System: PSP
FFVII is one of my earliest memories of stellar RPGdom. I think the only one before that was Super Mario RPG. I remember watching my friend Alex play the scene leading up to and including the first boss fight, and falling totally in love with the game. I eventally went on to beat the game years later, and loved it.
Crisis Core talks about what happened before all that, and it does an amazing job of doing so. The graphics are of PS2 quality in-game, and cut-scenes are as detailed as Advent Children. Music is spot-on, as well as the voice acting. The astetics of this game are nearly flawless.
The combat is like Kingdom Hearts, only better. In combat, controls are quick and responsive, and executing commands becomes almost secondhand, despite the real-time format. Traversing the game world is your standard fare, but I never really expected anything innovative there anyway.
A really cool gameplay mechanic is the Materia Fusion system. It's exactly what it sounds like, and results in you being able to experiment with different combos and stat boosts to customize Zack to your playstyle. I personally went the spellcasting route. There's also the DMW, which is a 3-slot roulette system that sits in the corner and occasionally levels you or your materia up, as well as giving you limit breaks and restoring some HP, MP and/or AP. It feels weird at first, but ends up working well and being a fun part of battle.
The story is great, and works beautifully whether you've played FFVII or not. There are some perks to having played FFVII before, and playing this really helps you understand the latter much more. The mission system tacks on some optional gameplay, and gives you the opportunity to unlock some really cool gear and materia. The drawback to this is that the normal game becomes really easy once you've done enough missions.
The game isn't perfect, though. A minimalist can get away with spamming the "attack" command and getting through a lot of the main game. The fact that most enemies flinch when they're hit make it possible to continuously hit them to avoid ever getting attacked. This is usually rectified by having at least 2 enemies in every battle. However, this doesn't do much to help since many normal enemies will attack only sporadically intstead of making a team effort, much like in action movies where the hero is outnumbered by henchmen. The designers tried to make up for this by introducing enemies later on in the game that cast the Death spell, which is an unavoidable one-hit kill if you don't interrupt the cast by specifically targeting and hitting the enemy casting it (or you could equip one of the rare items that negates it).
Also, the odd decision to not allow the player to skip non-movie cut-scenes was a bad design choice. Sometimes you've already seen it (like if you had to continue from an earlier save), and sometimes you just don't care.
In addition, all 300 missions take place on the same 6 or 7 maps, which makes them really boring to look at after seeing the same caves for the 40th time. It's slightly mitigated by the fact you start in a variety of areas. However, these are fairly small complaints when compared to the rest of the game.
All in all, this is one of the best, if not THE best game on the PSP. Whether you're a FFVII fan or not, Crisis Core is worth checking out.
Rating: S - Rank
