Part 1 of the remake was fucking amazing, but it only being part of the story still left some of that FF7 urge unscratched, so recently I went back and played the original again on Vita. It still wasn’t enough though. I needed MORE! So I thought what the hell I’ll play all the spinoffs again too.
So of course I’ve never played the lesser known Before Crisis, it having been an old-timey mobile game that only ever released in Japan. Naturally, the internet couldn’t let that slide though and the game has since been remade by a fan in English for RPG Maker. Conveniently enough there’s also a homebrew version of RPG Maker Player for Vita too, so that’s nice. Too bad it’s a terrible game! Maybe it was exciting by 2004 mobile game standards, I seem to remember mobile games being pretty awful back then, but trying to play it now isn’t too fun. Extremely basic and clunky gameplay, writing, and graphics. I just couldn’t get into it and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, even big fans of the world of Final Fantasy 7.
Crisis Core still holds up pretty well. Great graphics and sound for a dated handheld game. Decent combat and an interesting, if sometimes a little cheesy, story. I always found it impressive that this game managed to make me care so much about a former background character like Zack, to the point where I remember hoping he’d end up surviving somehow even though we all know he’s already dead (and yes I was quite excited to see him pop up again in Remake). Anyway, it was pretty fun, but I do feel like playing in New Game+ was a mistake. I did turn the difficulty up to hard, but it was still super easy with how overpowered I was from the first playthrough. Note to self: just start over fresh next time.
And then there was Dirge of Cerberus. Ehhhhhhhh. I can see now why I couldn’t remember a single thing about this game. Great graphics and sound for its time, but everything else about it is painfully mediocre. It’s just an utterly average 3rd person shooter with a director who very clearly thought he was making a Metal Gear Solid game. Shiiiiit, just sooooo many cutscenes and almost none of them remotely interesting. Vincent is a boring protagonist who barely speaks and just gets mountains of exposition dumped on him by a bunch of boring new characters with funny names and even funnier outfits. Like the one eyed, one armed scientist who knows martial arts and dresses like some kind of 80’s movie hooker underneath her labcoat for some reason. They just scream “I think I’m in a Kojima game!”. Really the only thing worth seeing here is the high end cg cutscenes (which make up a very small portion of all the game’s cutscenes), which were done by the same animators of Advent Children. Next time I’ll just watch those on YouTube instead of wasting a dozen hours on this snorefest.
Now…what to play next while killing time until I can get a PS5?
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