Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7 Reunion Review – Conflict Resolved
Much like protagonist Zack Fair himself, the story of the self-proclaimed country-boy-turned-SOLDIER-First-Class is not one shrouded in mystery. If you’ve engaged with Final Fantasy VII or any of its various spin-offs, prequels, remakes, or animated movies, chances are you understand the weight of his legacy–which is, coincidentally, only rivaled by the weight of his sword. However, if you’re looking for the definitive way to experience it, look no further than Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion.
A remake of the 2007 PSP exclusive Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, Crisis Core Reunion is a faithful retelling of Zack Fair’s story with dramatic visual upgrades, full voice acting, and several quality-of-life changes. Considering the game was already heralded as a fantastic prequel and one of the best titles on PSP, it comes as little surprise that this version is triumphant in making Crisis Core into a modern day must-play for Final Fantasy VII fans. Not only does Crisis Core Reunion port the once fairly difficult-to-find game to several new consoles, allowing for a greater audience to experience the title, it transforms the game from feeling like a smaller, handheld experience into something that can proudly stand beside Final Fantasy VII Remake as a worthy companion.
Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion follows Zack Fair, a skilled young man who quickly moves up the rank of soldier–Shinra’s elite fighting force–to stand beside other legendary heroes like Genesis, Angeal, and the later-notorious Sephiroth. However, once information regarding the various experiments Shinra conducted on these elite warriors begins to surface, the four colleagues quickly find themselves at odds with each other. Inevitably, these tensions set into motion the events of Final Fantasy VII, including Sephiroth’s turn toward madness, the burning of Nibelheim, and Cloud’s involvement in the whole ordeal. However, Crisis Core doesn’t solely exist as a precursor to something bigger, as it succeeds in weaving an engaging, intimate, and emotionally impactful narrative of its own.
A lot of this is due to the game’s protagonist. Whereas Final Fantasy VII’s leading man, Cloud Strife, has a tendency to be soft-spoken and a bit moody, Zack is exuberant and extraordinarily likeable. Throughout the game, Zack’s mentor, Angeal, likens the fighter to a puppy and affectionately teases him for his hyperactivity and eagerness. However, when compared to the other SOLDIER members–like the stoic Angeal, dark and poetic Genesis, and no-nonsense Sephiroth–Zack is a breath of fresh air who is widely idolized within the SOLDIER program (particularly by Cloud) for his proficiency, zeal, and encouraging nature. Outside of Shinra, these qualities also endear him to our favorite flower girl, Aerith, who shares a brief but powerful love story with Zack, complete with long-distance phone calls and tender letters.
In Crisis Core Reunion, the emotional impact of all these events is amplified thanks to the entire game now having full voice acting. While some voices might take getting used to, as they differ from the original Crisis Core’s performances, the new voice actors do a fantastic job in making the story more engaging than ever before. This voice acting also profoundly impacts how we view Sephiroth as the story progresses–Tyler Hoechlin’s performance makes him even more sympathetic as the truth about his birth is slowly brought to light and his downward spiral becomes more heartbreaking. On that note, I was delighted to hear several of the series’ new voice actors lend their talents to the characters who appear in Crisis Core Reunion, including Tifa, Aerith, Tseng, Reno, Rude, and several others. This is all a part of Square Enix’s push to make Crisis Core more cohesive with Final Fantasy VII Remake, which it ultimately does with gusto.
This feat is also accomplished by how much care the team put into visually upgrading Crisis Core. Every location is lush, intricate, and has been adjusted to more closely resemble the world we see in Final Fantasy VII Remake, which makes the game’s trips to Junon, Costa Del Sol, Nibelheim, Shinra Manor, and Gongaga–areas that we’re yet to venture to in the remakes, but will see in the future–a bit surreal. In Crisis Core Reunion, we’re presumably getting our first look at just what lies ahead for us in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, which, if you’re a die-hard fan, makes the game well-worth playing in itself. As someone who has spent the last few years yearning to see what wandering throughout Shinra Manor will feel like, or how grand the streets of Junon might feel as Cloud is tasked with parading down them, it was an emotional experience to see even a less graphically intensive glimpse at what’s on the horizon.
Crisis Core’s gameplay systems remain intact, albeit streamlined and remapped in fantastic ways. Those not familiar with the gameplay will find it to be unusual but exciting. Rather than Final Fantasy VII’s turn-based system, Crisis Core Reunion features fast-paced action-style combat. While the game’s simplistic hacking, slashing, and blocking is a fun time by itself, with challenging enemies requiring fast reflexes and quick planning, Zack can also equip up to six pieces of materia, which grant him spells and abilities he can use in battle. In the original Crisis Core, cycling through all these combat options could be daunting, as you were forced to use R1 and L1 to scroll through them all, then hit X on which one you wanted to use. In Crisis Core Reunion, this has been completely overhauled, as you now can hold R1 and assign all these abilities to various buttons to make combat less frustrating and more efficient.
Crisis Core Reunion also improves one of the original game’s most notable features: the Digital Mind Wave. Also referred to as the DMW, it’s a constantly spinning, slot machine-style combat enhancer that lurks in the upper left corner of your screen during combat. The icons featured on the slots are characters and summons you meet throughout the game, with characters providing you with limit breaks based on Zack’s relationship to them, and summons granting you the ability to, well, summon them. As your relationships with certain characters are altered, you become more or less likely to see them make an appearance in the DMW. In theory, it’s an incredibly strange feature, as this slot machine is responsible for allowing you to dish out your hardest-hitting moves as well as level up. In execution, however, the DMW is extremely fun and satisfying, generally working out fairly well for players while also introducing an element of randomness to battles that keep them fresh.
In the original Crisis Core, this feature did earn some criticism for its “modulating phase,” which would grind battles to a halt as the slots took up the entire screen. These phases no longer exist, though Crisis Core Reunion will still interrupt battles to show brief cutscenes when the slots land on certain characters. Considering the time we get with Zack is so brief, I found these cutscenes not only fascinating to watch, but needed. As an extroverted person who is supremely devoted to the people around him (just take a look at how many text messages the guy gets), having this mechanic where Zack’s relationships play a role on his mental state–and subsequently the way he battles–is a brilliant choice that tells us a lot about him without adding hours onto Crisis Core’s story. All these unique qualities create a tangible difference in Final Fantasy VII and Crisis Core’s gameplay, which drives just how different Zack and Cloud truly are.
Crisis Core also features materia fusion, which allows you to take leveled up materia and combine it with other types to create new and more powerful spells and abilities. While grinding materia out in Final Fantasy VII was arguably already fun, the implementation of this fusion system makes it even more satisfying. Rather than simply raising how powerful your Fira becomes, materia fusion allows you to create entirely new spells all together, such as combining said Fira with Assault Twister to create Fira Blade, an ability that inflicts magic damage while not using MP. Additionally, you can add items during fusion that, when equipped on Zack, alter his stats. I spent a lot of time managing and fusing my materia while playing Crisis Core Reunion, and despite being someone who doesn’t necessarily love crafting, I enjoyed every minute of it.
However, not all of Crisis Core Reunion’s grinds have aged quite as well. For starters, the game has far too many random battles. At times, I found myself sprinting with Zack pressed up against the game’s walls to avoid being in the centralized areas that trigger them. Additionally, Crisis Core Reunion has a lot of side missions. Considering the game was originally created to exist on a handheld console, it is understandable: Each of these missions last for a few minutes and would be ideal to play through if you have a few spare minutes while out and about. Removed from that context when played on a console, these missions are not as satisfying. And, considering how similar they are even if the background stories are slightly different, they quickly grow repetitive.
That being said, Crisis Core Reunion is marketed as a direct remake, so it makes sense it’s all there and I can’t fault the studio for carrying over pre-existing content too much. Even so, the game would have greatly benefited from finding ways to make this content more worthwhile and less outdated in feel. Really the only feature I would argue was woefully neglected by the studio is the game’s dialogue, which can come across as awkward and very “early 2000s JRPG” in feel. This is exacerbated by just how incredible the dialogue changes and additions were in Final Fantasy VII Remake, which enhanced already-fantastic characters as well as made the overall story deeper and more comprehensible. While Crisis Core Reunion did not set out to expand or reimagine the same way Remake did, a few alterations–and less awkward pauses from Aerith–would have gone a long way.
Ultimately, if you go into Crisis Core Reunion expecting a one-for-one remake of Crisis Core, quirks and all, you will not be the slightest bit disappointed. It is a greatly improved version of a great game, one that all Final Fantasy VII fans eager for more story would benefit from playing. While you shouldn’t expect any new content or story revisions (sincere apologies to all of you who were hoping, I’ll admit I was too), you can expect a powerful ode to the kindest man you’ll ever meet and the legacy he passed on.
Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes Review – One In A Hundred
In the years since the explosion of game crowdfunding, a stigma has emerged surrounding these titles. Yes, there have been plenty of games that enjoyed great success after their crowdfunding campaigns, but more people remember the high-profile flops: games with big names and ambitious promises attached that, for a variety of reasons, betrayed the high hopes fans held for them. Many of these were revivals–spiritual or otherwise–of beloved series from ages past. Now we have Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, a crowdfunded game designed to carry the torch of the much-beloved Suikoden series from the PS1 and PS2–and, with such a high pedigree attached, there’s understandable trepidation: Will this be a glorious return to form, or another disappointment? Fortunately, for us (and all of the backers), it turned out wonderfully.
Gallery
Eiyuden Chronicle begins when a young man named Nowa joins the Eltisweiss Watch, a small militia unit under the command of Countess Perielle of the League of Nations. On a joint mission with a military team from the Galdean Empire, the Watch discovers a powerful, ancient artifact, the Primal Lens, earning everyone involved instant renown. However, it’s not long before squabbling between the Empire and League over the device, along with internal power struggles in the Empire, erupts into an invasion of Eltisweiss and a full-blown war. As the scope of the conflict expands, so does the story: Nowa rebuilds a resistance army in an abandoned castle, Imperial military prodigy Seign struggles with his feelings of obligation, friendship, and loyalty, and a young warrior woman named Marisa finds her clan caught in the middle.
The story doesn’t shy away from its similarities to games in the Suikoden series. In several ways, it outright embraces them: a story that branches into multiple viewpoints, loyalties among friends being tested during war, internal political intrigue, powerful magic runes being a crucial plot device, and, most obviously, the conceit of building a huge band of warriors to take on an even bigger enemy. The story was helmed by Suikoden creator and writer Yoshitaka Murayama (who sadly passed away shortly before the game’s release), and it brims with the warmth, wit, and plot twists that made the early Suikoden titles so engaging and memorable.
Throughout the game, you’ll be on the lookout for more characters to bolster the ranks of the Watch and, eventually, help build a base for the Resistance army. Some characters are easy to find and recruit, but others will require some searching or additional effort: You may have to go back to a town or dungeon from much earlier in the game, locate a rare item, play a minigame, or fend off a vicious foe to get someone to join the crew. Searching for heroes is a lot of fun (and much easier once you get the fast-travel ability), and the reward of seeing your base grow and improve with the efforts of your new comrades is immensely satisfying.
But the characters themselves are often their own reward. Despite having such a large cast, Eiyuden Chronicle manages to give each character their own unique voice and personality. They don’t just fall into the background once their recruitment arc is over, either; they’ll comment on current story events while they’re in your party, chatter as you explore towns, and interact with other characters at the base and elsewhere on your travels. Sometimes they’ll show up to add extra flair when you least expect it, like when they get dragged into judging a cooking competition.
Aside from giving you a good amount of freedom to search for friends when you feel like it, Eiyuden Chronicle’s story progression is similar to the typical JRPG: mostly linear with major setpieces and battles to highlight key story points. You’ll go through the usual dungeons, deserts, tundras, forests, and mines, sometimes needing to solve puzzles to progress. While most of the puzzles are pretty simple, they can sometimes be more obnoxious than intended due to random enemy encounters interrupting things at the worst possible times. Still, the dungeon design is solid and exploration is generally rewarding.
Despite having such a large cast, Eiyuden Chronicle manages to give each character their own unique voice and personality
Combat is also heavily based on the Suikoden games: turn-based, with up to six active party members at a time, plus a seventh support member who can grant passive benefits like stat boosts or money gain. Characters can have both skills based on SP (which regenerates over time) and MP (which needs items to restore), and each be changed based on the runes that character has equipped. Placement is key: Some attacks and skills won’t reach far beyond the front row, while some less-armored characters work better in the back–and there are also skills that target entire rows. One distinct combat element carried over from Suikoden is multi-character team attacks that require two or more characters with some sort of connection to be in the party together, who can then perform a tandem specialty attack.
Not every character in your army is available to fight, but you’re still given a very wide selection of party members to pick from to fight the way you prefer. You’re probably not going to use every single character you recruit in combat, and that’s fine–seeing who you click with and building them up generally works well. And if you do need to bring a character you’ve been neglecting up to snuff, a graduated XP system works to get them to parity with your high-level warriors quickly. A bit of auto-battling and they should be set.
Boss battles are where things get interesting. Many boss fights in the game come with some sort of interactable gimmick that changes the way you approach the battle. These can be objects to hide behind to avoid damage, background objects that cause damage to either you or the opponent based on who gets to it first, or even a treasure lying just beyond a row of foes. Sometimes these gimmicks are really fun and clever, like a boss who gets knocked off-balance when one of the lackeys hoisting them on their backs is felled, leaving it defenseless. Sometimes it’s miserable, like needing to guess which side of the arena the enemy will appear on to hit a book and deal extra damage, missing entirely if you guess wrong. When the gimmicks are good, they make for very fun fights, but when they’re not, you’ll be longing for more straightforward combat. And sometimes the boss is simply a big difficulty spike in general, leaving you in a very bad situation if you come in ill-prepared.
Gallery
By far the worst combat experience, however, are the large-scale army battles. These play out like a turn-based strategy game, with your party members commanding armies and moving around a grid, but lack any of the fun and excitement you’ll find in a dedicated strategy-RPG. You spend most of the time just watching things happen, feeling like you have very little control over the proceedings as the armies you moved around, slowly engage the enemy. You’re left hoping they’ll do more damage than the opposition so you can go back to the fun parts of the game instead.
Overall, Eiyuden Chronicle hits the retro-RPG sweet spot nicely. It’s focused on delivering that warm, comforting feeling of a classic JRPG, and even all of the side distractions–the card minigame, the weird Pokemon/Beyblade hybrid top minigame, the raising/racing sim, even commodities trading–don’t distract too much from the game’s prime mission. Add some gorgeously painted and animated spritework and a stellar soundtrack into the mix, and you’ve got a delightful experience that sometimes falters, though not enough to make you put it down. Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes might not be revolutionary, but it successfully delivered on its core promise–and that’s really all it needed to do.
Ereban: Shadow Legacy Review – Way Of Shadow
In what feels like a spiritual successor to 2016’s Aragami, Ereban: Shadow Legacy transforms you into a deadly shadow that can become one with the darkness–the ultimate stealth operative. The game doesn’t quite deliver the necessary challenge to make for a successful stealth game, however, as the first trick you learn will get you through the entire game without a hitch. It does far better on the platforming front, and though its cast of characters could have used some fleshing out, the futuristic sci-fi world they inhabit is cultivated with colorful sights and intriguing snippets of lore.
As its name implies, Shadow Legacy’s main gimmick is its use of shadows. You play as Ayana, the last of the titular Ereban, a people who possess the innate ability to become one with and manipulate shadows. Using her shadow merge ability, Ayana can sink into shadows to creep past enemies, slink up walls, and dispose of bodies, encouraging you to stick to the shadows where your toolbelt is at its strongest. Alongside these shadow abilities, Ayana has an assortment of advanced gadgets–some are always useful like a recon pulse that marks enemies and items through walls, while others are more situational like mines that stun targets–which work regardless of the lighting situation.
I initially thought that this would present plenty of opportunities and strategies to sneak past enemies, most of whom will take out Ayana in a single hit. There’s a healthy variety of foes who want to take her down–standard enemies don’t pose much threat beyond the flashlight they carry to take away your darkness, but the more adept snipers can spot you from afar and the stealthy droids who can go invisible can ruin your day if you’re not taking time to look for the telltale shimmer. And then there are the human enemies who present a moral quandary rather than a gameplay one–while the mechanical droid-like enemies that dominate each level can be killed with impunity, murdering the living and breathing human workers will negatively impact Ayana’s morality and others’ perception of her (which I’ll touch on a bit more later).
Unfortunately, Ayana’s natural ability to merge into the shadows and traverse unseen is very powerful–so powerful, in fact, that you don’t really need to rely on anything else. The enemies aren’t very smart either, so they’re easy to avoid even if you solely rely on shadow merge. This means that it’s actually quite easy to go through the entire game without being seen or resorting to lethally cutting down humans, making for a stealth game that doesn’t quite give you enough opposition to challenge you to think critically when it comes to circumnavigating a threat. There aren’t any difficulty settings to make the enemies smarter or more plentiful either–though you can adjust how many environmental guides show up in each level (purple lamps or purple paint that point you in the general direction you have to go, for example).
Shadow Legacy teases you with a tantalizing view of what it could be in its third chapter, briefly breaking free from its otherwise linear stealth levels to give you a playground in which you can tackle an assortment of missions in any order within an open area. Within this open space, you have more of a choice in how you approach each assignment instead of being funneled through a more linear challenge. Mistakes have a more drastic impact because you’re not moving from one area to the next–it’s all one big connected location, where your actions can snowball into unintended effects. Ayana’s assortment of abilities and gadgets also have way more utility in this level. The binoculars used for scouting and mapping enemy movements are way more valuable in a giant open space than in an enclosed laboratory or city street, for instance. The game never opts for this format again, however, and in doing so it leaves me wishing for what might have been.
To the game’s credit, the back half of Shadow Legacy has some creative set pieces from a platforming standpoint, with one section in particular that I adored for how well it challenged and encouraged me to utilize all I had learned up to that point in one fast-paced gauntlet. Shadow merge can be used to eject out of shadows to make otherwise impossible jumps or interact with the environment to solve simple riddles–skills that apply to challenges that steadily get more complex as the game goes on. Even if Shadow Legacy falls short of being a great stealth game, it’s a good platformer. The environmental elements create an assortment of shadows–some oddly shaped, others that move, and still more that can be altered–and figuring out how to reach an out-of-the-way platform is sometimes a puzzle within itself, made trickier and more rewarding to solve given the stamina meter tied to Ayana’s shadow merge. Not only do you have to figure out which shadows to move or follow or jump between, but you also usually have to do it in a timely manner.
In service of these platforming challenges, Shadow Legacy features a colorful diversity of locales, ranging from an outpost in the desert to an autonomous factory. My favorite is an urban street that hints at the human life that once populated it, now devoid of any movement save for the autonomous drones that patrol the streets and promise that this is for the best. Sporadic graffiti and text logs hint at the growing loss of autonomy among the human citizens leading up to the corporate takeover that promised everyone a better life. It’s such an eerie level, framed against the setting sun that’s causing the street to slowly be encroached by shadow. It feels fitting that Ayana uses those same shadows to sneak her way past the guards searching for her, paralleling how the oppressive regime’s efforts can’t stop the resistance–they squeezed so much life out of this one city block that now there’s no living soul to report Ayana to the authorities, just dumb, easily-fooled machines.
Guiding Ayana through these challenges is a story that never quite gets room to breathe. Initially trapped by an AI-controlled entity hellbent on using her powers for some unknown purpose, Ayana finds herself quickly working with the resistance seeking to free themselves from corporate tyranny. Ayana is hesitant to work with them, having heard they’re nothing more than terrorists but agrees to use her unique skillset to help on the condition that the group gives her everything they know about the Ereban people. There are some interesting, albeit familiar, narrative themes here, but Shadow Legacy rushes through them–Ayana buys into the resistance’s cause remarkably quickly, for example, despite being given no catalyst to do so.
In the game’s third chapter, Ayana is warned to spare humans so as to help alleviate the accusations that the members of the resistance are terrorists. This is the game’s morality system, shifting the coloring of Ayana’s design toward shining white or sinister purple depending on how bloodthirsty you play her. As far as I can tell, the ramifications of this only impact one small moment in the final level of the game–it’s not much of a narrative payoff.
At certain points in the story, Ayana can upgrade her shadow powers and you have a choice of whether to unlock new branches on one of two skill trees. One branch leans toward non-lethal abilities, like cushioning your footsteps, while the other opts for skills that make you a better killer, like making it easier to hide bodies so your deeds aren’t discovered. This creates some fun replayability as it’s impossible to fully unlock both branches in a single playthrough, but, again, shadow merge is just too strong. The new powers are cool, but I never had to use them, as shadow merge makes it fairly easy to sneak through a level without being spotted. Granted, I opted for a nonlethal run. It’s possible that if I had aimed for a playthrough where I killed everything that moved, I’d have needed to rely on more of the powers that hide bodies or kill multiple enemies at a time in order to not alert guards that something was wrong.
Ereban: Shadow Legacy sits in a weird place for me. As a stealth game, it rarely challenged me, reducing protagonist Ayana into a one-trick pony that could sneak past any target with the same shadow merge skill every time. But as a platformer, Shadow Legacy incorporates some entertaining puzzles that grow increasingly complex and rewarding to overcome. I never quite managed to connect to Ayana’s journey against the autonomous overlords planning to doom an entire civilization, but I had a lot of fun slinking up walls and exploding out of the darkness, striving to time my jumps with the movement of a windmill and the rotating shadow it was casting. Those nail-biting moments are the ones that stuck with me, not the dozenth time I slunk past an unsuspecting droid.
