Screenshots :.
Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7
PSP
Matt
06-05-2008
"That looks kinda fun, in a way..."
"Cloud and Zack, Norwegian boy-band."
"Attack for massive damage etc etc."
"The rather silly slot system thing."
"Midgar still looks wonderfully brooding."
There were brief moments during this past weekend that I actually began to dread what the contents of this review of Final Fantasy: Crisis Core would end up looking like. Whilst I happily admit to anyone unfortunate enough to be in listening distance just how much a fan of Final Fantasy 7 I am, the resulting weight of expectation was always going to sit heavily on Square Enix’s PSP title unless it turned out to be another blockbuster.
Let’s put those theories to rest right now: Crisis Core is no blockbuster. Although the twisting, turning (and rather short, sadly) narrative is something that adds greatly to the ever-growing Final Fantasy 7 canon, the actual game behind it all pleases and frustrates in equal measure. Fans will obviously hoover it up no matter what, but there’s a few warnings you should all heed before you do.
Crisis Core tells the tale of Zack Fair, the black-haired chappy whom most of us were introduced to in the original Final Fantasy 7. The game actually deals with the events that led up to the beginning of the PSX title, telling us all how things went down before Cloud even managed to set foot on the scene with his bleached spiky bonce and unreasonably large sword. Travelling through a series of familiar locations with a ragtag bunch of characters to meet on the way, your task is to discover why elite Soldier fellow Genesis has gone rogue and started attacking the Shinra Corporation, for whom he once worked.
Things unfold with a distinct action flavour more in line with Kingdom Hearts than Final Fantasy, with the playing guiding a single character around throughout and choosing what combat action he wishes to use in real-time rather than having the action pause.
The game pretty much divides itself up in two, with the main story running through on one hand and a heck of a lot of side missions to work through on the other. These side missions are accessed from save points that are littered around the world and are in effect the primary way for you to level up Zack through combat given the lack of a free-roaming world to explore. The general idea is that as you level up the more of these missions are able to be unlocked by completing others and so on, with lovely shiny items and materia your reward for working your way through.
Unfortunately, working your way through these missions quickly becomes somewhat of a grind. You can see what Square Enix were thinking with having these missions; that giving some small pretext to otherwise random battling would sharpen the otherwise dull edge of level grinding your way up through the game. Sadly, despite the missions some sort of story or aim, each boils down to you being put in a cut-down section of one of the game’s main environments and having to slash your way through any enemies on your way to a final ‘boss’ group of monsters. The rewards for your endeavours are pleasing enough, but whether even the most ardent of Final Fantasy fans will hang around to clock 100% of the missions is something I seriously doubt.
The combat itself brings up further issues, although to be fair the basic way in which it all works is actually pretty good. Depending on which materia – think magic crystals – you equip into the slots in your weaponry and armour, you are afforded a number of spells and attack options that you can scroll between with the shoulder buttons. You can queue commands up if you’re particularly adept at all this and even use barrel roll and defend to avoid or block enemy attacks (this becomes particularly crucial the further you delve in) so on the whole the bare bones of the battle system works nicely.
This is all slightly undone by the rather confusing slot machine system that takes care of limit breaks and levelling up for you. The general – and I mean general – gist of this is that in the top left corner of the screen you’ll find a slot machine type thing that spins through pictures of the major characters in the game, as well as numbers. Certain combinations of these numbers will imbue various status effects on you, whilst having three similar pictures line up with take you into a further screen from which there is a chance you could level up, have your attributes boosted or have a limit break initiated.
The big problem in all this is the word ‘chance’. As long as you have defeated enough enemies and gained soldier points – of which 10 are spent on rotating the wheel – you’ll constantly have the thing spinning away in the corner at you, but when it stops and what you’ll get as a result is very much pot luck. The result of this is that you could end up unleashing an epic limit break at the very end of a fight in which you could have done with one much earlier, or as in my case not levelled up for an age and then gone up two inside one battle. It’s a frustrating system that’s difficult for you to get your head around, but thankfully as the main acts of combat are dealt with yourself it isn’t something that can cripple you too much.
The further you progress into Crisis Core, the more your feelings begin to divide themselves. Whilst on the one hand you find yourself somewhat intrigued as to what the story has to offer up next, you equally find yourself becoming somewhat tired of the constant button mashing dungeon crawls that chain together to form the stories and the side missions alike. The characters are all given plenty of depth and padding in true Final Fantasy fashion and are all an interesting bunch, but then again Crisis Core works from a frame that was created for it over a decade ago so this was perhaps to be expected.
Another thing to praise the game for are its visuals and sounds, both of which are amongst the best that anything on the PSP has managed. The cutscenes which litter the story are really rather special at times and look like a miniaturised version of Advent Children, which in itself is a great testament to their visual prowess. The musical side of things mixes spruced-up versions of some old Final Fantasy 7 favourites with a bunch of new tunes that blend in very well, and all in all it accompanies the proceedings very nicely indeed.
Still, you can’t help but feel that Crisis Core is somewhat of a game that fans will get the most out of, whilst everyone else might be left a little cold. It’s a fairly lazy way to round up any game to tell the truth, but in this case the slipper really does fit. The majority of the joy that I had with the game came in re-visiting the locations and people with whom I’ve spent countless hours over the last decade. Even taking this into account I couldn’t for one moment even start to think that Crisis Core is a fantastic game; it has its moments of epic storytelling, looks and sounds lovely and never really does anything monumentally wrong, but on the flipside it never really breaks out of the rather repetitive mould it sets itself either, and has a bloody confusing limit break and levelling system to throw in a bit of added frustration. What more to say than ho-hum, really.
Let’s put those theories to rest right now: Crisis Core is no blockbuster. Although the twisting, turning (and rather short, sadly) narrative is something that adds greatly to the ever-growing Final Fantasy 7 canon, the actual game behind it all pleases and frustrates in equal measure. Fans will obviously hoover it up no matter what, but there’s a few warnings you should all heed before you do.
Crisis Core tells the tale of Zack Fair, the black-haired chappy whom most of us were introduced to in the original Final Fantasy 7. The game actually deals with the events that led up to the beginning of the PSX title, telling us all how things went down before Cloud even managed to set foot on the scene with his bleached spiky bonce and unreasonably large sword. Travelling through a series of familiar locations with a ragtag bunch of characters to meet on the way, your task is to discover why elite Soldier fellow Genesis has gone rogue and started attacking the Shinra Corporation, for whom he once worked.
Things unfold with a distinct action flavour more in line with Kingdom Hearts than Final Fantasy, with the playing guiding a single character around throughout and choosing what combat action he wishes to use in real-time rather than having the action pause.
The game pretty much divides itself up in two, with the main story running through on one hand and a heck of a lot of side missions to work through on the other. These side missions are accessed from save points that are littered around the world and are in effect the primary way for you to level up Zack through combat given the lack of a free-roaming world to explore. The general idea is that as you level up the more of these missions are able to be unlocked by completing others and so on, with lovely shiny items and materia your reward for working your way through.
Unfortunately, working your way through these missions quickly becomes somewhat of a grind. You can see what Square Enix were thinking with having these missions; that giving some small pretext to otherwise random battling would sharpen the otherwise dull edge of level grinding your way up through the game. Sadly, despite the missions some sort of story or aim, each boils down to you being put in a cut-down section of one of the game’s main environments and having to slash your way through any enemies on your way to a final ‘boss’ group of monsters. The rewards for your endeavours are pleasing enough, but whether even the most ardent of Final Fantasy fans will hang around to clock 100% of the missions is something I seriously doubt.
The combat itself brings up further issues, although to be fair the basic way in which it all works is actually pretty good. Depending on which materia – think magic crystals – you equip into the slots in your weaponry and armour, you are afforded a number of spells and attack options that you can scroll between with the shoulder buttons. You can queue commands up if you’re particularly adept at all this and even use barrel roll and defend to avoid or block enemy attacks (this becomes particularly crucial the further you delve in) so on the whole the bare bones of the battle system works nicely.
This is all slightly undone by the rather confusing slot machine system that takes care of limit breaks and levelling up for you. The general – and I mean general – gist of this is that in the top left corner of the screen you’ll find a slot machine type thing that spins through pictures of the major characters in the game, as well as numbers. Certain combinations of these numbers will imbue various status effects on you, whilst having three similar pictures line up with take you into a further screen from which there is a chance you could level up, have your attributes boosted or have a limit break initiated.
The big problem in all this is the word ‘chance’. As long as you have defeated enough enemies and gained soldier points – of which 10 are spent on rotating the wheel – you’ll constantly have the thing spinning away in the corner at you, but when it stops and what you’ll get as a result is very much pot luck. The result of this is that you could end up unleashing an epic limit break at the very end of a fight in which you could have done with one much earlier, or as in my case not levelled up for an age and then gone up two inside one battle. It’s a frustrating system that’s difficult for you to get your head around, but thankfully as the main acts of combat are dealt with yourself it isn’t something that can cripple you too much.
The further you progress into Crisis Core, the more your feelings begin to divide themselves. Whilst on the one hand you find yourself somewhat intrigued as to what the story has to offer up next, you equally find yourself becoming somewhat tired of the constant button mashing dungeon crawls that chain together to form the stories and the side missions alike. The characters are all given plenty of depth and padding in true Final Fantasy fashion and are all an interesting bunch, but then again Crisis Core works from a frame that was created for it over a decade ago so this was perhaps to be expected.
Another thing to praise the game for are its visuals and sounds, both of which are amongst the best that anything on the PSP has managed. The cutscenes which litter the story are really rather special at times and look like a miniaturised version of Advent Children, which in itself is a great testament to their visual prowess. The musical side of things mixes spruced-up versions of some old Final Fantasy 7 favourites with a bunch of new tunes that blend in very well, and all in all it accompanies the proceedings very nicely indeed.
Still, you can’t help but feel that Crisis Core is somewhat of a game that fans will get the most out of, whilst everyone else might be left a little cold. It’s a fairly lazy way to round up any game to tell the truth, but in this case the slipper really does fit. The majority of the joy that I had with the game came in re-visiting the locations and people with whom I’ve spent countless hours over the last decade. Even taking this into account I couldn’t for one moment even start to think that Crisis Core is a fantastic game; it has its moments of epic storytelling, looks and sounds lovely and never really does anything monumentally wrong, but on the flipside it never really breaks out of the rather repetitive mould it sets itself either, and has a bloody confusing limit break and levelling system to throw in a bit of added frustration. What more to say than ho-hum, really.
6/10
