Crisis Core Review

Here's the next review for actionbutton. This piece is much more negative than I feel comfortable with today, but then again games have certainly earned their fair share of bile.

"a review of

Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII

a videogame by Square Enix

published by Square Enix

text by jacob munford

Score: 1 stars out of 4

Bottom Line: Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII is “one of the more pleasant terrorist acts that I have taken part in”

People who write about games are called games journalists, despite the fact that the majority of what they do has nothing to do with journalism whatsoever. Some are journalists, but the majority are critics. Scratch that, the majority are just game writers. But let's pretend this is journalism for this review because I'm going to do some undercover investigative journalism posing as somebody who could possibly give a shit about the story of this game. This game is an extension of the story of another game that was released about 10 years ago. People like that game, so when the guys who made this game they made it with similar scope and ambition. The characters created in that game come back for this game and...fuck this. Long story short as possible, the plot of Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII is that there are a bunch of people with angel wings, but only one angel wing. One of the bad guys has a black angel wing. Some of the good guys have white angel wings. The conflicted guy has a big angel wing and a tiny angel wing. If this isn't depressing to you, go buy a book or failing that, a thick metal cable. Then just do what comes naturally.

Like most Japanese role-playing games these days, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII is an extended exercise in tedium. Playing through the 'story mode' is pretty excruciating in the way that most of these things are: you walk from point A to point B, interrupted by pointless and weightless fighting approximately nineteen times per minute. These hikes are then interrupted by small movies with poor writing and subpar voice performances. It's a lot like running a marathon where you have to tie your shoes every five seconds. Oh, and the track is nothing but a straight line and you have explosive diarrhea. Did I mention that it is about 20 hours long?

The reason why this game is worth writing about is because of something that the game calls 'mission mode'. You can access 'mission mode' by standing still at a glowing diamond and going into the menu usually reserved for the type of minute statistic tweaking reserved for magic mathematic pornographers. 'Mission mode' also happens to be the finest terrorist attack perpetrated upon game development since the original Final Fantasy VII. 'Mission mode' is a list of somewhere around 200 scenarios where you navigate your character through one of five total environments. These scenarios are usually finished in about two or three minutes. They consist of a point A, a point B and a treasure quest in between. The point B usually has a boss battle that is more difficult than the regular interruptions.

The beauty here is that in attempting to add content to their game, Square Enix has compromised their entire product catalog. The missions are a distillation of every reason that anybody even plays these games, all wrapped up in a two minute package. They aren't satisfying in themselves, but at least the missions are bite-sized. Think about what to expect from Final Fantasy XII. Or XV. Or XXVV. Unless you are especially invested in the ways that action figures emote, every single one of these games will be a 60 hour extension of one of these two minute missions. These missions even have stories! Missions start with two sentences from a soldier or villager or (holy shit!) Final Fantasy VII character and end with two more sentences. If one of these missions were released as a web browser game entitled “Every Final Fantasy Game Ever”, internet dudes would lose their business. It would become a meme that posters at kotaku would link to and have a laugh at. The creator would probably get praised and interviewed. Instead, somebody made about 200 of them and put them inside of an actual Final Fantasy game. The first time I played through one of these missions, I fell off of the chair I was sitting in. I felt the way that Teddy Roosevelt probably felt when he was warned about how dangerous exploring the Amazon was by a guy who then immediately fell in the Amazon and eaten by piranhas.

Do you guys listen to hip-hop? The new Raekwon album is pretty nice. On the end of one of the songs, Ghostface Killah tells his son to go to the store to buy some bologna to put on his face. This sentence lasts about three seconds on the album and is more entertaining than the entirety of Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII. Measuring games by how many hours you get out of them isn't going to help anybody, but would it be such a problem to have about two seconds of game as entertaining as some shit that Ghostface Killah says at the end of a song that isn't even on his album? 'Mission mode' tells me that somebody at Square Enix probably feels similar. This game gets one star because 'mission mode' is Square Enix attempting to forge a hot knife to cut through its own fat. They won't succeed until they realize that the ultimate act of criticism is to create something better than what they have, but I guess we should appreciate that they've noticed the poisoned well. Plus, the fact that you gain levels on a slot machine mechanic is just hilarious."