Being not much of a fan of Final Fantasy VII, I was never in a rush to try out any of the related games or media that Square Enix dubbed “Compilation of Final Fantasy VII”. So I did watch Advent Children back in the day, and thought it was quite crap, but have not looked into 2 internationally released games in the collection – Dirge of Cerberus (for PS2) and Crisis Core (for PSP). Yet, while Dirge wasn’t particularly liked by anyone, Crisis Core did have a lot of positive reviews. Which might be one of the reasons that Square Enix decided to remaster (on a technical level – remake) the game for modern platforms now called Reunion. And I’m glad they did, because this title is pretty neat.
One thing to emphasize from the start – if you’ve never played the original Final Fantasy VII and are only familiar with the fantastic Remake, you might want to not get the game just yet. Thing is – the main events of the game, and this is a prequel, are things that serve as a gigantic and important story twist in the FFVII storyline. The original one. In the Remake continuity these things have only been hinted on but never properly addressed. And given that this twist in the original game still holds up today, I’d say that unless the future remake titles decide to play it down entirely (which would be a shame), you will spoil yourself on a really cool revelation later.
Speaking of the story – without saying what it is, I have to say that it’s… inconsistent. On one hand, the charming simpleton of the main character and some of the events and other characters lead to genuinely fun and memorable moments that elevate the original game (but pale in comparison to the Remake). On the other – some of the characters are absolutely insufferable and a lot of the situations feel extremely condensed to the point of losing the impact they would’ve had otherwise. It’s understandable given the original scale of the project, but feels especially jarring with really good looking facelift the game received in Reunion, where you may forget this isn’t the Remake.
The main gameplay mechanics are quite peculiar. The title plays more like a pure hack and slash, even in comparison to the modern FF entries, though entering battles still waits a bit to switch modes instead of being instant or almost instant. And the main gimmick is the “pachislot” in the upper left corner that is completely chance based and has a shocking amount of influence on what happens. Leveling up the character or the materia? Get lucky and get good numbers. Want a specific story-driven memory about a character unlocked (which also gives you Limit Breaks during the fight) – pure chance and you might not get the ones you want in 20 hours. It’s such a fascinating idea that works perfectly fine if you just follow the main story and don’t focus on it much, but becomes an annoyance as soon as you try to do side content.
And that side-content… The game, being made for a portable system, has a lot of optional “missions” you can take. They’re usually very short and just involve running around a tiny part of a level and then fighting a target or just an arena. And there are 300 of them. It’s odd – some of them have interesting little stories, including ones that affect the lives of characters in the main story. But most of them are just there to give you a chance to grind for crap. And after a point they become very rude and very grindy. I gave up around halfway through and don’t want to continue, especially since so many of them aren’t difficult, just very very tedious.
But if you just focus on the main story, do some missions that are more important than others and don’t spend one hour fighting 1000 enemies because that’s supposed to be fun I guess, the game is genuinely cool. Again – inconsistent and some moments are just bizarre, in a bad way. But the majority of the game is nice and enjoyable. If you like FF VII in particular, this is worth checking out. If you’re not – it’s still a very neat hack and slash, you’ll just get very confused playing it, I suppose. But I did like my time with Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion even if I doubt I will ever revisit it to do the rest of the optional stuff.