Wolf Kanno's Bottom Ten JRPGs.

[Mirage]

that won't stop us from ripping into him!

anyway yeah, 95% positive with over 1900 votes is pretty good.

[Wolf Kanno]

Fine fine, love your sappy Japanese WWII knockoff Strategy game. As Fynn has noted though, this is not a Top Ten Worst games, this is my Ten Bottom List of games I own. I'm also changing VC to number six on the list because reviewing 9-7 made me realize I like it less than them.

[Fynn]

I'm also changing VC to number six on the list because reviewing 9-7 made me realize I like it less than them.

[Wolf Kanno]

New #7 Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII
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Ah another game most of you have probably played and will hate me for putting on this list, let me take in the sweet smell of fanboy/girl anger in the morning. You know what's worse than a game/show/movie/piece of tech/brand that fans shove done your throat treating it like it was brought down from Paradise itself as the creation of the gods themselves? Watching the company that made it try to retread on the glory days because they realize they are creatively bankrupt. Even worse when they crank up the fanservice to make sure the message boards will light up like a Christmas tree and increase sales.

Do you know why I generally don't care for direct sequels/prequels to series? Because they're safe. They rarely require real thought or creativity, you just bring back popular characters, create fanservice with not-so-subtle references or foreshadowing, and you let the core popularity sell itself instead of actually putting in the effort to make something original and interesting. I am not against Crisis Core being made so much as I am disappointed by how absolutely manipulative, patronizing, and absolutely phoned in this game was. The plot feels like some awful fanfiction retelling of the main game without any subtlety or respect to the original mythos and canon. Its gameplay is disjointed and lacks any middle ground, trying desperately to appeal to a crowd of gamers who can't be bothered to put in any more effort to see the plot than to mindlessly mash X there way to victory; and trying to appeal to a hardcore group that want to mindlessly grind to min-max their way to making the game actually playable. The side missions are insulting the, the character assassinations are appalling and Genesis, just dear lord in heaven, Genesis...

Okay, I'm getting ahead of myself, let's start over...

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Conceptually Crisis Core feels like a great idea. Reuinite most of the high profile names that made everyone's favorite FF and do a prequel about one of the most important if completely underutilized characters from FFVII's back story, Zack Fair. Then make the game as the most high tech looking game for Sony's PlayStation Portable as an Action-RPG like Kingdom Hearts, that will hopefully sell the system and get SE back in the good graces of fans not happy with FFXII. The reality is that is largely worked as well, the game was greeted with critical acclaim and I believe it's still ranked as one of the best selling games on the PSP. Which largely proves that nostalgia makes everything better because I often find that when I grill fans of the game about some of its problems they often agree but then deflect the criticism because they got a chance to play VII again in a new form. I'm not saying this game doesn't have any merits whatsoever but I find it odd that despite hearing from fans themselves of the laundry list of problems the game possess, they still absolutely adore it. Why? because they're fans. I'm not judging here, this argument can easily be turned on me for games such as Chrono Trigger and MGS3 that have several flaws that I feel their overall awesomeness outweighs, and hell Xenogears itself has several glaring problems. but I still rank it as one of the best games of all times even when I can agree that it's gameplay doesn't come close to receiving such praise. So this isn't about me lambasting the fanbase for elevating a mediocre and flawed experience into an exclusive club of high profile games it really doesn't deserve to be in, I am simply explaining why I feel a game that has so much praised heap on it can actually be not quite up to par.

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I'm not a VII fan. I played the original back when it was new and I still wasn't really won over by it. I didn't jump into Crisis Core as a fan, I played it as someone who happens to like FF and heard good things about it. What I got was a mix bag of interesting ideas and terrible design choices. When the game was first announced, I remember watching the trailer for the plot with some of my VII fan friends and noted that they awed and oohed as the trailer went on and all I could notice was how vaguely familiar the plot sounded. Cloud was an Ex-1st Class SOLDIER turned mercenary who fights again Sephiroth, an Ex-1st Class SOLDIER who wages a war against Shin-Ra and the world when he learns that he is not human and the product of a super soldier experiment. The whole time, Cloud learn all the dirty secrets about Shin-Ra. Zack Fair is a 3rd Class SOLDIER who eventually becomes a mercenary, who battles Genesis who is a former 1st Class SOLDIER who wages a war against Shin-Ra and the world after he learns he is not human and the result of a super soldier experiment that was flawed and is killing him. Like Cloud, Zack leaves Shin-Ra (after becoming a 1st Class SOLDIER) when he discovers all of Shin-Ra's dark secrets. There is a real sense of deja vu in the games plot and it largely falls on the game's principle antagonists.

Genesis is basically what I expect the worst kind of fan would create in fanfiction, the fact he's modeled, voiced and even cosplayed by Gackt really doesn't help make this analogy feel accurate.
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Genesis is a wannabe and a pretender. The fact that part of his personality involves being jealous of Sephiroth for being more awesome than him just makes it a bit more funny to me. They have similar origins and similar motives, similar powers and both eventually turn from revenge to battrout crazy schemes that seem to come out of nowhere in the plot. Sephiroth was an ax-crazy psychopath whose god-complex was as overwhelming as his Oedipus complex. Despite all that, his backstory and the flashback showing his dissent into darkness actually made fans feel for him which was never really the writer's intentions but happened anyway because frankly Sephy got a raw deal. This is why I feel Sephy endures as a memorable villain because you can actual sympathize with him despite Nomura and Squenix's insistence that he's evil incarnate.

Squenix Sephiroth all the time
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Fan view of Sephiroth when he's not doing evil
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It was unintentional but it really worked for the character and Squenix. Hell Crisis Core even plays up on it a bit, giving him a few pet the dog moments to make his fall that much worse for the player. Genesis is pretty much a character trying too hard to recreate the phenomena. On paper, he's a really sympathetic character, basically the same origin as Sephiroth but he's a failure and will die very young because of it. Sephy went ona rampage initially as a misguided revenge for who he thought his people were and then went really crazy after learning the truth when he was swimming in the Lifestream and concocted a plan to become a god. Genesis spends half his time sticking it to Shin-Ra and the other half trying to find a way to reverse his condition, so again it's sympathetic. The issue is that Genesis is such a pretentious whiny asshole that you can't help wanting to get in his way and hope he'll finally die.

Let me give you the Genesis Experience

He says part of this play/poem every single time he shows up. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. Yes, the villain of this game is some goth kid who spends most of his time reciting crappy symbolic poetry while angsting away about his eventual demise. If he had been written to act and react like a human being, he might have come across more sympathetic and made his story feel more conflicting for the player but instead he comes across as some angsty self-absorbed whack job you can't wait to have Zack smack his Buster Sword up against his head. Even worse is how like any self inserted fanfic author avatar, Genesis keeps inserting himself into scenes he has no business being in such as the Nibelheim flashback. That messing with canon was about the point I decided I really didn't like the game. I don't even like VII and I felt it was insulting to pull such a half ass retcon into one of the game's most important plot points.

My complaint about the changes to the story and characters can best be summarized by this thread.

In terms of gameplay, Crisis Core plays like Kingdom Hearts to a certain degree. Like the first game it has a terrible camera system and the play mechanics are a bit simple where just alternating between Dodge Rolling and smacking things with your sword is enough to win 95% of your battles. There is a guard command but it's almost completely worthless as most attacks can easily be dodged roll even if logic dictates they can't and the few moves it would be useful against, like the unblockable cutscene super attacks bosses perform can't be reduced by the guard move. The enemy A.I. is largely simple and easy to exploit which becomes apparent when you jump to Hard Mode and realize the same strategy on Normal mode works just as well despite the massive stat increase of the enemies. The Materia Fusion mechanic is actually a pretty neat concept and if the VII remake ever comes out, I would hope they would incorporate it along with some of the new command materia like Jump and Darkness.

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The real problem with the game comes down to two elements: the gap in difficulty between modes and story vs. sidequest, and the quality of the sidequest vs. story mode:

Normal should be renamed "Hold you hand while I wipe your ass" mode and Hard mode should be renamed "smurf you for not being a completionist" mode. In normal mode, the Story mode is painfully easy with it being possible to beat the final boss fairly easy with a character under level 30, and I'm not talking about an FFVIII problem where the customization system is so broken it just makes the game pathetically easy, I'm talking FFX issue where the game is just easy as long as you have some decent common sense. The only boss fight that is actually hard in story mode is Sephiroth in Nibelheim and it's only because his attacks have this special effect where they push Zack back and if he falls off the ledge it's an automatic game over so really the only hard boss battle involves a bit of fake difficulty. Side quest Mission Mode tends to be where the real challenge is, even in Normal Mode but playing through them is both monotonous and easy to send Zack into god mode where story mode becomes an utter joke. Hard mode has the opposite problem, because you basically can't do anything with it if you both don't understand how to abuse the Materia Fusion system and don't have several endgame resources to simply survive. Basically you need to complete most of the content in Normal mode to not get screwed over by the game in Hard Mode. This is especially infuriating because the difficult spike is actually manageable with skill alone except when you encounter those unblockable and unskippable cutscene attacks bosses throw at you. Most of the enemies can one shot you in Hard Mode if your not sporting mid-to end game side mission mode stats and equipment, but even with the bare requirements to beat the game, if you are skilled enough to dodge roll on time, you can actually win most of these battles, it's only with the moves that you're completely helpless against that makes this mode unwinnable without going back and maxing out your stats and items so it's a really frustrating design choice.

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Story mode is actually pretty neat in hindsight, the game incorporates some mini-games and different play-styles into the story mode which is both a nice connection to VII's gameplay style but also helps break up the monotony of the gameplay. Side missions on the other hand are basically 200+missions of walking through the same 10 dungeons with just a few enemies and murdering everything until you fight the enemy you need to. It is absolutely monotonous after awhile and makes doing mission mode pretty boring especially since combat is pretty simple and lacks much depth. Had the mission mode gotten a bit more variety like some of the story modes mini-games and has story mode gotten a better scale of difficulty, the game side of Crisis core could have been salvageable.

Granted the game does have some strong moments here and there, in fact most of the time the game ignores its silly new content and focuses on things relevant to the original VII, it begins to really shine. While I'm not a huge VII fan, the Nibelheim scene was still a really fun and chilling experience for me, well until Genesis showed up and ruined it anyway. While I don't care for the game's retcon to Zack's final battle, I will concede it was really well done in terms of the gameplay story integration. The cutscene that followed was a bit too much for me but as I said, this game really wasn't designed for me and I get that. I'm not really the target audience and that's why I have a harder time accepting it for what it is.

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[Ayen]

You want Genesis?

*drops limp body of Genesis on Square's desk*

You can have Genesis.

[Fox]

Fine fine, love your sappy Japanese WWII knockoff Strategy game. As Fynn has noted though, this is not a Top Ten Worst games, this is my Ten Bottom List of games I own. I'm also changing VC to number six on the list because reviewing 9-7 made me realize I like it less than them.

Haha. There's something funny about that phrase.

"Pssh! This war is just a knockoff of WWII!! Why can't we have some originality​ in our wars!?"

[Wolf Kanno]

Fine fine, love your sappy Japanese WWII knockoff Strategy game. As Fynn has noted though, this is not a Top Ten Worst games, this is my Ten Bottom List of games I own. I'm also changing VC to number six on the list because reviewing 9-7 made me realize I like it less than them.

Haha. There's something funny about that phrase.

"Pssh! This war is just a knockoff of WWII!! Why can't we have some originality​ in our wars!?"

I guess it is funny, I don't know, WWII gets glorified too much I guess and I just think certain other conflicts are more interesting. I think the game may have worked better had it felt a little more like WWI with it's awful trench warfare. Would have driven the camaraderie aspect better if you were dealing with the day in drudgery of watching friends die pointless deaths to gain a few feet of land against the enemy. Though to be fair, VC does borrow several elements from both World Wars. While war is inherently never a good thing and always deals with human suffering, I do feel that history has painted certain ones more painfully and tragic than others depending on the country of course.

[Fynn]

Ah, Crisis Core. You pretty much summed up my thoughts on the game, though I'm still a bit more forgiving of it. The saddest part about the story is that it could've been pulled off well, as SE have proved themselves. Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days basically had the same relationship to the first game as CC did to FFVII. Heck, it even had a self-insert Mary Sue type character. But it's done so well, seemingly deconstructing fanfic, and actually incorporating real human emotion, making it possibly the most depressing entry yet, as it should be.

[Wolf Kanno]

Yeah, I honestly feel the game would have been the best part of the Compilation had it balanced out the gameplay better and removed Genesis from the second half of the game. Do a bit more about Zack and Cloud returning to Midgard and make the final conflict not feel so damn over the top.

[Pumpkin]

sharky got it for the PSP and I decided to try it one day. While I like FFVII, I do find it pretty weak for a FF game, and I never really liked the characters that much and I didn't really care about Zack the little bit he was there

I'm not sure why I decided to try it :P

I didn't like it, in case anyone wasn't clear on that

[VeloZer0]

Bang on with the fanfiction comments on Crisis Core. (Well, the whole compilation really).

[Del Murder]

I'm always on the fence with Crisis Core. On the one hand I really liked Zack's character and the last hour of the game (which honestly what I was playing it to see) really delivered on the emotion. On the other hand the invention of Genesis was way too forced and the battle system was too easy to exploit. I just ran around in circles with dodge roll and standard attack to win everything, with a Cure spell every now and then. The reels also made no sense and were too random though it was cool I got help from it.

In the end I like the game because it pretty much solidified Zack as the most likable character in the FFVII universe, and then killed him. The fact that you know it is going to happen the entire way just makes it even more of a gut punch. Kudos for that SE.

EDIT: Oh, and Yuffie stealing my treasure was annoying but also hilarious and it's a great example of the whimsy missing from the modern FF titles.

[Ayen]

I liked Zack too, but not sure how I feel about the battle system (I only tested to see if it work when I first got it so haven't played it much). But I'll never forgive them for adding Genesis to the Mako reactor scene. I would feel that way regardless of who it was, though. Stop changing the canon, dammit!

[Polnareff]

Oh god, Thousand Arms. Terrible, terrible game. The only saving grace was the adorable character sprites when walking around town.

Crisis Core is all right, but it's a fundamentally broken game, story aside. Who the smurf thought it was a good idea to make leveling up random?

[Wolf Kanno]

We're now halfway through my list and it's betting time to see how predictable you all think I am, so start guessing what may show up in the top five.

Clues:
Two games are on the same console.
Two games do bear the Final Fantasy name. They also have the same director.
Only two games are sequels.
Two of these games I doubt many of you have ever played or even heard of.
Only one of these games is made before 2001.
One of the games isn't really an RPG. It's really more of another genre.
Most of these games make excellent, if expensive paperweights.