The not at all late Crisis Core Review

It took me about 20 years to actually buy and finish this game, and then another 30 or so to actually write and then post this review. Well, better late then never. I hope that you enjoy.

Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core is the latest part of the Final Fantasy Saga, published on the PSP. It starts several years before the events of the original game and follows the exploits of Zack Fair leading up to it, including the infamous incident and Nieblheim.

Plot

The plot is great, well paced with a very satisfying conclusion, though I advise you have tissues at the ready. It fills in the holes of the original brilliantly (though I would have liked to have seen more of bat shit crazy Sephiroth), elaborates on the new elements without going over the top and the new characters don't jar with the existing.

Zack initially is a rather annoying protagonist but as the game progresses he calms down a lot and becomes a very sympathetic character. One of the best (or worst, depending on your view point) aspects of this game is that you know how it all will end. When he heads off to Nibleheim his farewell to Aries is truly tragic.

For better or worse this game will change the way that you view the original. Aries's relationship with Zack makes you re-evaluate her relation to Cloud in the main game. Cloud seems much more the pathetic weakling he was touted to be originally. Angeal and Genesis serve to flesh out Sephiroth and make his later actions much more understandable, though their importance seems strange considering their complete absence from the main game.

The only issue with the plot is that there's not enough of it too fill the 20 odd hours that SquareEnix has deemed its games must take. Admittedly the fans (myself included) would have a fit if this game was reduced to the 5 or so hours that it needs to be. In order to fill out the remainder though the game has been populated with a miriade of minigame and sidequest like portions that must be completed to advance the plot. It is a pet peeve of mine, leading to disproportionate amounts of rage, for games to have sections like this that do not flow. The game does try hard, bless its little cotton socks, but never quite manages to pull it off. They always seem like they have been just dumped in and generally only serve to break the flow of game play, though it does provide a welcome break from what would otherwise be a long slog of random encounters.

Graphics

Seeing the characters brought into spanktacular 3D was incredible and caused much fangirling on my part. The fully rendered cut scenes rival the visuals of Advent Children (the scene with Genesis and Sephiroth fighting on the Junon Canon... my god! YouTube it). Seeing the much loved vistas of the original rendered beautifully does have a certain squee factor but they have lost a lot of their charm in the transition. All the character of the paintings from the first game is gone though there are some rather nice nods to the old game (signs to locations in the game etc). The camera is a bit whippy, becoming uncontrollable when you are in a battle and this makes it very easy to get lost.

Music

As I've previously stated I am a HUGE fan of music in games and Final Fantasy, VII being high in my list. Crisis Core borrows heavily from the original game re-orchestrated by Kazuhiko Toyama with additional music by Takeharu Ishimoto. They have used the advancement in technology to allow for a deeper and more complex soundtrack. The two composers manage to mesh the old and new together, but Toyama is obviously no Uematsu and the two styles are distinctly different. There are a few new themes of note such as 'A Moment of Courtesy', but it's the reworking of the old that will catch your ear and make you take notice.

Game play

This is where the game falls down in spectacular fashion. Having gotten used to the absence of random encounters in more recent instalments, their return here seems annoying and tedious. This is heightened by the fact that you have a party of one and can't run away. Luckily these battles flow rather more smoothly than in the original, and do not break from your game play so much. The battle system itself is comparatively simple but very restricting; you have 6 equiped materia, attack and item commands and cycle through them using the shoulder buttons. This eliminated a lot of the fun of trying to find the perfect combination support and magic that made you utterly invincible, instead forcing you to rely purely on levelling.

So its a brilliant game in all aspects... except the whole game bit. It's just as well that most people who play Crisis Core are not going to be in it for a great game playing experience. This does well what it set out to do; finish, or rather start, the saga that is Final Fantasy VII. Crisis Core is at it's heart a fantastic story, if a flawed game, and a welcome addition to the FF VII franchise.

Jacob = Lucifer?

Got bored on Wednesday. Tried to go to work. It was raining. Got soaked. Starting coughing again. Found out all computers were down. Went to pub for an hour. Got sent home. Played Assassin's Creed II for the next two days while watching Lost.

I took it as a sign from his noodeliness on high that I wasn't supposed to go to work again this week. I was getting better, now I'm not. The joys.

I'm watching the final two seasons of Lost on account of wandering off early in season 5 when it was on. It really did get a hell of a lot better in the last two seasons, not that I have a clue what is going on but I feel like at least they knew. That was what pissed me off about S3 and 4; it just looked like a whole load of random things that happened with no real thread or point to it. They made out there was this great plan to the whole thing, but then failed to back it up. The same thing happened in BSG but they managed to back that up by NOT killing off every character you actually gave a rats about.

I got a little confused by the fact that the guy who plays Jacob also plays Lucifer's vessel in Supernatural. It makes trying to work out who's evil much harder.

Bed rest

Went to see the doctor today on account of the lung that is trying to escape me. Her advice -'rest until it goes away'... yay...

So been at home all day, not doing much really. wrote a good 1000 words to add to the 2000 I did last night, so I'm all proud of myself for that. I've also done about 9 pages of doodles, mostly people and faces from old photo's of uni and stuff. Some are good, some not so much. If I carry on drawing like this (unlikely as most of my creativity comes in spurts and starts, manic one day then nothing for months as life takes over) I might make a few webcomic type things. Nothing fancy, I'm not committed enough to do that, but just a few funnies I think of. Working on some of the characters in my head, will prob get them down on paper tomorrow if I still feel like it and I haven't... ya know... died.

Ezzy Le Bob

Chapter 2 - Fin but crape!

So I'm trying to write my magnus opus again. Currently finished chapter 2. It is shit and will need heavy reworking as will the first chapt (and by heavy I mean complete rewrite) but need to just power through and get it done or I'm going to spend forever reworking the same first chapts over and over. I think I'll have a better idea of what needs to be done once I've finished and I know what needs to be put into it and where it needs to go. So-

Chapt 1 - Into the West

Chapt 2 - The Ruby City

Chapt 3 - ?? Something about Magi and lakes maybe? No idea what this will be about so I'll name it when I'm further in.

This is madness! THIS IS AMECON!

I went to Amecon 2010. It was fun. Now I am destroyed. I shall describe it shortly.

Good con, could have been better.

Reasons.

Good Con

+Interesting and informative panels

+I now have two shiny Sephiroths and they only cost be £30 for the two. Yay.

+Nia get up was awesome. People took lots of photos of me and I was adored.

+Lots of people in fantastic cosplays

+Introduced me to http://www.khaoskomix.com/home.html. It is awesome. You should read it. It has the man love. And the lady love. And the man/transgender love times two!

+Fun times with good people. Many hijinks did ensue. Like Dave burning his face off with super glue. How we did laugh.

+Energizer Bunny Piplup. He just kept going and going and going...

Could have been better

-Sick. As. A. Dog. Seriously. People asked if I had whooping cough.

-Several things were late and badly run. Many technical issues though I can't blame them too much. They were running this at someone elses uni.

-There was barely anything happening on Friday.

-Many things clashed. Pub Quiz, Yaoi panel and Yuri panel were all on at the same time. I wanted to go to all three, went to the first and then walked out after 2o mins due to it being crap and later found out that the Yaoi panel was apparently awesome. Dang.

-I shouted at people because they were not able to read my mind. That was wrong of me.

So yeah. That happened.

A Symphony in midi

One of my favourite things in many games is the music. About a quarter of my music comes from games (the majority of which can be attributed the genius that is Nobou Uematsu, legendary composer for most of the Final Fantasy series but he gets his own post later).

A good soundtrack can make or break a game. It doesn't matter how a good a game is if it has an annoying soundtrack you won't play it or you'll mute it and loose all the whizzes and bangs that help you submerse yourself in the moment. But it's so much more than that. Music sticks in the mind long after the excitement of the game has worn off. If you don't believe me hum a few bars of the Mario or Tetris theme on a packed train and see how many people start tapping along. They got stuck in your heads for hours and they're still there in the back of your mind all these years later.

Game music is notoriously difficult to get right. It has to be distinctive and suit the mood and atmosphere of the game, but at the same time it has to blend into the background to not take focus away from the action on screen. You could be listening to the same 5 minute loop over and over again for hours; if done right you'll feel a deeper connection to the characters and their plight, if done badly you'll want to throw your controller at the wall and gouge out your ear drums.

There are many modern games that have good soundtracks but there are very few in recent years that can hold a candle to these giants of ages past. Most rely on similar styles themes: pounding syths for fights and flights, ye-olde flutes and lutes for bimbling about country villages, grand orchestras and choirs when you need 'epicness'. While being a good short hand to let the player know what's happening and doesn't jar by being unexpected it does lead to everything game in a genre sounding the same and rather blasé, nothing that sticks in your brain for longer than it's playing. Can you think of any game from the past year that had even one tune that you can still hum now, or has everything become one great wash of Latin chorus and thumping that wouldn't be out of place at a rave?

Not all games use original scores of course. Games set in a contemporary world are increasingly using contemporary music, such as Grand Theft Auto. Following the huge success of Guitar Hero many bands now see games as a platform to get their music across to a whole new audience. And it works. It was a demo of the first Tony Hawk game way back when that had 'Superman' by Goldfinger on it, the song that introduced me to the wonderful world of punk rock.

It seems like music in games is beginning to get it's just recognition with events such as the fantastic Video Games Live, a travelling show where composers Jack Wall (Mass Effect, Myst, Splinter Cell) and Tommy Tallarico (Earthworm Jim, Prince of Persia) perform medleys of soundtracks accompanied by a local orchestra. If it comes to a town near you I highly recommend it, it's a lot of fun. Hearing Tetris and Space Invaders played on classical instruments is a real kick. It's not just specialist events like this though. At Christmas I went to 'Nokia Night of the Proms', a night of pop acts from various parts of Europe brought together to play whilst backed by a full orchestra. I was surprised when I suddenly realised that they were playing the Advent Rising medley I'd heard only a few weeks before at VGL! Unfortunately we caught the show in Munich and I don't speak a word of German but my friend tells me that the host was saying how games were becoming an important step in the evolution of music. I have to say I agree with him and it's an evolution that I can get behind.

Bored of the Rings

I'm currently reading LOTR -The Two Towers. It took me 8 years to read Fellowship. 8 YEARS! 8 bloody buggering years! Why am I doing this to myself? Because I have to. How can I call myself a fan of all things fantasy when I haven't read Lord of the Rings? So now I have to slog through 7 billion pages of a bunch of people with Paper Thin Personality Disorder walking in a sodding wood and getting into the occasional fistycuffs!

Yes. I know. It's 'seminal'. It defines a genre, a genre for which I have great love. I just hate the way its written. The characters all sound the same, segregated into three groups; Gollum, hobbit and other. The battle of Helms Deep is crammed into about 10 pages, completely devoid of tension or any sense of peril only to be followed by 20 pages of walking, oh, sorry, riding as they bugger off to Isengard! Seriously? The language is dated, the bits that are in English I mean. The characters show no emotion; you're told what they are feeling but there is little in the way they talk or act to reflect this.

And the ring. What does it actually do? What is it about the ring that makes it so bloody powerful and makes everyone want it? It makes you invisible. Kinda cool, you can use it to spy on the ladies but worth destroying the world for?

Any time I dare voice my opinions in public I'm immediately shot down. I said I know it is THE most influential fantasy book ever but it needs an editing hatchet taken to it. People always tell me 'oh you just need to skip over the Council of Elrond... and the bits with Sam and Frodo... and anything that appears in italics, then it's a fantastic novel'. Well, here's some news for you. If you have to skip out nearly half the book it's not a fantastic novel. A fantastic story maybe, I'm not saying the plot isn't brilliant. You just shouldn't have to wade through 1000 odd pages of pointless shite to get to it. A novel shouldn't require Appendices.

So here. I'm saying it. Tolkien is not the God of Fantasy. Godfather, maybe, but his books are not sacred texts to be put on a pedestal and admired for all time, any speaking against them to be struck down for such blasphemy.

Okay, so maybe I'm being overly harsh, but I'm sick of being treated like a leper for feeling like this. As much as I slagged off the book for giving us every small detail on the workings of Middle Earth it's quite cool having all the back story but I have to agree with something J K Rowling once said. An author should know everything about their characters and their world but the reader doesn't have to. If you want to go into minute detail on the number of days in a Shire month do it in text book.

I will get through the series. I'm not wasting that 8 years but next time I think I'll just stick to watching the films.

RPGs - Would you like a live chick with that?

In today's gaming field there are very few games which do not have some kind of role play aspect to them. Gone are the days of Pong and Tetris, simple little games to sap countless hours of your time. In a FPS you are the soldier fighting his way through the D-Day landings. One day you could be the international sleuth trying to solve the murder case, the next you're trying to outrun rampaging zombies that just wanted to invite you to dinner. Start to play an RTS and you're.. well in an RTS you're God I guess. Games are about escapism, getting away from the tedium of out mundane lives and being someone else for a few hours. In short, role play.

The few games out there without some kind of role play aspect seem to be trying very hard to convince people that they are not games. They are educational, brain expanding masterpieces that everyone should buy and bask in their glory, or aids in fitness or some other aspect of life enrichment.

So what actually is an RPG these days? To me I always see it as a plot or character driven game. One where the main point of the game is not to kill aliens or solve riddles, but where these are merely a means to unravel the story and develop your character.

The RPG, as with all genres of game, is evolving and right now is undergoing a real change. Now for the first time it appears to be shifting back to its table top roots placing a much larger emphasis on the choices, both tactical and moral, that you and your character make. Where as before your decisions might lead to a different item being picked up or at most lead to an alternate ending now deciding to make a cutting remark to your in game peers could cause a chain of events that alters the entire course of your game. Later you are held accountable for your earlier judgements as NPCs start to treat you differently or different side quests open up to you depending on whether you have been the epitome of goodness or an utter git.

Of course there is still the old vanguard. Square-Enix's Final Fantasy series, long the unquestioned ruler of RPGs, is still alive but perhaps not all that well. Their latest instalment, Final Fantasy XIII (ever the imaginative title), has incurred several slating reviews. Whilst still rating very highly overall (82% according to the good people over at Metacritic) the series's throttle hold on the market is undoubtedly beginning to slip. It was held up for its extreme linearity, far more so than an previous FF game. In a market where games increasingly rely on choice this game has none, not even about whether to go left or right as you are forced to follow the laid out path. However, in this game the plot is king. Every five minutes you will incur a cut scene and something will happen, breaking up the long stretches of walking into nice manageable chunks so you don't get bored and constantly immersing you in the lives of all six main characters. This is a video with game.

Now take something from the new wave, games like Fable II or Fallout 3. In all of these you are constantly questioned, making moral choices that will affect how others in the game see and react to you. The plot is almost secondary, instead it is character here that counts and they are yours to mould, from the colour of their hair to whether they eat live chickens. In Fable II you could get through the main plot in a few hours, just find the Heroes of Strength, Will and Stephen Fry and be on your way. Instead you spend your time trying to woo the local lads and lassies, buying and fixing up a house to become a property magnate or trying to join cults of the damned. You want to fully explore the world, take yourself off the beaten track and see what there is to be seen (and earn all of those damn achievements to boot). Fallout 3 expands the idea even more, the main plot only covers a small portion the whole map and the rest is just left there for you to explore at your leisure.

By using a single main character rather than some kind of party system, you feel more connected to the character and put yourself in their shoes. You can even chose to make them look like you if you want. These are games based on character development, living a life how you chose to. However, this high degree of freedom means that the main playable character has little personality shown, not even having voice acting in most cases. It is up to you, Mr or Ms Player, to put that on yourself and become the character. However I generally find that it just makes the character rather boring and I find myself thinking about them as some empty, soulless sprite.

There are now games appearing that seem to be trying to bridge the gap between these two, games where plot is still key but where you are given more freedom to effect how the characters of the game turn out. In the example of Mass Effect there is a main plot which is rather substantial on its own but is enriched by doing side quests and exploring the expansive world. They make the experience more real and involved but are by no means necessary for a rich and fulfilling gaming experience. There are several minor judgement calls in most conversations and a few cases where your previous action can result in plot junctures that even reach into how the sequel game pans out.

So. What does this all mean? Is the classic RPG dead? I don't think so. There will always be people, people like myself, who just want to sit down and be immersed in a world and a story that's all already there. Then again, by including so many decisions it is nearly impossible to play any two games exactly the same vastly increasing re-playability and making for a more interesting game. Like it or lump it, RPGs are changing. Perhaps one day we'll just be plonked in a fully formed world and be told to get on with it but until then it'll be interesting to see what games crop up.

The first post

Well yellow there!

So what is the purpose of this blog then eh? Well mainly it's because I have opinions and things to say and I'm going to subject them to you, oh you internetty going public you. It shall contain many things, reviews of whatever I think about, anecdotes of any particular interesting thing that happened to me that day and an awful lot of me waffling on about games.

Welcome and I hope you all enjoy.

Ezzy le Bob