Final Fantasy VII is one of the most beloved RPGs, and quite possibly games in general, of all time.

An exciting aesthetic step forward for the iconic series in terms of both setting and visuals, with a host of characters that have since become iconic. Like a lot that was popular in the 90’s, the love for the game has stayed strong over time. Raised above its peers with then-stylish 3-D cutscenes and graphics, the new and exciting Active Time Battle system, and a story that has a special place in the hearts of many who played it, VII has long since cemented itself as a classic, and fans today are still eagerly clamouring for a remake so that they can relive their favourite moments of both triumph and iconic tragedy. However, like many massively popular properties, Final Fantasy VII was simply too lucrative to be left stagnant for two decades, and in the intervening period we’ve had our fair share of extended adventures with Cloud Strife et al through what has come to be known under the oh-so-catchy title; The Compilation of Final Fantasy VII. Exhilarating.

First unveiled to the world in 2003, the compilation kicked off in 2005 with a bang, a feature-length CG film that serves as a direct sequel to the events of the game, taking place two years on from the Meteor Crisis- Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. Perhaps, as the first extension of the compilation I should go into detail on the nature of Advent Children but as a humble amateur I’d feel remiss in offering my woefully underqualified opinion on the piece of art that simultaneously elevated cinema and video games to new echelons. A blocky PS1 era JRPG is one thing, but this- I could do a separate piece on the travesty that was its Oscar snub. However to those of you who lack my refined tastes it may appear that this film is little more than an exercise in fan service, with a plot on par with say, your basic shonen anime OVA. What is significant about Advent Children, however, is that it sold, and demonstrated that the public had a definite taste for more FFVII. This marked the beginnings of an explosion. From pre-smartphone era cellphone-exclusives like Before Crisis to dodgy third-person shooters like Dirge of Cerberus, Final Fantasy VII was pimped out and put to work while Square Enix waited for those reliable fanboy truck-fulls of yen. Then, in 2007, it came time for VII to work the street corner of the PSP- and a funny thing happened. The result was far-from-perfect, and yet… something was different. This was not the mediocrity that audiences had been trained to expect from the Compilation. There was a real spark to the game, and the story, while marred by flaws, had an appreciable heart. This was, dare one say, actually quite good. This was Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII.

Crisis Core was a PSP exclusive game set in the FFVII universe with gameplay somewhere between action-RPG and slot machine. Let me explain, briefly: the battle system in Crisis Core was a blend of real-time combat in 3-D space, and the familiar command menus of FFVII’s Active Time Battle system, coming together in what was similar to a more bare-bones, RPG style variation of the sort of combat systems seen in action RPG’s such as the Kingdom Hearts series. You used materia to customise the abilities that the protagonist, Zack, had on hand in combat, and building yourself into a powerhouse SOLDIER was pretty decent fun. The unique element introduced into this model was the Digital Mind Wave system, or DMW. The DMW was quite literally an emotional slot machine. As you progressed throughout the story, empty slots would fill with the faces of various characters, symbolising Zack’s emotional connection to them. During battle, the slots would constantly spin, and should they align, Zack would perform a Limit Break special attack inspired by the character in question. The mechanic, while outwardly appearing wholly randomised, could have its probability affected by equipping certain materia abilities, and also by its Limit gauge, a story-triggered mechanic in which Zack’s heightened emotions increase the chances of certain characters’ portraits appearing.

The game’s director, Hajime Tabata, as well as Final Fantasy higher-ups Tetsuya Nomura and Yoshinori Kitase, spoke about the desire to keep the gameplay of Crisis Core exciting, in a story which, by its nature, they felt excluded the possibility of a traditional JRPG party-based system. This is why Tabata elected to employ a more action-RPG style system involving free movement, while Kitase and Nomura, both fans of pachinko, invoked the idea of incorporating the kind of luck-based system seen here into a game, in order to stop battles from feeling repetitive. I have to say that, at least to a point, it works. The combat might feel a bit stiff, but the customisation was rewarding. Many fans decried the folding of key features such as Limit Breaks, Summons and even levelling up into an apparently random mechanic; however the game’s manipulation of the DMW leaves it far less functionally random than it appears, and with regards to levelling up, Zack still had a traditional EXP value, it was simply hidden. And when you’re in a clutch boss fight only for the DMW to bail you out with a well timed super-move it can be immensely satisfying, or at the very least relieving. Furthermore, because I was so invested in the characters and story, the ludo-narrative synchronicity of the DMW and Zack’s emotional state lead to some quality moments, including possibly the games most effective one.

The story of Crisis Core is a prequel to the original Final Fantasy VII storyline, and centres on Zack Fair, a character with a brief but crucial role in the original’s plotline. Zack was the key element in the plot-twist that redefined the character of Cloud, FFVII’s main character. In the original title, Cloud’s initial backstory is that he is a former member of SOLDIER, the elite, enhanced, sword-wielding fighting force of the villainous Shinra Corporation. During a moment of trauma however, Cloud is forced to relive his own memories of his final mission with SOLDIER, only to reveal that his memories were falsehoods, that he had never been in SOLDIER, and that he had been unconsciously assuming the identity of his friend, Zack, who had given his life to protect Cloud. This twist shattered audience’s perception of Cloud’s identity, as well as his own, and is one of the highlights of the FFVII narrative. It also hung heavy over the concept of Crisis Core: from the very beginning, fans of FFVII know that they are following a protagonist whose doom is already assured.

Zack is a rambunctious, brash, proud and ultimately good hearted character. Right from the beginning, the game establishes his youthful exuberance, with many characters directly referring to him as a “puppy”.Immediately, Zack is a breath of fresh air for long time fans of a series that had become weighed down by the archetypal brooding hero. Zack is a direct contrast to the compilation’s model of a protagonist. He is the anti-Cloud. Cloud in the FFVII series has become a victim of the impact of his own journey in the original story. Robbed of his identity, his self-belief, and of love interest Aerith Gainsbourgh, perhaps the most notorious character death inn any games story, period, and one whose impact is still well-remembered. Despite the ultimate defeat of their antagonist in FFVII, the heroes, and Cloud especially, are put through a great deal of trauma within their journey. The conclusion of FFVII has Cloud assert his symbolic emancipation from the psychological manipulations of series villain Sephiroth, who takes advantage of Cloud’s identity crisis to suggest that he may in fact not be a real person, but a clone created by Sephiroth himself, bound to his will, with no individuality or past of his own, just like the many other Sephiroth clones that the heroes do battle with during their journey. Cloud’s victory in the original story is that throughout the trauma Sephiroth inflicts on him, he does not surrender his will or identity to him, and declares himself as his own person, reclaiming his control of his own identity-an affirming note on which to end the story. The problem with Cloud’s characterisation lies in that story’s extension; specifically with Advent Children, and the ubiquitous rise of ‘Emo Cloud’.

In Advent Children, we see a vision of Cloud’s identity that he has forged for himself in the wake of his release from the deceptions and delusions in which he was previously entangled- the results are a far cry from anything affirming. Cloud has become a fatalistic loner, haunted by guilt over the death of Aerith, isolated from the friends that supported him, even Tifa, his oldest and most caring supporter, and the other love interest of Cloud’s life. The trauma of Cloud’s story have left him a depressive, apathetic mess, and a terminal patient who is waiting to die. This is the picture Advent Children paints of the world-saving hero of the original, and while it may be gritty, and may ring true to the Cloud of the original’s darkest moments, to see him in this state two years after the Meteor Crisis undermines the hard-won philosophical victory he was supposed to have already achieved. Cloud’s arc in Advent Children sees him learn the value of his friends, make the choice to fight to stay alive and protect those he loves, and defeat Sephiroth in a climactic battle- all ground which had already been covered by the original. By the end of the film, Cloud is just getting to a place that he should have been getting to two years earlier, and by stunting his character growth in order to have him re-tread old ground, the film re-imagines the hero as a character defined by self-pity and defeatism for a great deal of its runtime. This has been met with considerable derision from the community at large over the years, and the archetype of the brooding JRPG protagonist has fallen out of favour with many fans, thanks in no small part to the indelible mark the indulgence of that trope left on one of the genre’s most iconic faces.

Thus, we come to Zack, the opposite of Advent Children-era Cloud in almost every way as a character. Loud, bold, and generally of an optimistic disposition, Zack is the perfect mirror to Cloud, who, after all, was first a reflection of him. Zack forgoes the melancholy persona, to the point of being a positively cheerful voice even in dire straits. His desire in life is stated outright early on and perfectly frames his character-“ To become a hero”. Everything you need to know about Zack is summed up right there; he’s brave, he’s naïve, he’s enthusiastic and genuine. This choice of characterisation helps Zack to stand out and become truly likeable, a character with whom the audience will sympathise all the more because of his preordained fate, rather than fail to invest in him because of it. Furthermore, the brooding, pretty-boy archetype that Cloud embodied is instead cast in this piece not as a hero, but as a villain.

The issue of Crisis Core’s original character and primary antagonist, the rogue SOLDIER Genesis Rhapsodos, is, I think, the single most contentious issue surrounding the game as a whole, specifically because of the place which the writing carves out for him in the wider canon. The concept of Genesis was first introduced as a secret in the decidedly sub-par Dirge of Cerberus, a game that was awash with the grandiose, melodramatic aesthetic of the Compilation. The secret “Soldier G” ending revealed the bizarre sight of Japanese popular musician Gackt, bedecked in red leather, with Sephiroth’s iconic single wing. This figure was later revealed to be Genesis, villain of Crisis Core.

To put it lightly, this left audiences apprehensive and confused, particularly in the West, where Gackt’s profile was positively obscure. However despite his conventionally Nomura-esque design, and the undeniable similarity to Sephiroth in certain aspects of his character, I found the little details of Genesis to be of surprising quality. His depth may not be cavernous, but it runs farther than some may think, and I would even consider him to be a superior character to many mainline Final Fantasy antagonists. He, like many if not most good villains, gives a dark reflection of the hero’s own philosophy. While Zack’s desire to become a hero drives him to match and surpass the likes of Sephiroth, the legendary SOLDIER First Class, Genesis believed himself to be a hero, that to be a hero was his right, and though he ranked alongside Angeal and Sephiroth, the feeling that he could never surpass SOLDIER’s silver-haired poster boy distorted his psyche with envy, ultimately leading him down a dark path.

This is compounded by the revelation that he and Angeal were genetically engineered as part of the JENOVA project, the same experiment that fans of the original will recognise as having created Sephiroth, and that the cells in his body will begin to degrade, triggers a full tilt descent into villainy, as he embraces his status as a “monster”. So far, so Sephiroth, right? Sure, there are obvious elements cribbed, but Genesis puts an interesting spin on the villain of the series proper. For one, his inferiority complex towards Sephiroth does a lot to make him more interesting. In FFVII, Sephiroth was so far gone down path to alien god-being that he was pretty much totally detached from humanity, and, as such was pretty thin on identifiable humanising traits. So if you’re going to do a Sephiroth remix, giving him this trait does a lot to add humanity to his character, no matter how much he might deny it. And you know what else? You can mock Genesis for his obsession with the fictional play, ‘LOVELESS’, and his incessant melodramatic quotations of same, but it essentially serves as a stand-in for the whole extra-terrestrial Oedipus Complex Sephiroth has with JENOVA. Genesis’ search for the enigmatic “Gift of the Goddess” might be vague, but the writers know it- “There are various interpretations”. Unlike Sephiroth, whose plan in the original was nicely defined: get Black Materia-Call down Meteor-crack open Planet to get at its “Lifestream”-Absorb said Lifestream- Become alien god-being”, Genesis’ goal is a little more small-scale; he wants to cure his body’s degeneration. Yes, he might want to get himself some revenge on various parties after that but that’s never the focus of his story because the entire game, Genesis is doing his villain thing in service of finding himself a cure. To him, the ‘Gift of the Goddess’ is whatever it is that will cure his own planned obsolescence, and since his humanity is something he’s written off anyway, he doesn’t really care what he has to do to get it. As the story goes on, Genesis becomes more desperate, more physically degraded and almost pitiable, until a final encounter where he seems almost fatalistic, accepting of his own fate. We’re essentially watching him cope with his own terminal illness, a nice spin on the old villain trope of being motivated by the desire for immortality. The fan backlash towards Genesis, however, has been strong, and most of it can be attributed to one scene: the Nibelheim reactor.

A crucial scene not only in Crisis Core but in the VII story generally, the Nibelheim reactor scene is the moment in which the hero of SOLDIER, Sephiroth looks at the deformed humanoid monsters created by Shinra’s Mako Energy experiments and draws a parallel between himself and them, beginning to doubt his own humanity, becoming visibly unhinged and withdrawing into the basement library/laboratory of the Shinra Manor for seven days, sleeplessly poring over research notes about the alien JENOVA, the “Ancients”, and his own birth, before emerging having fully transformed into the sociopathic momma’s boy mass murderer we all know and love. He slaughters the town of Nibelheim, fights and ultimately defeats Zack in the reactor, before Cloud, the lowly infantryman, scores a fluke win over him and knocks him into the reactor core, after which he disappears til the events of FFVII proper. In that game, as well as the animated short film FFVII: Last Order, that’s the entirety of the Nibelheim story as far as Sephiroth is concerned. Crisis Core adds a retcon wrinkle to that crucial moment of revelation on his part, however, by having Genesis enter stage right in the middle of it.

Anyone familiar with the original scene playing Crisis Core would at this moment, be surprised, confused and apprehensive. Genesis goes on to essentially spell it out for Sephiroth in a bid to get a sample of his “S-Cells”, perfect JENOVA cells that he believes will cure his degeneration. Which as we later see, can take the form of… eating his hair? Which seems degenerate to me. Nevertheless, Sephiroth tells Genesis that he can rot, and Genesis exits as abruptly as he appeared, having pretty effectively muddled and marred what was an important and perfectly functional scene in the original. I may have defended Genesis’ characterisation in general, but his retroactive inclusion this scene is clumsy and ill-advised, and the fanbase’s distaste for it is, in my opinion, pretty justified. It’s the one Genesis scene that doesn’t make sense as simply unmentioned background to the original narrative. Everything else involving him either can be lifted straight out without touching the original story, or even inn some cases enhance it- for example; Genesis led a mass desertion of SOLDIER when he left, which goes towards explaining the relative lack of SOLDIER presence during the time of the first game. But shoehorning him into a scene like this is pretty artless and hamfisted, and I think its fair to expect that, if and when we do get the FFVII Remake, his inclusion in this scene is pretty much guaranteed to be ignored. Genesis’ presence in Zack’s story fleshes it out and gives its main character an interesting foil, but his presence in Cloud’s would, I think, only serve to confuse matters.

Despite complaints on canonicity, as a story, Crisis Core actually stands out as interesting and compelling. From ruminations on the meaning of heroism, to debates on the distinction between man and monster. The game actually has some intriguing and high-concept themes with a satisfying amount of moral greyness, far surpassing the nose-smashing symbolism of, say, being tossed in the air by each of your friends to illustrate the message that Friendship is Good. Crucially, the story also stuck the landing on the moment to which the entire game builds up- Zack’s last stand. After being held prisoner and experimented on for four years by Shinra, and after concluding the Genesis storyline, Zack and a comatose Cloud are fugitives, hitching a ride back to Midgar, with Zack excited to finally reunite with Aerith- that’s right, Zack even had Cloud’s love interests before Cloud did. Zack talks to the unresponsive Cloud, suffering from the after-effects of their four-year ordeal, painting an optimistic picture of what they’ll go on to do once reaching the city, before spotting something on the horizon: what appears to be an entire army of Shinra soldiers lying in wait. Seeing the situation, Zack lays Cloud down out of sight before going out to face down the overwhelming enemy force. In a heart-wrenching sequence, the game actually gives you full control of Zack, who by now you’ve elevated to an endgame level, far beyond that of these standard grunts. At first, you’re dispatching them with ease- but for every wave you cut down, another takes its place. The shots that get through begin to add up. No matter how many soldiers you repel, an infinite stream on them step forward to face you. As Zack, you’ve taken on countless enemies, godlike Summons, and foes of the highest calibre, but the unrelenting tide of infantrymen cannot be turned back. As your health ticks down, the situation grows more and more dire. Zack becomes bloodied and battle-damaged. His movement slows. He can barely swing the iconic Buster Sword. Then, cruelly, the DMW begins to spin, only to visibly glitch and malfunction. The mechanic that has bailed you out of tough situation throughout the game begins to fall apart on-screen as you take damage. The faces of those with whom Zack has built his bonds with begin to fade, as his memories of their words play, distant and echoed. Finally, Zack falls. Of the massive force that confront him, only two troops appear to remain on the field. They stand above the exhausted SOLDIER, before firing on him point blank. Cloud awakens just in time for Zack’s dying moments. Zack clutches him, and tells him to live for the both of them. Cloud, his face stained with Zack’s blood, kneels beside his friend as he dies, before letting out a howl of raw grief.

The scene may not have the shock factor of Aerith’s death, but it is intense, it is drawn out, and it is absolutely harrowing. The entirety of Crisis Core comes together in this moment to deliver in a massive way, and this is a scene from th original that I can safely say is undeniably improved in its adaption here. Zack was barely a character in the original, more a placeholder than anything else. Here however, we have spent at least twenty hours with him. We have gotten to know him as a fully-fledged character We’ve seen his optimism, and we’ve seen that optimism tested. We’ve seen him suffer loss and betrayal. We’ve seen him find romance and friendship. We see new scenes of those friends racing against the clock to prevent his fatal encounter, knowing they are doomed to failure. The tragedy in this scene is the emotional payoff to the entire experience and it delivers with multiple powerful gut-punch moments. It’s an ending that has stayed with me for years, and no doubt will for years to come. When we see the post-credits stinger, a remake of the original Final Fantasy VII opening, and hear the narration, “My name is Cloud, SOLDIER First Class”, it hits us, because we can feel the trauma that Cloud has repressed in a way we never could before Zack’s own story was told.