2.5/5 ★ – Lazare's review of Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion.

I played a lot of the original Crisis Core, so it felt like a real treat to play this again with heavily overhauled graphics. However, I came away from the experience with some incredibly mixed feelings. First, the good: Crisis Core is, in my opinion, probably the second action RPG to really establish a winning formula for gameplay — the second being Square’s other ARPG Kingdom Hearts II. You can tell it works, as practically every subsequent ARPG developed by Square Enix has this game’s DNA. You don’t get Lightning Returns, Final Fantasy XV or the newer Final Fantasy VII Remake without this game. The gameplay’s just great, and with Reunion, they’ve somehow managed to improve it by getting rid of the pauses that came with the original ATB-inspired system, the restriction of tying items and materia to the same equipment slots, and the introduction of the VII Remake-inspired Buster Sword combat arts. Everything else about the game… kinda sucks. I can’t really cushion how I feel about it after spending so much time with this and 100% the game. The limitations of the PSP’s hardware remain very much intact. I feel like this is very apparent in two specific ways: the scope of the game is miniscule despite much of the non-story missions taking place in the massive city of Midgar, which had about five hours’ worth of explorable content in the original Final Fantasy VII. Here, the city is reduced to a little over a handful of unique, small maps populated with a handful of NPCs each. You can go from the Shinra HQ to Aerith’s church in about five screens, each with their own ungodly loading times. There’s also the way the game does optional gameplay content in the form of missions, each being more or less the exact same thing, over and over, for a few hundred missions. It’s insanely repetitive, and even though I still had fun mowing through them, it was disappointing to see that Reunion didn’t do anything to make the missions stand out from one another. Lastly, the story here is godawful. The writing? Unbearable. Genesis Rhapsodos is maybe the worst-written character in any video game ever, period. His repetitive, faux-poetic “dialogue” (mostly wholesale quotations from an in-universe play) was obnoxious as hell, and his role as the game’s villian is incredibly weak. Not that other characters are much better — with how much Angeal goes on about “honor” to the exclusion of all else, you’d think he was a racist caricature of Eastern philosophy, were the game not made in Japan. Zack is written a little better considering that him and Sephiroth are the only dynamic characters in the game, but even his personality and dialogue is incredibly one-note shonen protagonist genki bullshit. A lot of the story feels totally uninspired, adapting the backstory of VII while throwing in clones of Genesis and Angeal that fuck up the sense of tech available in the world of VII. I played through this twice because I missed a chest in Gongaga (late-game unrevisitable location) and stupidly only used one save slot, preventing me from accessing a shop that had materia that affects Zack’s DMW chances of triggering Octaslash so that I could use it against a Magic Pot in mission 7-6-6 in order to get the Genji Shield, and if that isn’t the most Final Fantasy optional content bugfuckery ever, I don’t know what is.