FF7 Crisis Core is clever

[blackboxme]

I enjoy a JRPG from time to time, and I'd like to give a defense of the JRPG. To make my defense, I'll point to the PSP game FF7 Crisis Core, which I think shows that the JRPG is still fun in one form or another.

JRPG simplicity

You can only equip two types of items: materia and accessories. All told, there are about 8 slots to equip. At any given time, you can swap in a set of skills and stats to suit your play style in about 30 seconds and it's all easy to understand.

There aren't any "skill trees" or "upgrade paths", and if you get a cool new item or skill, you can always equip it without any hassle or worry.

The accessory system is taken directly from Final Fantasy's past, and it's a really smart RPG design.

JRPG real-world crossover

BioShock has tape recordings to tell its back-story, Crisis Core has twitter. Actually, it's not twitter, but something similar: Japanese cell-phone emails. Email in Japan is a cell-phone oriented medium, and as luck would have it, that makes it a good vehicle to tell game back-story. Why? When you're emailing on a cell-phone screen, you keep it pithy! Throughout Crisis Core, you receive one or two paragraph emails from people, corporations, your bosses, just like you would expect in real life.

In addition to cell-phone emails, you can also get cell-phone calls from like your boss telling you to come back to the office or go on a mission or whatever. How useful is that as a game design idea? Quite useful.

This is like in FF8 where you had a job so you had a salary to buy stuff with.

JRPG cartoony stories

Crisis Core has many classic voice acted scenes. In one, a man yells "What does an angel dream of!?" In another, after the main character passes out, a woman's voice says "Helloooo", to which the main character responds "Mom?" and this repeats 3 times.

JRPG as slot-machine

Crisis core makes leveling up and skilling up dependent on a slot machine. You know what's interesting about slot machines? They're rigged. That's smart because then there's no digging around menus to see your progress, and you just end up not caring about that stuff too much.

JRPG as casual game

The JRPG isn't the ultimate genre, but it is a nice low effort amusement, much like the modern casual game.

[ThunderPeel2001]

I love the FF series, but I've not played Crisis Core. It's good then?

[blackboxme]

I love the FF series, but I've not played Crisis Core. It's good then?

The story is really goofy, but I find it interesting because I want to see how it ties into FF7. Does that make me sound like an idiot? There was just a lot of strange stuff in FF7, and the CC story is centered around that stuff. I've also heard that Crisis Core has a really good ending.

The battle system is fun. Everything is designed so that you can dodge attacks if you wait until the last second, and there is a good variety of attacks and abilities to choose from. For instance, in the classic magic spells, fire is a homing missile, lightning is a laser of damage, and blizzard is an area of effect spell, so in practice they're used for different things.

I see a few problems with the game. Sometimes the missions can be too simple and sometimes the environments are really boring, but these problems seem to decrease as the game progresses.

If you are a big FF fan, this game is very much in the style of Final Fantasy in pretty much every way, so I would guess that you would enjoy it.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Cool (I'm also a massive FF7 fan, too ).