Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII

• 1. Introduction

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  Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII arrived in 2007 with an unusual burden: explaining one of gaming's most beloved tragedies before it happened. Zack Fair, a young member of the elite military force SOLDIER, would carry the entire weight of that story. He was, in many ways, already a ghost before players ever picked up the game. His fate was predetermined, his death woven into the DNA of a 1997 game millions already knew by heart. So the question that hangs over every chapter of Crisis Core is not what happens, but why it happens, and who Zack was before the story of Cloud Strife could begin.

  The game was built for the PlayStation Portable and developed and published by Square Enix. It sits within the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, a sprawling metaseries of related works orbiting the original title. But Crisis Core had a more intimate ambition than most of its companions in that collection. It wanted to make players grieve for a man they had only glimpsed in passing. By the time Square Enix's UK sales director Doug Bone called it "the must-have PSP game of 2008", the game had already sold over two million units worldwide. The story of how it got there is as layered as the game itself.

• 2. Zack Fair's World

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  Seven years before Final Fantasy VII begins, Zack Fair is an eager, friendly soldier assigned to support Shinra's war against the people of Wutai. His mentor is Angeal Hewley, a 1st class SOLDIER who counts Sephiroth among his closest peers. When Angeal vanishes during the Wutai campaign, Zack is pulled into a search that will reshape everything he understands about the world he serves.

  The megacorporation Shinra sits at the center of that world, funding wars and running covert operatives known as the Turks alongside SOLDIER. Zack works under Director Lazard, a man the game eventually reveals to be the illegitimate son of President Shinra himself. The Turks' leader Tseng becomes one of Zack's trusted allies, as does a female operative named Cissnei. Through Tseng, Zack first encounters Aerith Gainsborough, a young woman tending flowers in a ruined church in Midgar's slums. Their relationship grows into one of the game's quietest and most affecting threads.

  Cloud Strife enters the story as a Shinra infantryman, not yet the swordsman of Final Fantasy VII. Zack befriends him on the road to Modeoheim, and that friendship becomes the hinge on which the entire ending turns. The game's logo quietly encodes these relationships: the blue sky represents Zack, the white feather Angeal, and the water Aerith.

• 3. Project G and Its Fallout

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  Genesis Rhapsodos is the game's primary antagonist, a SOLDIER whose body is slowly degrading and who will do almost anything to survive. With the help of Dr. Hollander, a scientist nursing a vendetta against Shinra, Genesis builds an army of clones to assault Shinra headquarters. When Zack and Sephiroth track down Hollander's secret laboratory, the truth about Project G emerges: Hollander used both Genesis and Angeal as subjects in an attempt to create supersoldiers infused with cells from the extraterrestrial lifeform Jenova.

  Angeal's gradual degradation becomes the story's first major loss. Tired of fighting and unable to stop the physical decay consuming him, Angeal fuses with his own clones and mutates into something monstrous. Zack is forced to kill his mentor. Before dying, Angeal passes the Buster Sword to Zack, telling him to protect his honor. That sword, and the obligation it carries, will pass to Cloud in the game's final moments.

  Sephiroth's own unraveling comes later, at a Mako reactor near Nibelheim. Genesis explains that Sephiroth, too, was implanted with Jenova's cells before birth. Sephiroth refuses to accept what Genesis is asking of him, but the revelation breaks something in him. He locks himself in Nibelheim Mansion and, a week later, sets the town ablaze. Cloud ultimately throws Sephiroth into the Lifestream below the reactor. It is a moment Final Fantasy VII players already knew; Crisis Core delivers the perspective that had always been missing.

• 4. How the Game Was Made

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  Hajime Tabata was chosen as director for an upcoming PlayStation Portable title, and after conversations with Tetsuya Nomura and Yoshinori Kitase, the team committed to setting the game within the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII. Tabata felt the pressure of working within a beloved series would sharpen both his team and himself. The original plan was different: a PlayStation Portable port of the mobile game Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII. Once the team committed to Zack as protagonist, that plan was dropped.

  Kitase was specific about what he did not want. Rather than a tribute that simply echoed Final Fantasy VII, he wanted the new game to share substantive links with other titles in the Compilation. The team also watched fan reaction carefully. When the original video animation Last Order: Final Fantasy VII altered the events of Nibelheim's destruction and drew negative responses, Crisis Core's staff decided against making equivalent changes. They operated on the principle that they were depicting the characters' younger days, which gave them room to add new elements without disturbing the established versions fans already knew.

  Zack's story had, according to Kitase, "been cooking for 10 years". Despite being a minor character in Final Fantasy VII, Nomura had developed conceptual artwork for him and Kazushige Nojima had already worked out a story. Genesis was added after producer Hideki Imaizumi met the character's Japanese voice actor, Gackt, and was struck by the character's brief appearance in the secret ending to Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII. UMD storage limitations forced the removal of scenes that would have expanded on Zack and Cloud's flight toward Midgar, shifting the emphasis instead to Zack's life as a warrior.

• 5. The Digital Mind Wave

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  Crisis Core was first conceived as a pure action game, but most of the development staff had far more experience with role-playing game design. The result was a hybrid: real-time movement and combat layered over mechanics that gave the player a sense of steady, RPG-style growth. Zack can equip up to six Materia at once, drawing special attacks, magic spells, or passive bonuses from each one. Fusing Materia together produces more powerful versions, allowing an attack Materia and an elemental magic Materia to combine into something that deals both physical and elemental damage.

  The system that generated the most discussion among critics was the Digital Mind Wave, or DMW. It runs as a slot machine in the corner of the screen, spinning constantly as long as Zack has at least ten Soldier Points. When pictures of characters Zack has befriended line up in threes, he performs a Limit Break. When the number slots read 777, Zack gains an experience level, which means leveling is governed by chance rather than accumulated experience points. Nomura and Kitase included the mechanic partly out of genuine enthusiasm for pachinko machines.

  The Materia system was designed to let players choose between what the team called "RPG-oriented enhancements" and "action-oriented enhancements". GamesRadar's AJ Glasser recommended players try the Hard Mode, citing how overpowered the DMW system can become on normal difficulty. That Hard Mode was initially available only in the North American and European releases; the remaster later added it to the Japanese version as well.

• 6. Sound and Spectacle

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  Takeharu Ishimoto composed the game's soundtrack, which was released on the 10th of October 2007 across two discs containing fifty-five songs. Ishimoto also composed the soundtrack for Last Order: Final Fantasy VII, and the Crisis Core soundtrack included remixes of music from the original Final Fantasy VII, originally composed by Nobuo Uematsu. Critics specifically praised Ishimoto's handling of those classic themes, noting how the reworked versions helped the game feel both familiar and new.

  The game's ending theme, "Why", was performed by Ayaka. Square Enix announced the song in May 2007, and Ayaka herself explained her connection to it: she was fascinated by the game's story and said she "would like to deliver 'Why' alongside Zack's fate to the hearts of many people". The single was released in Japan on the 5th of September that year.

  Presentation more broadly became one of Crisis Core's calling cards. After the game was released, Kitase expressed surprise at the quality of the cutscenes, saying the result was close enough to a PlayStation 2 game that he was caught off guard. GamePro called it the "best looking PlayStation Portable title" at the time. Rick Gomez's voice work as Zack also drew specific praise from reviewers.

• 7. Sales, Reception, and Legacy

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  Crisis Core sold 350,000 copies in Japan on its release date alone, a figure that included the 77,777 limited edition PSP bundles released on the 13th of September 2007. That bundle paired a silver-colored PlayStation Portable Slim and Lite with Final Fantasy VII's 10th anniversary insignia on the casing. By March 2009, worldwide sales had reached 2.1 million units, with 830,000 of those coming from Japan. Square Enix labeled it their best PSP game of the year and called it "an incredible success".

  Critical reception was broadly positive, with GameSpot awarding it an "Editor's Choice" label and 1UP.com calling it one of the best prequels of all time. The site argued the narrative "does a better job of putting players in FFVII's world than even the original game did". Computer and Video Games noted the main story runs about twelve hours, with side quests adding considerable length. Criticism landed on the DMW system's reliance on luck and on unskippable cutscenes. X-Play's review was contentious enough that the outlet published a satirical re-review giving the game an impossible 6/5.

  In 2011, Famitsu readers voted Crisis Core second in a poll of the most tear-inducing games of all time. Dengeki's equivalent poll placed it third. Yoshinori Kitase later described the remaster, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion, released on the 13th of December 2022, as a bridge for players moving between Final Fantasy VII Remake and its sequel Rebirth.