2008 Woodie Awards
'Crisis Core' Plays Like an Artificial Crisis
Brent Wallace
Issue date: 4/9/08 Section: Entertainment
|
Crisis Core is a prequel to Final Fantasy VII, one of the most influential role-playing games of all time. While Crisis Core does make excellent usage of this source material, it is ultimately held back by a few major shortfalls that prevent it from achieving the greatness of its predecessor.
The storyline follows Zack Fair, a member of the SOLDIER organization funded by the Shinra Corporation, which is busy harvesting a valuable resource known as 'mako' from the planet. Zack's story covers the events that lead up to the events of FF7, from Zack's training with SOLDIER, to the events of the Nibelheim incident.
Zack was only briefly seen in FFVII during some flashbacks seen in the game. Fortunately Crisis Core does an excellent job of expanding Zack as a character. Crisis Core also has appearances by some of the memorable characters from FF7, such as the original game's protagonist Cloud and its immensely popular villain: Sephiroth. It is also nice to notice that Crisis Core also has a decent sense of humor that is even more obvious than what we saw in FF7.
Crisis Core also throws in some new characters, such as Zack's mentor Angeal and the 1st class soldier Genesis. These characters are unfortunately not very well developed. Other than this disappointment however, Crisis Core uses its source material brilliantly, and will undoubtedly please fans of FF7.
Unfortunately, people may not be pleased by how Crisis Core plays. Crisis Core takes many liberties from the game play of FF7. Instead of a turn-based battle system like the one used in FF7, Crisis Core uses a fully real-time battle system that lets you move Zack freely around the arenas you face enemies in.
The combat system is solid, with a fairly wide variety of orders that you can give to Zack, such as basic attacks and the abilities that Zack can perform depending on what materia he has equipped.
The most unique addition Crisis Core makes to the combat is the Digital Mind Wave (DMW). The DMW is essentially a slot machine that randomly lets Zack perform devastating limit break attacks whenever three portraits of the same character line-up. The limit break performed depends on which character comes up.
Be the first to comment on this story