Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core (Spoilers)

Being my first title on the PSP, (I’m more of a DS girl) I found that this was a tough game to rate. It took me 30 hours to beat, which isn’t bad at all, but I don’t know if I got what I wanted from it. The game play was really fun, the interface was beautiful (Kudos to the UI team), the CG was breath-taking (It is Square-Enix after all), the score was really memorable and the characters re-designs were awesome.

But the issue that I had was with the terrible writing and voice acting. I should not be laughing when Zack dies because his lines were so bad. It was absolutely horrid. Genesis with all his overbearing “Loveless” speeches and Aerith sadly was a bit fake as well. :( The characters lacked personally and seemed overly dramatic like they were all in a theatrical performance (I guess it doesn’t compare to Yuna’s William Shatner impression throughout FFX). So I hope this was a localization problem and that the Japanese version was not as campy. I know they can do this right because FFXII recently had some pretty deep, intriguing character development; but that was a major title.

Another unfortunate thing was that the story was really hard to follow at some points. I found myself continually questioning what was going on and had to read up on the game to get the story filled in for me. That’s bad when you have to turn to the internet to interpret what the fuck is going on in the game you’re playing.

Oh yeah and if you die, you can’t skip cut-scenes. I don’t care if it is pretty Square cut-scenes, I don’t need to see them again when I’m pissed off because I got my ass handed to me by Sephiroth. Only once though. ;)

So if you have 30 hours to spare and really like the franchise, then sure play it. If not, then maybe it’s not for you.

~Claudia