I feel what ultimately bugged me about Crisis Core was the fact that it had the potential to be really good but instead settled for every easy sequel cliche they could go with and never focused on anything I felt was relevant. Overall, I think the biggest writing sin the game had was the hubris of trying to make Zack's story as epic as the original game's plot. I feel a more reserved and scaled back plot focusing on the nature of SOLDIER and the general corruption of Shin-Ra would have been far more interesting than Genesis and another Jenova super soldier project. Likewise, I feel the game missed a prime opportunity of spending all of it's time before the Nibelheim incident, whereas I feel it should have had more time dedicated to Zack and Cloud's cross-country journey back to Midgard. I think the worst part is just how Aerith was portrayed in the game. Made me wonder if the staff bothered playing the game before writing this script.

The gameplay side of things would have been better had the game either been developed for console and thus had the memory to do more for mission variety, or if the optional missions were more specialized and went for quality instead of quantity. The UI was pretty awful, defend was such a useless skill, and dodge roll has KH's problem of being incredibly broken. Materia Melding was cool and I enjoyed the fact that more classic FF commands were introduced like Jump and Darkness/Souleater. I know most people hated the Slot machine aspect, but CC was so ridiculously easy and prime for Junction system levels of brokeness with the materia system that it's random factor was negligible at best except for leveling materia. Personally, I would have made all of Zack's summons be ones that wind up in weird places in VII and you could have him lose them over the course of the story to explain why such powerful materia is sometimes just on the floor in random places.