’97, but how even the original creators could have so completely forget what makes their own characters tick I cannot imagine. I belong to what often feels like a depressingly small minority who finds AC Cloud painful to watch. Cloud may have been on the anti-social side for the first ten minutes or so of FFVII, but whatever happened to the character he developed into after that, the one who rode chocobos, cross-dressed to save a friend, gave advice to airsick ninjas and made big motivational speeches to the giant party of characters he’d inspired into helping him save the world? I can’t even imagine AC’s dull-looking loner emo-boy in any of those scenes. And sadly, most of the rest of the cast have only fared any better because they had less time on screen.
AC also gets a major award for making me giggle my way through all the parts of the fight scenes that didn’t put me to sleep - they just went on and on and the animation did absolutely nothing for me. It's all very well to have cartoony-style characters like the KH cast flying through the air and waving around construction girder sized weaponry as if it doesn't weigh a gram, but when you go to the effort of near-realistic characters like the AC cast you need to at least make a decent pretence that you're applying some kind of basic physics or the effect loses all believability. Bullet deflecting capes and a scene where Cloud’s friends team together to toss him skywards at the monster? Come on.
Next we got Dirge of Cerberus, which, between its complete bastardisation of everything I’d ever found interesting Vincent's backstory and a plot so nonsensical I can no longer even remember who the villains were ever meant to be, stands out most for being even worse. Before Crisis may have been better, though I’ll probably never know since it seems unlikely anyone outside Japan will ever get to play it. The only part of the compilation we actually enjoyed at all was the Last Order OAV covering what happened to Cloud and Zack in Nibelheim (excluding what they did to poor Tifa's characterisation and a few nitpicky changes), which did give us some vague hope for Crisis Core.
Unfortunately, it seems that in recent years, Squeenix have brought themselves to the conclusion that the appeal of FFVII is all down to one feature: lots of pretty boys. How else could it have seemed like a remotely good idea to make such a point of writing Gackt in as a character? Don’t let the new canon fool you - the original game told us what those creepy Sephiroth clones looked like under their black cloaks: they were barely-sane low-lifes like the man with a tattoo on his arm you encounter living in a pipe in the Midgar slums. Only when it came to time to try and dredge up enough unresolved plot for a sequel did anyone think of rewriting any of them as pretty boy Sephiroth rip-offs like the trio from AC - all in the name of gratuitous bishonen eye-candy. There's also the ridiculously costumed female cast of DoC and the lobotomised Lucrecia to cover the female fanservice angle. All this could still have been forgivable if they’d come up with enough new plot to make it all interesting, but not the slightest effort has been put into developing any of these second rate villains - they add very little to the story except a convenient excuse for a final boss battle.
But enough with the general griping. The fact remains that we still had some hope for Crisis Core - we’d seen some more promising reviews and knew we could at least count on Zack not to angst his way through the game the way Cloud and Vincent did, so we figured we’d give it a chance.
The Battle System
I’ll start with the battle system simply because that’ll be the short part. Combat happens in real time, more like the Kingdom Hearts games than the original FFVII. Hit X to attack, hit the L1/R1 buttons to select and use any of the materia you’ve got equipped. Pretty straightforward, and my sister tells me it’s also pretty fun to play.
Things only start to get ugly when you factor in the main defining gimmick of the system: something called the ‘DMW’ (apparently standing for ‘Digital Mind Wave’) which is the system which governs when you get your limit breaks, summon magic attacks, various stat bonuses which turn up in battle, how you and your materia level up and when combat will be randomly interrupted by flashbacks for no obvious reason. That’s an awful lot of unrelated stuff to cram together into one feature, and it’s achieved by linking each outcome to combinations on a series of slot reels - a bit like what you use in limit breaks like Cait Sith’s or Wakka’s, except that all the symbols are the images of other characters from the cast with numbers on them from one to seven. Lining up three Aeris’s gives you an Aeris-themed limit break; lining up three sevens levels you up. Et cetera.
This is already a bit confusing, since it would seem to imply - for example - that levelling up is something that happens to you completely by chance (or based on how good you are at lining up those sevens), which is a pretty dubious concept on which to base a levelling system. Only, the reality is that you never actually get to select when the reels stop reeling - the game does that for you automatically, whether you hit any buttons while it’s rolling or not. Nor do you get to select when the reels appear; that happens at random in the middle of combat with no obvious trigger. Why they even bothered to make this feature look like slot reels is beyond me, since the result is something like watching someone else play part of the game for you.
Since the tutorial section of the game had given us no clue whatsoever as to precisely why there were a set of automated slot reels constantly running through Zack’s head, I looked it up online and discovered that the truth is that levelling isn’t so random after all. You get EXP in battle, and once you’ve been through enough battles that it’s time to level up, the game will call up the DMW and roll the wheel around until it gets three sevens. So, in reality, a standard levelling system is pretending to be a random chance system, which is pretending to be an interactive slot reels minigame, and not even pretending very well. Basically, the entire DMW is an elaborate way of hiding a lot of information we’d be given up front in other FF instalments (like how much EXP you’ve got or how close you are to getting your next limit break) and taking away a lot of your choices (which summon or which limit break you use and when you use them). Not to mention those random flashbacks. I still don’t know what the deal with them is meant to be either.
The entire gimmick behind the CC battle system can be summarised as “random stuff happens at random.” I don’t think there’s any scathing comment I can make at this point to do justice to exactly how inane that is. I’ll grant you that battle systems have been based on crazier ideas, but all other RPGs I’ve played have at least made some token attempt to explain why throwing cards at the enemy does damage or how always leaving half your team behind makes sense. Crisis Core doesn’t even give us that much to work with.
The Plot - I use the term loosely
But hey, I’ve never really played RPGs for the gameplay, the make-or-break part for me is the story, so let’s talk about the Crisis Core plot. The game opens with a flashy battle scene that turns out to be an uber-realistic virtual reality training simulation, and already the game has nailed one of my pet hates: prequels in which the technology is inexplicably more advanced than in the original. Holodeck style VR rooms are such an overused sci-fi trope as it is, and they're completely out of place in a world like FFVII where big, clunky robots are the height of technological achievement and mankind still hasn't even made it to the moon. Soon after that Zack is handed a mobile phone and told how he's going to get all his official Shinra orders in the form of text messages, and once again the compilation sinks to the level of a high budget mobile phone advertisement. We never got a good look at the old PHS from FFVII, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say it probably wasn't advanced enough to handle text messaging. I'm also finding it terribly amusing to imagine that one could cut out the entire Shinra military communications system simply by jamming up the mobile phone network for an hour or two.
Early on, we meet this character called Angeal. Apparently he's some sort of mentor to Zack or something, it's not very well explained. He's the previous owner of the Buster Sword, and has all these ideas about how SOLDIERs need to have 'dreams and honour'. Where honour has something to do with not stealing apples from your friends or something. And where SOLDIER - let's remember - is the private army of an evil, world dominating corporation. Dreams and honour. Suuuure.
Already we're in trouble. Let's get a few things thing straight, Squeenix: the Buster Sword is an oversized hunk of metal that picks up surprise sentimental significance late in the FFVII story because it used to belong to Zack. It doesn't need to be important to Zack because it belonged to someone else before him, let alone someone as incomprehensible as Angeal. Also, no family with a precious heirloom that symbolises their honour is going to name it "The Buster Sword." Nor does it make any sense that Angeal carries something that weighs that much around all the time but refuses to use it in combat more than occasionally for fear it will (I kid you not) pick up scratches. The Buster Sword exists for busting things, that's what Cloud used it for, and that's its entire purpose in life. Alright? Right, let's get back to the plot.
While hanging around the Shinra headquarters and wondering why he's been off duty so long (and doing squats! Aww, okay, they get a point for including that) Zack hears from some random soldier dude that things are all in a mess because some first class SOLDIER called Genesis has turned traitor and is keeping admin unusually distracted. Hardly have we heard that, and Zack's got a new mission anyway - off to fight in the war with Wutai and maybe even get a promotion to First Class out of it if he does a good job. The Wutai section was handled relatively well - the war's an established part of the FFVII backstory so there's plenty of sense in including it, and the enemy troops looked about what I'd expect Wutai soldiers to look like (though I could've done without the gratuitous Yuffie cameo. Don’t get me wrong, I love Yuffie, but seeing the compilation forget every important aspect of her character except that she spins and wobbles in her victory pose has not been worth it).
Zack stuffs up towards the end of the mission and has to be bailed out by Angeal when a giant monster just about lands on him from above, so there's no promotion for him today, but they finish the job in one piece and head for home. On the way out, Zack and Angeal separate briefly - can't remember exactly why. Zack finds himself fighting some unfamiliar soldiers who don't seem to be from Wutai (don't ask me how he could tell) and then Sephiroth shows up for no particularly obvious reason and tells you that the mysterious soldiers you've just fought are Genesis clones and Angeal has betrayed you all and joined the enemy.
Back up there a sec. You may want to reread that last line again.
We've been playing now for maybe half an hour. We've known this Angeal guy existed for about three scenes, we last saw him all of about a minute ago, and already he's pulled a Shocking Betrayal! If you thought Seifer's betrayal in FF8 happened a little early to have much impact, well, you ain't seen nothin' till you've played Crisis Core. What the hell, Squeenix - seriously, what? Let's for a second ignore that he's switched sides in the time it takes to exit stage left and we don’t even know how Sephiroth’s supposed to know that, why are we supposed to care? We don't know bugger all about the enemy, we don't even hardly know anything about Angeal yet except that Zack seems to look up to him and nothing he says ever makes any sense. Random characters doing random shit for no remotely explained reason isn't a clever plot twist, it's a recipe to alienate your audience when they've barely started playing.
But surely this is all early plot development and all will be explained later on, right? WRONG. Angeal spends the rest of the game playing now-I'm-a-good-guy-now-I'm-not. Genesis, who is what you get when Squeenix quite literally decide to write Gackt in as a villain, spends it spouting horrible poetry and... being evil or something. I didn't see a lot of the rest of the game, but as best my sister could fathom the closest they're ever given to a motivation for anything they do is some vague implications that they're taking their anger out on society because Shinra made them into monsters. Y'know, as Shinra do, what with the giant production line of Sephiroth clones they've been turning out since before they even had a Sephiroth to clone. And as anyone who's seen the trailers should know, the way they show us the horrible things that Shinra's done to them is to give them wings. That is, they get wings collectively. They get exactly one wing each.
I could rant about the stupidity of a couple of second rate villains running around sprouting a feature that Sephiroth himself didn’t get to show us until the very last part of the final boss battle (and even then he would have been better named the Seven Winged Angel counting the other six he had coming out of the bottom of his torso and making him look like a giant flying squid). But the real problem I had with them is that one wing may be very pretty and symbolic, but someone needs to remind Squeenix that YOU CANNOT FLY LIKE THAT.
Obviously no-one bothered to tell either Angeal or Genesis this, because they both do it - repeatedly - all throughout the game. It might’ve worked okay if they’d only left the flying off-screen and let the audience assume that magic was going all the work, but oh no, instead we’re treated to endless flying scenes with beautifully rendered shots of a single ridiculous wing flapping all over the screen. By mid way through the game even the weak-ass Genesis clones you run into in random encounters are sprouting a wing and flying around. One of the scenes I saw in full even featured Angeal flying down in front of Zack, picking Zack up and flying away again. With that one lop-sided wing to hold the both of them up. Actually, we quite enjoyed that bit, but only because it made us laugh our heads off.
The whole explanation for all of Genesis’s and Angeal’s weirdness - and here is where I seriously had to start wondering whether I was hearing about an official game or a Mary Sue fic - is that they were created by a Shinra scientist who injected Jenova cells into a pregnant woman. Gosh, now why does that sound so familiar? Logically you could argue that it makes some kind of sense that Shinra could have tried the experiment a couple of times before they got it right, but where does that leave the story? You just can’t add elements like that this far down the line without them feeling like they’ve been crudely tacked on, especially not when so much of what made Sephiroth so genuinely scary was that how he came into being was so terrible and unique. I mean, Hojo convinced the woman who was carrying his child to let him inject cells from a hostile alien into her unborn baby. When Sephiroth was killed it took them dozens of experiments to recreate anything like him. But now it turns out that all the cool Shinra scientists were doing the same thing. It’s the equivalent of telling all the main characters that they’re going to have to go through all that work again because it’s just turned out the big bad had an identical twin.
I managed to miss most of Aeris’ scenes, so I will say only that from what little I did see her English voice actor actually wasn’t as terrible as I was expecting, but considering what I was expecting after KH2, that’s not much of an endorsement. From what I heard of the scenes I missed she was ever bit as OOC and ditzy as the trailers had led us to expect. pinneagig will have more to say about her role than I will here via a series of 4-panel parody comics she’s working on, so I’ll leave that one to the professionals.
The final section of the game post the escape from Nibelheim is dragged out to the point of pain. All we ever saw of it in the original FFVII was crammed into three very brief scenes, so while it’s reasonable to assume that maybe there was a day or two we didn’t know about in there, having Zack drag a comatose Cloud around the country for a week while he deals with some final boss stuff takes all impact out of the sequence. (BTW translation team, the word you were looking for for what Cloud is suffering at this point is probably ‘Mako Poisoning’ or ‘Mako Withdrawal’. ‘Mako Addiction’ makes no kind of sense in this context unless he was secretly waking up at night and sneaking away to find a fix, and that would be a bit crazy even for you.)
The final scene was going to be a hard sell to me whatever they did with it, because damnit, I liked how understated it was in FFVII. I know the same wouldn’t have worked in a fleshed out version like CC, but the way Zack’s little skittle-armed sprite goes jerking around on the ground as the Shinra soldiers continue to pump him full of bullets even after he’s down is something I always found horrible creepy and effective in the sorts of ways you don’t expect from graphics of that quality. By contrast, the new version really is like everything else about the game - drawn out, incomprehensible and generally a bit dull. Perhaps it would have had more impact on me if I’d seen more of the scenes leading up, but given that one of the few I did see was still trying to pack massive symbolic importance into those apples Angeal brought up to explain honour back at the start of the game, I don’t find it very likely.
And in conclusion?
In the end, nothing is properly explained, the story flow is awkward and ugly and constantly made me feel like I must’ve failed to do some kind of vital pre-reading that would have made what I was watching make sense. The plot always seems to be taking second place to things like finding room for cameo appearances for random characters from other compilation instalments which I haven’t played (just exactly who is Cisne meant to be anyway?) or giving you time to play with your phone. Probably the biggest single problem is that FFVII never actually needed any sequels - or prequels either. There were aspects left ambiguous that could have benefited from some better development, but resurrecting characters we knew were dead and dredging up other Shinra experiments as and making the main cast go through fighting them all over again can only cheapen everything the characters went through in the first game, and that seems to be about all the compilation does.
The shame about Crisis Core is that there are just enough redeeming features that you could see how much better it could have been. Zack is as endearing as he’s ever been. Sephiroth in his pre-psychosis days seemed mostly well handled from what I saw, and there were some nice moments between Zack and Cloud, and the escape from Nibelheim and all the rest - just enough to remind you that these are characters the original game made us love so much and there is a story here that could have been worth telling.
It’s not hard to come up with ways the same basic concept could have been re-imagined so that it worked. Lose Genesis and all the tripe that came with him, he was never anything more than a second-rate excuse for a final boss character anyway. With him gone you’ll have plenty of extra story-space to fill in, so let’s start by moving the beginning of the game back a bit so we can cover Zack’s early SOLDIER days properly, rather than throwing us in at the middle when he’s already at Second Class. Show us how - and why - he joined SOLDIER in the first place, how he went through training and worked his way up the ranks. Give his parents at least a cameo - we did meet them in FFVII, and they’d have to have some sort of opinion on what their son was doing with his life. If you need backup characters, how about giving Zack some classmates or some kind of team? The SOLDIERS you fight in the game always have at least one partner, and there’ll be ample chance to write the others out or kill them off along the way if need be. If you still want to give him a mentor like Angeal, go for it, but leave out the one-winged crap and rambling about honour - and this time, take the time to show us how he and Zack met at the start, why they were assigned together and why we’re supposed to care about their relationship. The people playing this game are going to know very little about what it’s like to work for Shinra at the start of the game, and we’re going to have a much better chance of empathising with the main character if he’s in the same position.
If you want to keep some suspect Shinra science practices in there to (quite rightly) foreshadow what’s to come then why not invent an employee or two who’s researching something different to Jenova? The idea that everyone and their lab assistant was injecting alien cells into their girlfriends is pretty far fetched, but I could easily buy that Shinra would have hired other people who were interested in some ‘unorthodox’ research subjects. And for a bit of plausible Jenova involvement, Zack’s a SOLDIER - he and everyone he works with were infused with Mako and Jenova cells when they joined. Wouldn’t it be interesting if we’d found out what the experience was like for them - how much physical change they saw to themselves afterwards, whether any of them got Reunion-inspired nightmares, or whatever else the side effects might have been. Maybe now and then there’s even a big mix up with the Jenova doses and someone mutates into something horrible (it’d sure be interesting seeing the Shinra department heads coming up with the technobabble to explain that one to the SOLDIERS who had to clean up afterwards). Meanwhile, you’ve got Zack’s relationship with a girl Shinra wants to kidnap as a research specimen, the story of how he got to know Sephiroth and plenty of other things like the old Shinra space program and the war with Wutai that could be going on in the background. Balance it all well, and you could spend the whole game dropping references to what’s coming, but still keeping them subtle enough that it’s still plausible that Zack could have made it as far as Nibelheim without any idea what he was in for.
See? You’re halfway to a plot for the game already, and there’s not a single poetry spouting Sephiroth-clone in sight. More importantly, we’re now covering plot points that people who played the first game might genuinely have been left wondering about. Stuff we’d find interesting.
Or at least stuff I’d find interesting, since I obviously can’t speak for the rest of FFVII fandom, and at the end of the day everyone’s still going to be entitled to love or hate any part of the series for whatever reasons work for them. The fandom’s still going strong and the games are still making Squeenix money, so clearly a lot of people are still getting something out of the new material. But I’d challenge even the most determined fans to make a case that the appeal of the new titles goes much beyond shiny graphics, pretty boys and loose excuses to put the words “Final Fantasy VII” before the colon in the title, and compared to the awesome story and characters that sold the original to me, that’s a bit sad. It would've been nice to be pleasantly surprised by Crisis Core; it would've been something even to be unpleasantly surprised by what I thought of it, but I passed that stage of disillusionment with the series a good while back.
I miss the good old days of early PS1 quality graphics and main characters with the detail and movement of lego figures. Say what you like about 'em, FFVII never needed any more than that to be one of the most successful RPGs in history - especially not any of the extras they've added on since.
The big disclaimer I need to make before starting is to admit I’ve hardly actually played the game myself. Most of these impressions come second-hand from watching over a shoulder while my sister did all the dirty work, and from what I heard from her (and sometimes the greater Internet) about the scenes I’d missed. So I can’t rule out the possibility I’ve gotten the wrong idea about a few of the details I talk about below (and can only welcome corrections if I have), but the basic problem remains that the impressions I did get left me with no inclination to look into the game in any more detail. I would have played it through myself once pinneagig was done if what I’d seen had left me with any desire to touch the thing again with a ten foot pole. It didn’t.
For me, the whole FFVII compilation has been one long disappointment. It’s been a long time since ’97, but how even the original creators could have so completely forget what makes their own characters tick I cannot imagine. I belong to what often feels like a depressingly small minority who finds AC Cloud painful to watch. Cloud may have been on the anti-social side for the first ten minutes or so of FFVII, but whatever happened to the character he developed into after that, the one who rode chocobos, cross-dressed to save a friend, gave advice to airsick ninjas and made big motivational speeches to the giant party of characters he’d inspired into helping him save the world? I can’t even imagine AC’s dull-looking loner emo-boy in any of those scenes. And sadly, most of the rest of the cast have only fared any better because they had less time on screen.
AC also gets a major award for making me giggle my way through all the parts of the fight scenes that didn’t put me to sleep - they just went on and on and the animation did absolutely nothing for me. It's all very well to have cartoony-style characters like the KH cast flying through the air and waving around construction girder sized weaponry as if it doesn't weigh a gram, but when you go to the effort of near-realistic characters like the AC cast you need to at least make a decent pretence that you're applying some kind of basic physics or the effect loses all believability. Bullet deflecting capes and a scene where Cloud’s friends team together to toss him skywards at the monster? Come on.
Next we got Dirge of Cerberus, which, between its complete bastardisation of everything I’d ever found interesting Vincent's backstory and a plot so nonsensical I can no longer even remember who the villains were ever meant to be, stands out most for being even worse. Before Crisis may have been better, though I’ll probably never know since it seems unlikely anyone outside Japan will ever get to play it. The only part of the compilation we actually enjoyed at all was the Last Order OAV covering what happened to Cloud and Zack in Nibelheim (excluding what they did to poor Tifa's characterisation and a few nitpicky changes), which did give us some vague hope for Crisis Core.
Unfortunately, it seems that in recent years, Squeenix have brought themselves to the conclusion that the appeal of FFVII is all down to one feature: lots of pretty boys. How else could it have seemed like a remotely good idea to make such a point of writing Gackt in as a character? Don’t let the new canon fool you - the original game told us what those creepy Sephiroth clones looked like under their black cloaks: they were barely-sane low-lifes like the man with a tattoo on his arm you encounter living in a pipe in the Midgar slums. Only when it came to time to try and dredge up enough unresolved plot for a sequel did anyone think of rewriting any of them as pretty boy Sephiroth rip-offs like the trio from AC - all in the name of gratuitous bishonen eye-candy. There's also the ridiculously costumed female cast of DoC and the lobotomised Lucrecia to cover the female fanservice angle. All this could still have been forgivable if they’d come up with enough new plot to make it all interesting, but not the slightest effort has been put into developing any of these second rate villains - they add very little to the story except a convenient excuse for a final boss battle.
But enough with the general griping. The fact remains that we still had some hope for Crisis Core - we’d seen some more promising reviews and knew we could at least count on Zack not to angst his way through the game the way Cloud and Vincent did, so we figured we’d give it a chance.
The Battle System
I’ll start with the battle system simply because that’ll be the short part. Combat happens in real time, more like the Kingdom Hearts games than the original FFVII. Hit X to attack, hit the L1/R1 buttons to select and use any of the materia you’ve got equipped. Pretty straightforward, and my sister tells me it’s also pretty fun to play.
Things only start to get ugly when you factor in the main defining gimmick of the system: something called the ‘DMW’ (apparently standing for ‘Digital Mind Wave’) which is the system which governs when you get your limit breaks, summon magic attacks, various stat bonuses which turn up in battle, how you and your materia level up and when combat will be randomly interrupted by flashbacks for no obvious reason. That’s an awful lot of unrelated stuff to cram together into one feature, and it’s achieved by linking each outcome to combinations on a series of slot reels - a bit like what you use in limit breaks like Cait Sith’s or Wakka’s, except that all the symbols are the images of other characters from the cast with numbers on them from one to seven. Lining up three Aeris’s gives you an Aeris-themed limit break; lining up three sevens levels you up. Et cetera.
This is already a bit confusing, since it would seem to imply - for example - that levelling up is something that happens to you completely by chance (or based on how good you are at lining up those sevens), which is a pretty dubious concept on which to base a levelling system. Only, the reality is that you never actually get to select when the reels stop reeling - the game does that for you automatically, whether you hit any buttons while it’s rolling or not. Nor do you get to select when the reels appear; that happens at random in the middle of combat with no obvious trigger. Why they even bothered to make this feature look like slot reels is beyond me, since the result is something like watching someone else play part of the game for you.
Since the tutorial section of the game had given us no clue whatsoever as to precisely why there were a set of automated slot reels constantly running through Zack’s head, I looked it up online and discovered that the truth is that levelling isn’t so random after all. You get EXP in battle, and once you’ve been through enough battles that it’s time to level up, the game will call up the DMW and roll the wheel around until it gets three sevens. So, in reality, a standard levelling system is pretending to be a random chance system, which is pretending to be an interactive slot reels minigame, and not even pretending very well. Basically, the entire DMW is an elaborate way of hiding a lot of information we’d be given up front in other FF instalments (like how much EXP you’ve got or how close you are to getting your next limit break) and taking away a lot of your choices (which summon or which limit break you use and when you use them). Not to mention those random flashbacks. I still don’t know what the deal with them is meant to be either.
The entire gimmick behind the CC battle system can be summarised as “random stuff happens at random.” I don’t think there’s any scathing comment I can make at this point to do justice to exactly how inane that is. I’ll grant you that battle systems have been based on crazier ideas, but all other RPGs I’ve played have at least made some token attempt to explain why throwing cards at the enemy does damage or how always leaving half your team behind makes sense. Crisis Core doesn’t even give us that much to work with.
The Plot - I use the term loosely
But hey, I’ve never really played RPGs for the gameplay, the make-or-break part for me is the story, so let’s talk about the Crisis Core plot. The game opens with a flashy battle scene that turns out to be an uber-realistic virtual reality training simulation, and already the game has nailed one of my pet hates: prequels in which the technology is inexplicably more advanced than in the original. Holodeck style VR rooms are such an overused sci-fi trope as it is, and they're completely out of place in a world like FFVII where big, clunky robots are the height of technological achievement and mankind still hasn't even made it to the moon. Soon after that Zack is handed a mobile phone and told how he's going to get all his official Shinra orders in the form of text messages, and once again the compilation sinks to the level of a high budget mobile phone advertisement. We never got a good look at the old PHS from FFVII, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say it probably wasn't advanced enough to handle text messaging. I'm also finding it terribly amusing to imagine that one could cut out the entire Shinra military communications system simply by jamming up the mobile phone network for an hour or two.
Early on, we meet this character called Angeal. Apparently he's some sort of mentor to Zack or something, it's not very well explained. He's the previous owner of the Buster Sword, and has all these ideas about how SOLDIERs need to have 'dreams and honour'. Where honour has something to do with not stealing apples from your friends or something. And where SOLDIER - let's remember - is the private army of an evil, world dominating corporation. Dreams and honour. Suuuure.
Already we're in trouble. Let's get a few things thing straight, Squeenix: the Buster Sword is an oversized hunk of metal that picks up surprise sentimental significance late in the FFVII story because it used to belong to Zack. It doesn't need to be important to Zack because it belonged to someone else before him, let alone someone as incomprehensible as Angeal. Also, no family with a precious heirloom that symbolises their honour is going to name it "The Buster Sword." Nor does it make any sense that Angeal carries something that weighs that much around all the time but refuses to use it in combat more than occasionally for fear it will (I kid you not) pick up scratches. The Buster Sword exists for busting things, that's what Cloud used it for, and that's its entire purpose in life. Alright? Right, let's get back to the plot.
While hanging around the Shinra headquarters and wondering why he's been off duty so long (and doing squats! Aww, okay, they get a point for including that) Zack hears from some random soldier dude that things are all in a mess because some first class SOLDIER called Genesis has turned traitor and is keeping admin unusually distracted. Hardly have we heard that, and Zack's got a new mission anyway - off to fight in the war with Wutai and maybe even get a promotion to First Class out of it if he does a good job. The Wutai section was handled relatively well - the war's an established part of the FFVII backstory so there's plenty of sense in including it, and the enemy troops looked about what I'd expect Wutai soldiers to look like (though I could've done without the gratuitous Yuffie cameo. Don’t get me wrong, I love Yuffie, but seeing the compilation forget every important aspect of her character except that she spins and wobbles in her victory pose has not been worth it).
Zack stuffs up towards the end of the mission and has to be bailed out by Angeal when a giant monster just about lands on him from above, so there's no promotion for him today, but they finish the job in one piece and head for home. On the way out, Zack and Angeal separate briefly - can't remember exactly why. Zack finds himself fighting some unfamiliar soldiers who don't seem to be from Wutai (don't ask me how he could tell) and then Sephiroth shows up for no particularly obvious reason and tells you that the mysterious soldiers you've just fought are Genesis clones and Angeal has betrayed you all and joined the enemy.
Back up there a sec. You may want to reread that last line again.
We've been playing now for maybe half an hour. We've known this Angeal guy existed for about three scenes, we last saw him all of about a minute ago, and already he's pulled a Shocking Betrayal! If you thought Seifer's betrayal in FF8 happened a little early to have much impact, well, you ain't seen nothin' till you've played Crisis Core. What the hell, Squeenix - seriously, what? Let's for a second ignore that he's switched sides in the time it takes to exit stage left and we don’t even know how Sephiroth’s supposed to know that, why are we supposed to care? We don't know bugger all about the enemy, we don't even hardly know anything about Angeal yet except that Zack seems to look up to him and nothing he says ever makes any sense. Random characters doing random shit for no remotely explained reason isn't a clever plot twist, it's a recipe to alienate your audience when they've barely started playing.
But surely this is all early plot development and all will be explained later on, right? WRONG. Angeal spends the rest of the game playing now-I'm-a-good-guy-now-I'm-not. Genesis, who is what you get when Squeenix quite literally decide to write Gackt in as a villain, spends it spouting horrible poetry and... being evil or something. I didn't see a lot of the rest of the game, but as best my sister could fathom the closest they're ever given to a motivation for anything they do is some vague implications that they're taking their anger out on society because Shinra made them into monsters. Y'know, as Shinra do, what with the giant production line of Sephiroth clones they've been turning out since before they even had a Sephiroth to clone. And as anyone who's seen the trailers should know, the way they show us the horrible things that Shinra's done to them is to give them wings. That is, they get wings collectively. They get exactly one wing each.
I could rant about the stupidity of a couple of second rate villains running around sprouting a feature that Sephiroth himself didn’t get to show us until the very last part of the final boss battle (and even then he would have been better named the Seven Winged Angel counting the other six he had coming out of the bottom of his torso and making him look like a giant flying squid). But the real problem I had with them is that one wing may be very pretty and symbolic, but someone needs to remind Squeenix that YOU CANNOT FLY LIKE THAT.
Obviously no-one bothered to tell either Angeal or Genesis this, because they both do it - repeatedly - all throughout the game. It might’ve worked okay if they’d only left the flying off-screen and let the audience assume that magic was going all the work, but oh no, instead we’re treated to endless flying scenes with beautifully rendered shots of a single ridiculous wing flapping all over the screen. By mid way through the game even the weak-ass Genesis clones you run into in random encounters are sprouting a wing and flying around. One of the scenes I saw in full even featured Angeal flying down in front of Zack, picking Zack up and flying away again. With that one lop-sided wing to hold the both of them up. Actually, we quite enjoyed that bit, but only because it made us laugh our heads off.
The whole explanation for all of Genesis’s and Angeal’s weirdness - and here is where I seriously had to start wondering whether I was hearing about an official game or a Mary Sue fic - is that they were created by a Shinra scientist who injected Jenova cells into a pregnant woman. Gosh, now why does that sound so familiar? Logically you could argue that it makes some kind of sense that Shinra could have tried the experiment a couple of times before they got it right, but where does that leave the story? You just can’t add elements like that this far down the line without them feeling like they’ve been crudely tacked on, especially not when so much of what made Sephiroth so genuinely scary was that how he came into being was so terrible and unique. I mean, Hojo convinced the woman who was carrying his child to let him inject cells from a hostile alien into her unborn baby. When Sephiroth was killed it took them dozens of experiments to recreate anything like him. But now it turns out that all the cool Shinra scientists were doing the same thing. It’s the equivalent of telling all the main characters that they’re going to have to go through all that work again because it’s just turned out the big bad had an identical twin.
I managed to miss most of Aeris’ scenes, so I will say only that from what little I did see her English voice actor actually wasn’t as terrible as I was expecting, but considering what I was expecting after KH2, that’s not much of an endorsement. From what I heard of the scenes I missed she was ever bit as OOC and ditzy as the trailers had led us to expect. pinneagig will have more to say about her role than I will here via a series of 4-panel parody comics she’s working on, so I’ll leave that one to the professionals.
The final section of the game post the escape from Nibelheim is dragged out to the point of pain. All we ever saw of it in the original FFVII was crammed into three very brief scenes, so while it’s reasonable to assume that maybe there was a day or two we didn’t know about in there, having Zack drag a comatose Cloud around the country for a week while he deals with some final boss stuff takes all impact out of the sequence. (BTW translation team, the word you were looking for for what Cloud is suffering at this point is probably ‘Mako Poisoning’ or ‘Mako Withdrawal’. ‘Mako Addiction’ makes no kind of sense in this context unless he was secretly waking up at night and sneaking away to find a fix, and that would be a bit crazy even for you.)
The final scene was going to be a hard sell to me whatever they did with it, because damnit, I liked how understated it was in FFVII. I know the same wouldn’t have worked in a fleshed out version like CC, but the way Zack’s little skittle-armed sprite goes jerking around on the ground as the Shinra soldiers continue to pump him full of bullets even after he’s down is something I always found horrible creepy and effective in the sorts of ways you don’t expect from graphics of that quality. By contrast, the new version really is like everything else about the game - drawn out, incomprehensible and generally a bit dull. Perhaps it would have had more impact on me if I’d seen more of the scenes leading up, but given that one of the few I did see was still trying to pack massive symbolic importance into those apples Angeal brought up to explain honour back at the start of the game, I don’t find it very likely.
And in conclusion?
In the end, nothing is properly explained, the story flow is awkward and ugly and constantly made me feel like I must’ve failed to do some kind of vital pre-reading that would have made what I was watching make sense. The plot always seems to be taking second place to things like finding room for cameo appearances for random characters from other compilation instalments which I haven’t played (just exactly who is Cisne meant to be anyway?) or giving you time to play with your phone. Probably the biggest single problem is that FFVII never actually needed any sequels - or prequels either. There were aspects left ambiguous that could have benefited from some better development, but resurrecting characters we knew were dead and dredging up other Shinra experiments as and making the main cast go through fighting them all over again can only cheapen everything the characters went through in the first game, and that seems to be about all the compilation does.
The shame about Crisis Core is that there are just enough redeeming features that you could see how much better it could have been. Zack is as endearing as he’s ever been. Sephiroth in his pre-psychosis days seemed mostly well handled from what I saw, and there were some nice moments between Zack and Cloud, and the escape from Nibelheim and all the rest - just enough to remind you that these are characters the original game made us love so much and there is a story here that could have been worth telling.
It’s not hard to come up with ways the same basic concept could have been re-imagined so that it worked. Lose Genesis and all the tripe that came with him, he was never anything more than a second-rate excuse for a final boss character anyway. With him gone you’ll have plenty of extra story-space to fill in, so let’s start by moving the beginning of the game back a bit so we can cover Zack’s early SOLDIER days properly, rather than throwing us in at the middle when he’s already at Second Class. Show us how - and why - he joined SOLDIER in the first place, how he went through training and worked his way up the ranks. Give his parents at least a cameo - we did meet them in FFVII, and they’d have to have some sort of opinion on what their son was doing with his life. If you need backup characters, how about giving Zack some classmates or some kind of team? The SOLDIERS you fight in the game always have at least one partner, and there’ll be ample chance to write the others out or kill them off along the way if need be. If you still want to give him a mentor like Angeal, go for it, but leave out the one-winged crap and rambling about honour - and this time, take the time to show us how he and Zack met at the start, why they were assigned together and why we’re supposed to care about their relationship. The people playing this game are going to know very little about what it’s like to work for Shinra at the start of the game, and we’re going to have a much better chance of empathising with the main character if he’s in the same position.
If you want to keep some suspect Shinra science practices in there to (quite rightly) foreshadow what’s to come then why not invent an employee or two who’s researching something different to Jenova? The idea that everyone and their lab assistant was injecting alien cells into their girlfriends is pretty far fetched, but I could easily buy that Shinra would have hired other people who were interested in some ‘unorthodox’ research subjects. And for a bit of plausible Jenova involvement, Zack’s a SOLDIER - he and everyone he works with were infused with Mako and Jenova cells when they joined. Wouldn’t it be interesting if we’d found out what the experience was like for them - how much physical change they saw to themselves afterwards, whether any of them got Reunion-inspired nightmares, or whatever else the side effects might have been. Maybe now and then there’s even a big mix up with the Jenova doses and someone mutates into something horrible (it’d sure be interesting seeing the Shinra department heads coming up with the technobabble to explain that one to the SOLDIERS who had to clean up afterwards). Meanwhile, you’ve got Zack’s relationship with a girl Shinra wants to kidnap as a research specimen, the story of how he got to know Sephiroth and plenty of other things like the old Shinra space program and the war with Wutai that could be going on in the background. Balance it all well, and you could spend the whole game dropping references to what’s coming, but still keeping them subtle enough that it’s still plausible that Zack could have made it as far as Nibelheim without any idea what he was in for.
See? You’re halfway to a plot for the game already, and there’s not a single poetry spouting Sephiroth-clone in sight. More importantly, we’re now covering plot points that people who played the first game might genuinely have been left wondering about. Stuff we’d find interesting.
Or at least stuff I’d find interesting, since I obviously can’t speak for the rest of FFVII fandom, and at the end of the day everyone’s still going to be entitled to love or hate any part of the series for whatever reasons work for them. The fandom’s still going strong and the games are still making Squeenix money, so clearly a lot of people are still getting something out of the new material. But I’d challenge even the most determined fans to make a case that the appeal of the new titles goes much beyond shiny graphics, pretty boys and loose excuses to put the words “Final Fantasy VII” before the colon in the title, and compared to the awesome story and characters that sold the original to me, that’s a bit sad. It would've been nice to be pleasantly surprised by Crisis Core; it would've been something even to be unpleasantly surprised by what I thought of it, but I passed that stage of disillusionment with the series a good while back.
I miss the good old days of early PS1 quality graphics and main characters with the detail and movement of lego figures. Say what you like about 'em, FFVII never needed any more than that to be one of the most successful RPGs in history - especially not any of the extras they've added on since.