crisis core Definitely shouldn’t work.By the time it’s finally released, the rest compiles final fantasy 7 The anniversary series has gone so far as to trample the memory of the original game, so much so that you can’t help but wonder if you actually loved it.
Elegy of Cerberus is a poor man’s Gungrave starring the most boring FF7 party members. Advent Children is a gimmicky, incoherent epilogue that softens the ending of the original game and helps push the world further into the more generic anime aesthetic it finds today. After all, the prequel proposal is downright threatening. Sequels you can ignore, the prequels carry a real risk of irreversibly damaging the source material.
On paper, this sounds absolutely abhorrent. The soundtrack for an industrial metal mix? A weird slot machine subsystem? Sephiroth’s origin story? Confidence in Square Enix’s ability to deliver a Final Fantasy game with real-time combat in the wake of Cerberus’ Dirge is non-existent. Granted, some at the time felt strongly that none of this was going to work — it was just another tasteless and redundant cash-out that needlessly complicates an already bloated saga. Not content to just flesh out Zack and Sephiroth’s history, Crisis at Core introduces a slew of new characters, secret projects, and clone armies, and weaves them into the already labyrinthine tapestry of the organizations and mad scientists that drive FF7’s story.
Released in what is arguably the flop era of Square Enix, it’s easy to see all of this and shut it down right away. According to Japanese pop giant GACKT, find out Sephiroth’s secret best friend and then die inside. Introduced to a slot machine-based combat system that randomly assigns special abilities and immediately wants to go to bed. It all seems a little vulgar. However, if you can get past some of the flamboyant excesses of this minimalist era in JRPG history, you’ll find a surprisingly dark and touching story that strengthens rather than undercuts the original.
Zac was doomed from the start, which made his existence as a truly light-hearted and lovable protagonist in a series known for its gloomy fringe lords even more of a blow. The end of the game is a reimagining of his death. Getting shot by three guys on the hill is clearly determined to be far from an epic send-off, enough to make the rest of the compilation over-the-top anime-style. Instead, Zach heroically plunges headlong into a battalion of heavily armed soldiers and missile-firing helicopters. Again, it seems like it should be just as absurd and flashy as other spinoffs. Somehow, it ended up being one of the most narratively and mechanically cohesive moments in Square Enix history.
Ridiculously named Digital Mind Wave’s spin slot, which was initially thought to be a redundant and silly addition to the combat system, is suddenly being used to convey emotional intuition. As the acoustic guitar kicks in and you cut into the ever-reborn SINRA tribe, portraits of Zack’s friends start lining up. Their memories flashed before his eyes, then burned like exposed 35mm film. The portrait of that character disappeared, becoming an unremarkable silhouette in a slot machine. As Zach took more hits, his health began to decline, and more and more people who were important to him were wiped from his consciousness.
The music stopped, and now it’s just Zach and the three guys on the hill. You can keep fighting, and Zack’s shattered body horribly crosses the battlefield as the screen begins to bleed and the digital mindwave begins to crumble. The only face left on the slot is Aerith, which Zach has been desperately holding on as everyone else has faded.
Of course, that’s in vain – Zach’s fate is decided by the game released ten years ago. He eats the last bullet, and three portraits of Alice line up on the screen before being engulfed by light. It shouldn’t work, but it definitely does. Turn a perfunctory moment in the original into something grander by leveraging the game’s own systems in ways that Square’s games rarely use.
Crisis at the Core may be a boring prequel that diligently and methodically prepares all the pieces for the opening of Final Fantasy 7. Instead, it’s a completely separate story of doomed friendship, tragic downfall, and corporate malfeasance. It uses characters and scenarios that players are familiar with to create something truly new and surprising. More than a decade later, the “remake” of Final Fantasy VII will shatter players’ expectations by a wide margin and take a completely different direction from the original. To be fair, Crisis at the Core was a smaller experiment that demonstrated that it was possible to tell a new story within an established framework.
It’s important to remember that this is still essentially a PSP game. If you’ve played the HD remake of Final Fantasy Type-0, you’ll know that there’s a strange gulf between visual fidelity and the stifling constraints of the environment and encounters. The real danger is that new players trying the game on expensive big-box PCs and modern consoles will encounter boring hallways and walls of repetitive button-mashings that come with expectations of no-name classics. Levels and battles are designed perfectly for short bursts on public transport, and when dragged to larger screens, absolutely fail.
If you can handle all of this, you’ll find the blueprint for Final Fantasy 7 Remake – a story that uses characters you already care about in a truly surprising way, rather than just dutifully sticking to what’s been before . It’s pretty goofy on a visual and mechanical level while being pretty serious at the same time, which is perfect for a game-based game where you battle haunted houses between ambient terrorism.
If you thought the original Final Fantasy 7 was a sacred text, Crisis at Core will turn your stomach. If you’re not so dogmatic, you’ll find a fascinating artifact in one of the media’s most enduring stories.
