Now, I know what you're thinking (because you're not wearing a tinfoil hat), and it IS a coincidence that this is #7, because of the most recent entry on the list pushing back all entries above it, I swear.


If Darksiders is on here mostly on artstyle, Crisis Core is on here mostly for story. The gameplay is just a grounded (and more restrictive) variantion of Kingdom Hearts' menu-based real-time combat, where you're placed in instances after running into an enemy on the map, which could be just the one or spawn a few extra creatures for you to deal with.

There's also very little in terms of customization or options, given the very linear nature of the game. Most of the combat will either occur during the storyline, or if you do the side-missions that place you in the same maps over and over, just with the occasional shift in enemies, difficulty, and loot to sniff out. And while your menu actions can be altered at will outside of combat, with specific combinations to unlock better variants of attacks and magic, it leaves much to be desired compared to either Kingdom Hearts, or Monster Hunter (another game with more grounded combat).

The real highlight of Crisis Core is in its protagonist, Zack Fair, and his story; either an anomaly or the reason being that, when I first played this game, I was VERY familiar with the story of Final Fantasy VII, but had yet to play it. It relies a lot on anime tropes, and the motivations for Genesis, the main antagonist, aren't given enough weight (obviously, considering he was never a part of the original); but Zack... Zack is a fully-realized character, with depth, with layers. He has goals, aspirations, he grows and changes as the story progresses. His interactions with every character always have a payoff, so you end up caring about them as well, providing another facet to those that were present in the original game (like Tseng); and the Digital Mind Wave, the Limit Break-equivalent for the game, plays into the importance of the people in Zack's life.

Spectacle and animu bullshit has become bolted to the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, and it's demonstrable in Crisis Core. EmoCloud still bothers me to this day, so I'm glad he's just 'Wimpy Insecure Kohai' trope throughout this story; but there are several other moments of style over substance, surface-level spectacle over depth, that paint a pretty jarring comparison between the original and every subsequent entry. So I'm glad to have had Zack to, for better (story) and worse (combat), ground us onto a solid foundation, while everyone else is flapping about. It's because of him that this game earned the #7 spot, and why he's my second-favorite FF protagonist (if not limited to main series titles).

Just... just stop beating a dead horse, and leave the stallion alone. Did we learn nothing from Frankenstein.


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