For Those Who Wish Cloud had Sexy Black Hair

Crisis Core:
Final Fantasy VII

Final Fantasy. With every iteration, they become final-er, and much more fantastical. For those who may not be familiar with the franchise, let me break it down: save the world, look sexy, fight monsters, level up, laugh, cry, cross dress (looking at you Cloud), and push systems to their brink.

To summarize, they’re everything you want from an epic adventure novel polished into a video game. Final Fantasy games have appeared in several flavors across the board from console, to pc, to handheld, to card game. FF’s done it all and always maintained a top notch production value, and Crisis Core has style to spare.

Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII is the story of Zack Fair, an elite member of the military group SOLDIER. The events that transpire in the game provide a clearer picture of events before the blockbuster game, Final Fantasy VII. The story covers everything from Zack’s ascension in the ranks of SOLDIER, Sephiroth’s downward spiral into madness, and Cloud’s inspiration to fight.

Long time VII fans will no doubt rejoice at hearing Sephiroth’s leitmotif “One Winged Angel” again, while newcomers can experience the story from a more canonically linear take. But where does Crisis Core fit into the busy lives of busy gamers?

Make no mistake, while Crisis Core falls into the handheld category, it offers up a console sized experience. Apart from the main story, there are three hundred side missions to keep you busy and the missions are what give the game legs. In a nutshell, the missions are short. While main story events can take upwards of an hour to complete, the missions accessed at save points can typically be completed anywhere from five to fifteen minutes. And with hundreds of missions to choose from, that’s pretty swanky.

The game also boasts some heavy customization. Equipment will help you boost stats, counter ailments, and learn new abilities. And what iteration of VII could be complete without its trademark materia? Equipping materia allows you to learn new spells, increase your stats, and acquire new moves. But that’s not all! In Crisis Core you also have the option of Materia Fusion, which allows you to fuse two materia together to create new or more powerful materia. Throw in fusion items for better results and you’ll jump from having 9,999 HP to 99,999 in no time! And how do you get the awesome equipment and materia? By playing the hundreds of short and sweet missions!

Sorry to sound like a car commercial, but if you’re into RPGs at all, it’s addictive. For Final Fantasy fans it’s almost mandatory to get the best equipment and max out your stats, and to do that in Crisis Core, it’ll cost you around a hundred hours. So how does a game this demanding amount of time stack up to one life standards?

Quite well.

The Game: 8.5 / 10 (Fantastic)
Easily the most beautiful game on PSP, Square-Enix pulls no punches in the graphics department. The controls are simple, but refined. The missions can be somewhat repetitive though. Oh yeah, and the story is Square-Enix caliber: incredibly epic and unnervingly sweet.

The Time: 9 / 10 (Top Notch)
But you said 100 hours?! That’s 100 hours of story and hundreds of side quests. While the game is every bit a Final Fantasy, the fact that you can pick up your PSP at any moment and bust out a five minute quest (and be rewarded for it) makes it a dream for the busy gamer on the go.

The Verdict:
Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII is everything a rushed gamer wants. If you want to sit down for hours, you’re good to go; if you only have five minutes to stifle your gamer jonesing, you’re set. It’s really an amazing little package.

That being said, I have two chief complaints, and only one of them is a pressing matter. For starters, the missions can be repetitive. There are maybe ten different maps all in all, and each mission uses different areas of the map, or the same areas with different monsters. If you find a clear afternoon where you can spend more than two hours on missions, you may find yourself getting bored. On the flipside, if you've got that kind of time you can always further yourself into the story and see a lot more diverse areas with a truly engaging story.

My second and much less serious of a complaint is the reference to a play within the game called LOVELESS. Without spoiling too much, this character named Genesis is constantly quoting from the fictional play in an attempt to foreshadow. Now I love a good Final Fantasy mysticism as much as the next nerd, but there's only so much, "The Wings of the Goddess will spread into the fruit of the farfignuegen, yada, yada, yada," that I can take. Seriously, the cat can ramble. I know it's meant to sound cool and mysterious, and he's sexy because he can recite poetry, but this crap is far from Macbeth. He just throws out these mystique-laden terms that get nerds antsy. He might as well be saying, "Trench coats, vampires, Neo, explosions, boobs, ninjas." It's almost that ridiculous.
Sigh... Now that that's out of my system, allow me to say that the game is great. It's beautiful visually, it has a sweet story, the action is intense, and a universe that you know and love feels a little warmer in your soul. While you might feel bad knowing how things end up, it's still charming to take the ride with so many familiar faces. In closing, it's games of this quality that make you glad there will never be a true, final fantasy.