The ironic thing about Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion is that the story it tells is hardly a fantasy: area man discovers the company he works for sucks, and he has been putting in too much time and effort molding his identity around that company. All of his friends are work friends; all of his favorite memories are memories of work. We say “we do not dream of labor,” but the unfortunate reality is that labor often crowds out anything else we might dream of in its stead.
Shinra is a particularly evil corporation, but the evil doesn’t exactly stray too far from the lived reality of fossil fuel and agrochemical companies eviscerating the planet and forcing people to live under their yoke, does it? It’s not like we don’t live in a world with big corporate militaries. Human genetic experimentation to create supersoldiers becomes a modest proposal. Final Fantasy, but it’s just our world ten minutes in the future.
Zack Fair is a cop, and unfortunately, it takes him a real long time to see that he’s not going to be the “good” one who proves that the institution he serves is worth preserving. Between putting down a peasant rebellion in Wutai and Pinkertoning his own colleagues to (apparent) death, Zack the Puppy (as he is colloquially known) is a faithful Shinra dog almost to the very end. He has to be stabbed, poisoned, locked in a test tube for five years, and hunted by the very army he served to see that his loyalty was not reciprocated.
The thing is, right, you can’t help but feel for Zack a little bit. You want so desperately for him to realize that his hard work and the things he’s had to sacrifice to become a SOLDIER 1st Class don’t mean shit to the people in power above him. He is a tool at best, a plaything at worst. You know he has integrity – honor, even – but what does that matter? His mentor, Angeal, also had honor, and all it got him was death by Zack’s own hand. Certainly it had nothing to do with Shinra, whose only comment on the matter was that Angeal had been “killed in action.”
Crisis Core: FFVIIR is also really good at making you empathize with the villains of the franchise. We can absolutely understand why Genesis and Sephiroth turn against Shinra, why the latter loses it after learning his whole life has been a fabrication. You still understand why you can’t let them do what they want to do, and since there’s not a “send to therapy” button on the control scheme, you instead have to send them back to the lifestream. But like, for 30 seconds you do find yourself going “damn, that’s real rough, buddy.”
The other aspect of Crisis Core: FFVIIR that is… maybe not so much ironic as it is a bit unexpected, is that aside from the combat, this is a fairly straightforward port of the PSP game. While Final Fantasy VII Remake was by no means an open world game, the areas you could explore felt big and dynamic. There were lots of people to talk to and quests you could stumble upon. By comparison, Reunion is small. The areas you’re more-or-less free to move around in are limited to the Shinra Building, Sector 8, and the Sector 5 slums, and really you’re getting a time-locked vertical slice of each area. This is by no means meant to be derogatory; I didn’t mind the smaller scope given that this game was originally meant for the PSP and I was playing on a Steam Deck.
You can access side quests by hitting up save points, and each quest is pretty simplistic. The longest quest I’ve come across is the one where you have to try and beat a thousand Shinra infantrymen in a fight. It took me about an hour. Most other quests barely last more than a few minutes. Collect items, navigate a small dungeon, fight bosses: that’s the basic structure of essentially every side quest in the game.
Why did I single the combat out? Because that’s like, the one thing anyone from the development team for this port mentions as being either a) different from the PSP port or b) similar to Remake. And to be honest, it felt like Kingdom Hearts combat. (Again, not meant to be a slight.) The main thing that set Crisis Core: FFVIIR apart from that series was the DMW, or “Digital Mind Wave.” Basically, if Zack makes a friend, it affects his performance in battle. A slot-machine-style counter is always running in the top left corner of a fight screen, and it does everything from provide you with summon opportunities to leveling you up. I genuinely found this kind of endearing from a narrative perspective, but while playing it never really got in my way.
So should you run out and spend premium money to buy this extremely straightforward remake? That’s the part I’m conflicted on, actually. It’s a good game, runs fine; voice actors are good; gameplay is solid; story is oddly intact. But Square Enix is kind of a particularly shitty company, a Shinra, if you will, and it certainly can’t help milking its players’ money with this franchise in particular. If you’ve never, ever played Crisis Core, this might be a good opportunity; or you could wait for the Ever Crisis mobile game, which promises (threatens?) to re-remake Crisis Core again. Or you could simply download an emulator and a ROM of the PSP version. At the very least, maybe don’t give Yotsuke Matsuda more NFT money to play with.