Crisis of Conscience
Is Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII awesome because of nostalgia, or awesome because it's just good? Either way, it's plain awesome.
Published: April 20, 2008
The gameplay itself is another matter. Being an Action RPG, though, the mechanics have to be there. Crisis Core isn't without some issues, but by and large it actually manages to take the turn-based bits of the original game and updates them with something that feels a little more input-driven. Battles are still random encounters, but once they start up, you're pulled into a smallish arena with minimal load times and can run around freely. This is important, because while movement is in real-time, actual commands have to be "stacked."
An auto-targeting system will assign a nearby enemy as the focal point and from then on all actions picked from the menu, be they physical attacks, offensive spells or items will be focused on that player. You can manually flick it elsewhere, but except in the case of denser crowds, it and the camera tend to work surprisingly well, to the point where you don't often have to think about it. Of course, when you do have to wrestle with things -- particularly the camera in tight areas as it gets hung up on geometry -- it can be rather frustrating, but most of the time it really does work without too much fiddling.
Physical attacks can be rolled into combos for constant beat-downs and I found this was definitely my primary means of getting through most fights. Spells worked, of course, but they also took both time and timing to actually hit some enemies if they were moving around. Speaking of rolls, tapping the Square Button initiates a diving roll that lets you circle around enemies and avoid most attacks, since it carries with it a bit of invincibility). Hit an enemy from behind and you'll notch a critical attack. In some cases this is just about the only way to off someone/thing because it can often knock them into a stun animation.
This brings up one of the more niggling gripes about the combat: it's not really all that deep. Yes, you have spells and items and you'll heal and attack and do all those fun Final Fantasy things with the trademark chimes and the classic sound effects, but most battles really just amount to rolling to get behind someone and spamming the physical attack. It's the quickest and easiest way through battles and while I never felt bored during the fights, it ultimately ended up being my core strategy. With the exception of maybe spamming the Jump ability when in crowds, it was almost single-handedly how I handled physically attacking the enemy.
That Jump attack -- along with all the spells in the game -- are once again made possible through the use of Materia, and it's here where Crisis Core gains a little depth. Just equipping Materia, just as it was in the original game, will let you slowly level them up, though it's a little more random than just beating up enemies with it equipped (more on that in a second). Moreover, you can now fuse Materia at any time along with items to create completely new and often far more powerful ones than you could buy in stores or find off enemy drops. I'll be honest: I played around with it a little, quickly took to the web to find recipes for more powerful stuff the second time through the game and really didn't touch it too much beyond making sure I constantly had a couple of key Materia like HP Up. It's useful, certainly, but also optional, which was a smart choice.
About that random thing, though. See, despite having all the normal trappings of a regular role-playing game, actual gains in levels for both Materia and just main character Zach's base HP/MP/etc-determining levels is handled by a big ass slot machine. Yeah, you read that right, a slot machine, and one that's not really randomized, as evidenced by the fact that juuust as I was starting to have trouble with enemies and at key parts of the story, I hit two or three levels in a row, just as others did. That was after a good hour or so of just about nothing happening.
