Awesome! We're Gonna Fail!

[rionaleonhart]

I've finished playing Crisis Core -Final Fantasy VII- Reunion, the remaster of Final Fantasy VII prequel Crisis Core! I watched a cutscene compilation of the original back in 2015 and enjoyed it - it gave me a new appreciation for Final Fantasy VII, which I'd struggled to get along with up to that point - so I'm glad the game's finally available on a console I actually own.

Crisis Core is an odd beast. The battle system and soundtrack are excellent, and Reunion is a great-looking remaster. On the plot front, we've got dodgy writing and voice direction, poor characterisation of Aerith, impressively terrible additions to the Final Fantasy VII canon, but sometimes it'll reach into that mess and pull out something genuinely affecting.

Crisis Core is a bit like Kingdom Hearts, in that respect. The writing of the Kingdom Hearts series is questionable and the plot is nonsense, but it's got real heart, and its emotional moments can hit hard.

Angeal: I never use my sword. Use brings about wear, tear and rust.
Angeal: Anyway, Zack, here's your sword. (stabs Zack's sword straight through some wooden floorboards)

Sephiroth said he, Angeal and Genesis used to sneak into the training room 'for fun', and then we got an astonishingly homoerotic flashback to them having a swordfight on top of Junon's enormous phallic cannon, and I'll be honest: it was pretty great.

All the line delivery in this game is so weird. You don't have to pause in the middle of every sentence!

I'm very touched by the way Zack keeps talking to Cloud even when Cloud is barely conscious and not taking anything in.

The ending was agonising, right up until cheerful pop music kicked in at the most inappropriate possible moment and I cracked up laughing. I think that's the perfect encapsulation of Crisis Core as a whole, a game that's simultaneously genuinely emotional and absolutely ludicrous.

I'm so glad this game lets you join a fan club for yourself.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I remember playing Crisis Core when it came out and accepting the general addition of Genesis and Angeal reasonably well in an attempt to be open-minded, but being extremely indignant about the bit where they took a flashback from the first game -and added characters to it-. Look, you can retrospectively create the characters, but don't add them to scenes they weren't in! They could just have been off on a mission or something Crisis Core, geez.

I liked the DMV as a concept but its randomness could make things feel very uneven.

I'm always surprised whenever some FF7 canon tries to characterise Aerith as demure, because my memory of her is almost entirely the opposite! Rinoa and her suffer in different ways, actually, thinking of FF in general: Aerith becomes a saint to fandom. Rinoa becomes a bitchy queen bee, if fanfic twenty odd years ago taught me anything!

I can't comment on voice acting as I've not played the remake and I don't remember tons of the original voice acting, though I do remember some. Is it the same voice actors? Sometimes they recast but I always find that odd unless it's a rights issue. I remember the Silent Hill 2 remaster recast the voice actors: I was offended, because I often see the voice acting of that game bashed, but while it's not perfect, I wouldn't say it's -bad-, though maybe it's a product of its time. James always gets mentioned as The Worst Voice and I always loved his voice, it has some strange line reads -but that is perfectly in character for him- and I much prefer soft-voiced, confused James to chronic action man James voice.

I'd heard about Genesis being alive in Dirge of Cerberus which makes very little sense to me as -the whole movement on the plot is based on the man being angry that he's dying/degrading-. How pointless!

In my gaming life, I've been playing The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles: that's right, I finally got in the mood! I'm currently on case 4 of the second game. There's a lot of things I enjoy but it does suffer from the Ace Attorney problem where the investigation can be a drag (and seems pretty long) as you're often just wandering between plot plot plot without much ability to stop and reason. It means I enjoy it but I have to stop and do something else sometimes just to break from it. It definitely feels like one big game though, rather than two: just with ten cases! I do like that it does some things quite differently and I've enjoyed the jury mechanic and the cross-examining multiple witnesses mechanic (even if the idea is extremely questionable). I don't know how far you got in the games so I won't say anything more!

In the future, I've got Trails to Azure to play sooner rather than later, given it's now released. But first to finish Ace Attorney.

-timydamonkey

[rionaleonhart]

being extremely indignant about the bit where they took a flashback from the first game -and added characters to it-.

I was also slightly outraged by this. You can't add characters to flashbacks we've already seen! (Except... except adding Zack to Nibelheim after we've seen Cloud's version of that story, obviously; that's a special case.)

I liked the DMV as a concept but its randomness could make things feel very uneven.

I really enjoyed the DMW - I'm all for occasionally getting fun bonuses and brief character scenes thrown at me during a fight, and the 'no AP cost' and 'no MP cost' results were a great way to get me actually using my abilities rather than just hoarding AP and MP - but tying levelling up to it was a slightly bizarre decision.

Rinoa and her suffer in different ways, actually, thinking of FF in general: Aerith becomes a saint to fandom. Rinoa becomes a bitchy queen bee, if fanfic twenty odd years ago taught me anything!

I remember my teenage struggles to find Squall/Zell fanfiction that didn't depict all the characters as hating Rinoa! I wonder if that's still a problem nowadays.

They recast the voice actors for the Crisis Core remaster, I believe. I wonder how different the Silent Hill 2 remaster feels with the redone voices; the original voice acting was definitely a bit awkward, but in a way it helped to contribute to the strange, unsettling feeling of the game.

I think Tem and I are somewhere in case... three? of the first Great Ace Attorney Chronicles game. We haven't played for a while, but I'm hoping to pick it up again! The jurors being able to give their verdict mid-trial is impressively ludicrous, even for Ace Attorney.

[(Anonymous)]

(Except... except adding Zack to Nibelheim after we've seen Cloud's version of that story, obviously; that's a special case.)

To be fair, there's never really an added character there, as I recall? Cloud and Zack are both always there. Cloud just has his helmet on and Zack's appearance is totally wrong but he is, in fact, in the scene. So I could live with that. My favourite part of FF7 was the existential crisis where you and Tifa try to puzzle out Cloud's confused Nibelheim memories.

They recast the voice actors for the Crisis Core remaster, I believe. I wonder how different the Silent Hill 2 remaster feels with the redone voices; the original voice acting was definitely a bit awkward, but in a way it helped to contribute to the strange, unsettling feeling of the game.

Yes, exactly! Foggy, monster-filled Silent Hill itself is like a strange waking dream--goes-nightmare. Awkward voice acting totally fits with this vibe, intentional or not.

I'm glad you and Tem haven't given up on The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles - I think you would definitely enjoy them. Case 3 was on reflection probably my favourite case of the first game so enjoy that one!

-timydamonkey

[(Anonymous)]

Checking in to say that I finished the second Great Ace Attorney Chronicles game and here is my favourite quote, because it gives away nothing and yet is still so fitting for Ace Attorney: “What’s this latest absurdity, Counsel?” What indeed.

-timydamonkey