Final Fantasy VII remains one of the most loved and respected games of all time, widely considered by fans as being the best of the now highly prestigious RPG series. I can’t argue with this praise, as FFVII still remains one of my all time console RPG favourites, right up there with Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI (otherwise known as Final Fantasy III… don’t ask). Just to make things clear at this stage: If you’re the kind of FFVII fan who still regularly brings the game up in conversation whenever tenously possible, or would happily change your name to Sephiroth if you thought you’d ever be able to get a job again then this review quite simply isn’t written for you. Add six points onto the little score at the bottom and pick up a copy as soon as possible, you’ll love it.
The problem is in the same way that this review doesn’t cater for those who are hardcore FF7 fans, Crisis Core doesn’t always cater for those who aren’t… First impressions are great: roaming about on SOLDIER missions as our predictably spikey-haired protagonist Zack has a feeling of pace and intensity to it, and the game’s graphics, music, and style all shine through to further bolster this rather meaty experience. The weight of the FF7 franchise brings the game to life immediately, sending you to familiar locales and throwing you into encounters with well known faces. If you’re a veteran of the original game then the first few hours of the game feel like a welcome trip down Midgar’s memory lane.
Man does sexy dance in helicopter, bystanders lost for words.
The combat system is considerably simpler than in other Final Fantasy games; simply locking onto an enemy then selecting an action carries out the move in real-time as you have free reign over the character’s movement on the battlefield using the analogue stick. Also able to use defensive moves, evasive rolls and blocking are mapped to square and triangle respectively, which adds a more involving edge to an otherwise overly simplistic system. There’s little to master here though unfortunately, as the effective and easy to master dodge roll renders blocking almost entirely obsolete right from the off.
The magic system uses the same materia as FFVII, which seems welcome at first but later feels poorly judged… Many of the magic spells are the kind that would be used by support characters to boost your main force, but only having one character in combat (and a powerful one at that) means taking up the time and the slot space for much of the materia seems a waste. As you’d expect you have the usual array of enemies with elemental weaknesses to explot using magic, but usually the game does little to dissaude you from simply mashing the attack command repeatedly.
