So after completing FF7R earlier this year, I was really excited to finally play a remaster of Crisis Core with the same new graphics. (Except the CGI scenes are still circa 2007 lol) Let’s see how things panned out! As usual, Kanade commentary will be in blue.

So first of all I will say right now – as a stand alone game, this game is not good. The gameplay shows its age of just being a boring grinder with very little story. Fortunately, if you’re a fan of FF7, this is a must play in my opinion for all the prequel story and lore of the FF7 universe. It’s also a must play for all the Zack x Aerith shippers, like me. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) Seeing little Cloud and Tifa was really cute too and honestly I wanted MORE of that but it was so short lived (´;ω;`).

I think, THINK that the format of the game probably made a lot more sense when it was on PSP rather than PC/console. If you’re like “oh I have 20 minutes to myself while I sit on the bus, yeah sure let’s pull out the PSP and knock out a few more of those 300 filler missions”. But when it’s time to sit down for the evening and spend 4 hours playing the game, then I’ll want to do something more substantive.

The story itself is very short and if I wasn’t doing some missions out of boredom/curiosity I would have probably finished the game within 8-10 hours. With breaks and streaming and doing side quests/missions I finished with about 17 hours on my steam counter. So unfortunately I cannot recommend the game as a stand alone RPG, however I think it makes a great addition to the FF7 universe. The best part of course, if you’re played FF7R you’ll know that Zack in fact, does not die and actually returns alive to see Aerith like he originally intended to. And so after playing this I’m now even more excited for FF7R part 2  which will hopefully come out 2023 or 2024.

Now I just want to talk about a few WTF things in the game. The biggest wtf moment was when Zack randomly got thrown into a beach episode with Cissnei (who I found out is a character from some other FF7 side game with an unresolved plot lol.) The beach episode last a whole 5 minutes

What was the entire point of this?? 5 minutes after being on the beach and fighting durds with his beach umbrella Zack is called on to fight more robot roombas at Shinra HQ. In fact the entire game Zack is fighting these Shinra robots and somehow takes no questioning of “man is Shinra bad?” It’s only when they discover the hidden dungeon near Cloud’s village with the secrets of all the experiments does the story finally move and reveal that Shinra are a bunch of assholes using people as lab rats. Unfortunately by then it’s too late as Cloud and Zack are stuffed into tanks to be experimented on until 4 years later Zack manages to escape with Cloud who is a victim of mako overdose.

There was a really weird moment late in the game where the game gives you the standard “point of no return” warning to save your game and only continue if you’re ready to proceed on rails to the end. The reason it was weird was because we were only at the end of chapter 7, meaning that there were three whole chapters still to go so it felt like a very early point of no return. Then when you start chapter 8, Zach gets a call from Aerith and he’s like “okay sure I’ll get back to you and fix your flower cart”, so as a player it feels like maybe this is like a quest or objective or something. But then you remember “oh wait, this is the point of no return…but also I’ve still got 2 chapters after this too, maybe when the chapter is over I can go back?” And then on top of THAT, it’s weird because like it kind of botches the dramatic irony because you “know” that Zach can’t go back because you got the game warning you beforehand?

Also why the hell is Gackt one of the main enemies. I don’t mean a character Gackt voices, or a character inspired by him. No it’s literally a Gary Stu Gackt because his model looks IDENTICAL to him with the remake graphics.  In the old version you could get away and say it’s a different character but thanks to graphic evolution over the years it’s now basically Gackt. 😂The entire game I had Vanilla playing in my head.

The battle system was similar to Stranger of Paradise so I had no issues getting used to it. However, there were definitely parts where the bosses were stupid hard and had 1 shot attacks (looking at you Sephiroth). At that point I just handed the wheel over to Kanade because I got tired of dying 3 times in a row. The game only had Normal and Hard Mode, so you couldn’t brute force your way through these things unless you did enough missions to synthetically level up your character.

I think the game might’ve also had like fake Echo in it for the boss fights too, because there were definitely a few that I failed and then eventually all the roulette wheel bonuses suddenly came up constantly hugely in my favor, like letting me spam limit breaks or getting powerful buffs like invulnerability.

On the topic of leveling, the leveling system was weird and stupid. The entire thing was based on some kind of dumb slot machine (and gave me weird Astrologian Divination Flashbacks in FFXIV) which not only influenced how much exp and level you go, but also influenced which LIMIT BREAK you’d be able to use. You could of course increase chances of a certain limit break with materia at the end of the game but ultimately I chose to just use materia that gave me better attacks or healing instead.

The stat and leveling system is kind of weird. It seems fairly straightforward at first in that you slot in materia that give you different skills, similar to FFVIIR (there’s no weapons and armor, just accessories so the materia is how you customize your character). But then instead of leveling through getting xp or using your skills, your materia and character level through (more or less) pure RNG where some roulette wheels periodically spin during combat and if they line up in certain ways it levels you up. While writing this up, I went to double check exactly how the RNG worked and the first thing I saw was “if you equip an accessory that regenrates your HP, you can just do a level 1 misssion and leave the game running overnight while the wheels spin over and over” lol.

And finally my biggest pet peeve, as an Aerith and Zack shipper was Aerith’s cart quest. So in chapter 7, Aerith asks Zack to make her a flower cart to sell her flowers in. Cool I’ll do anything for you Aerith-chan and so I made her the regular cart. She whined that it was too ugly and boring so I made Kanade do an idiotic sit ups mini game (similar to that in FF7R) to get her a flower cart tank. It has a funny cut scene following it, but still it was not what she wanted. What she wanted was a CUTE flower cart but in order to  get the materials, you had to have completed a side quest that was only available to complete in chapter 6. Yes you had to basically KNOW IN ADVANCE that you need to do that stupid Wutai member side quest in chapter 6, in order to make Aerith’s cart that you don’t even find out about until chapter 7. ಠ_ಠ WTF. So needless to say, I never made that cart and decided to just look for the cutscenes on Youtube.

The actual annoying part about the flower cart quest was less that you had to have completed a random sidequest in an earlier chapter and more that the game then tells you “complete the following sidequests to make her the cute cart” and it lists said uncompletable sidequest! It would’ve been much more clear if they just left that version out and only gave you the instructions for the (completeable) Shinra cart.

One of the other complaints others had that I didn’t is apparently everyone & their grandmother hated the new English dub. I heard a comparison of both and since I’m not a fan of English dub in general I honestly couldn’t tell the difference. The Japanese dub will always be superior to me (simply because they have professional voice actors who constantly voice act rather than hiring random guy or movie actor like they frequently do in western media.) And finally, we had the misfortune of buying the Digital Deluxe Edition which is supposed to come with a digital artbook and soundtrack on steam….but it doesn’t. You basically pay $20 for NOTHING. Kanade submitted a ticket to Steam but who knows if they will give him the money back. I mean, I’d rather get my artbook and OST but at the moment, it’s an extra $20 down the shitter. So if you plan to get the game on Steam, DO NOT buy the Digital Deluxe Edition.

So overall as I said, if you’re a Zerith shipper, get the game. If you want FF7 Lore, get the game. If you want massive quantities of chuunibyou edegelordery, get the game. If you want a solid interesting stand alone JRPG and have no connection or background with FF7, then don’t bother. And as usual check out my video of us reacting to the Zack and Aerith moments we encountered in the game:

Let’s summarize the game as a textbook example of a “wait for a sale” game. It’s more Final Fantasy VII if that’s what you want, but ultimately the game is just dozens of hours of sidequests fighting interchangeable trash mobs (that generally die in one or two hits because of elemental weaknesses) in the the same few reused levels gets boring extremely quickly, and an MSQ that took maybe like 10 hours to complete (and that’s without skipping any cutscenes). So yeah, don’t spend $70 for this like I did (also don’t spend $70 like I did rather than the base price because the DLC that I paid extra for didn’t work, lol.)

P.S. Oh my god loli Yuffie was so annoying lol. How does everyone like her??