Crisis Core

Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII is an entry in the thirst-quenchingly popular Final Fantasy series, and a direct prequel to the most well-known entry in the series, Final Fantasy VII. It is part of the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII.

Crisis Core follows Zack Fair, a character who had a minor but significant role in the original game, in the events leading up to the introduction to Final Fantasy VII. It also expands on the backstory of fan favorite Sephiroth. Many characters from the original game, such as Cloud, Aerith, and Sephiroth, play roles of various importance in the story.

Although the game is still an RPG, it contains more action elements in combat than its predecessor, and battles are faster-paced. The Materia system returns, if slightly altered.

Crisis Core was widely praised as pretty much the only entry in the Compilation to be a decent game by itself. Critics and fans enjoyed the story, direction, and gameplay, though they were turned off by the tedium of the 300 practically identical optional missions and the DMW System.

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Tropes used in Crisis Core include:

• Artistic License Physics: How do you fly with one wing?
• Absurdly Sharp Blade: Sephiroth's sword qualifies because of his special attack Draw Slash that was doing the actual cutting.
• Artificial Brilliance: Enemies may coordinate their attacks such that Zack rolls to avoid one only to be hit by another on recovery.
• Artistic Age: Cloud doesn't look any different than usual, and is voiced by Takahiro Sakurai and Steve Burton, like always. The only reason you buy that he's a kid is his attitude. And when he first shows up in the game, he's only 14.
  • And a bit shorter, if you compare him standing next to Zack and then do the same comparison in Advent Children. His features are a bit softer, too, if you look. Though that might be from not frowning all the time.
  • Also, Angeal. He looks like he's pushing forty, and numerous Final Fantasy VII fans speculated pre-release that he was Zack's father. Word of God says he's only about 25 years old, and born after Genesis.
• Badass Abnormal: All SOLDIERs, Zack included, count as this, because they're Super Soldiers created by Bio Augmentation with Jenova cells. Genesis, Angeal, and Sephiroth more than the others because they are the products of special research projects -- Sephiroth is a Super Prototype, while Genesis and Angeal are Flawed Prototypes.
• Badass Baritone: Angeal.
• Badass Longcoat: Sephiroth and Genesis have these.
• Beach Episode: Chapter 7's intro, Cissnei in a bikini and Zack in swim trunks. Fan Service for players of all orientations!
• BFS: The Buster Sword and the Masamune. Natch.
• Big Brother Mentor: Angeal to Zack and Zack to Cloud.
• Bloodless Carnage: With a handful of exceptions, including the ending, expect to play the game seeing plenty of sword fighting and gunfire, and not a drop of blood will be spilled.
• Bonus Boss: Minerva.
• Book Ends: Hitching a ride on a train.
• Bragging Rights Reward: Heike's Soul, which you certainly no longer need if you managed to beat the Bonus Boss, the hardest fight in the game.
• Bunny Ears Lawyer: According to the in-game information, all prominent 1st Class SOLDIERs were often considered to be this, with Genesis being the most extreme case of them all. Then their relatively harmless quirks turned into something much worse...
• But Thou Must!: Justified. When Zack is asked by a carpenter to name the bar he's going to build, there are multiple choices, but only one will be accepted. It's the Seventh Heaven, the bar that Tifa owns in the original game.
• Camera Screw: The camera hugs the walls, to the point where if you're against a wall you can barely see anything. Truly Fake Difficulty, because hugging the walls is the best way to avoid random encounters.
• Cast from Hit Points: Darkness and Costly Punch, though the latter takes such a tiny fraction of health that you'll barely even notice it.
• Changing Clothes Is a Free Action: There is a optional spy hunting sequence where Zack has to find Wutai spies in Midgar. When discovered, a chase would ensue and during a 1 second period where they are off camera while running, they will change from civvies to full Wutai soldier Armor.
  • Even more hilarious, although the last spy also changes to a Wutai soldier, his disguised form is a kid much smaller than his true form. That is some disguise.
  • Even better, he says outright "I'm a Mighty Wutai Spy!", but of course no one believes him!
• Clipped-Wing Angel: After defeating the final boss, it shifts into a more human form for the final showdown. Besides the fact its attacks are much weaker, it only has 99,999 HP in this form so a single Costly Punch will end the battle in five seconds.
• Companion Cube: Cloud for Zack post Nibelheim. He can't speak or move due to Mako poisoning, but Zack converses with him as if nothing's wrong.
  • Given Zack's attitude, it's likely his discussions with Cloud are an attempt to shake the guy out of his Mako poisoning. Also, possibly, an attempt to stay sane.
• Controllable Helplessness: They made the final showdown playable...the game has a Downer Ending. Do the math.
• Copy and Paste Environments: The missions, dear God, the missions. If you actually look at the maps in each mission, you'll notice pretty quickly that they're all set in the same eight or nine areas, you just get to explore different parts of them in different missions.
• Curb Stomp Battle: Any mission labeled "Very Easy" is expected to have these.
• Cutscene Power to the Max: The battle against Genesis, Single-Stroke Battle against a Dual Horn-type enemy in a Sephiroth DMW memory, etc.
  • The game opens with Zack jumping out of a helicopter, running across a train, dodging bullets, and pulling off all kinds of Advent Children-style kung fu feats. Nothing in this game's actual battle system even resembles that cutscene. Zack can swing his sword, do a dodge roll, and run around and that is it. He can't even jump. Naturally scenes like this happen throughout the entire game, and the playable battles never stop being any less dull in comparison.
• Death Wail: Cloud gives such a scream when Zack dies
• Degraded Boss: Several missions do this.
• Development Gag: Angeal's design is based on an early concept for Cloud in the original game.
• Defector From Decadence: Sephiroth was deeply considering retiring from Shinra and SOLDIER presumably due to growing distrust of the organization shortly before Nibelheim (where Retirony kicks in). It's heavily implied that Angeal's defection was also due to this trope.
• Disk One Nuke: Though you'll have to do a lot of level grinding to get the gil you need to buy them, and its very difficult to do the missions due to the high level requirement, as early as the beginning of Chapter 3 you can do missions to earn access to a shop that sells Quake Materia, "Hell" spells, Firaga/Blizzaga/Thundaga Blade, and other high-level Materia
• Doesn't Like Guns: Subverted, in that SOLDIERs seem to overwhelmingly favor swords, but Zack apparently has no issues about using a sniper rifle to eliminate some robotic enemies during the escape from Nibelheim.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Several plot points directly parallel events in Final Fantasy VII.
• Doomed by Canon: If you've played through Final Fantasy VII, then you will already know how this game ends.
• Doomed Hometown: Zack's Home town of Gongaga goes up in a mako reactor explosion.
• Easter Egg: In the first room of the final dungeon, Emerald Weapon's shoulders can be seen emerging from a crystal formation in the back of the cavern.
• Empty Room Psych: In most of the missions, there are only one or two chests, while the rest of the level is empty except for the boss.
• Enemy Scan: Libra.
• Everything Fades
• Everything's Better with Spinning: Several spin attacks..
• Face Heel Turn: Sephiroth.
• Facing the Bullets One-Liner: Zack, facing down half the Shinra army on his own -

Zack: Boy oh boy, the price of freedom is steep.

• • ...plus, his war cry of 'IRASSHAIMASE!' / COME AND GET IT! has the added connotation in Japanese of being shouted out by staff at every shop and restaurant, and would probably be better translated as 'COME GET SERVED!'
• Fan Service: The scenes at Costa Del Sol. Shirtless Zack AND Cissnei in a bikini.
• Feather Motif: All over the place.
• Fight in The Nude
• Fire, Ice, Lightning
• First Girl Wins: Subverted. Despite meeting Cissnei a few hours earlier, Zack "ends up" with Aerith.
• Flaming Sword: Odin's Zantetsuken starts flaming, gets extinguished, then rekindles.
• Friendship Moment: Almost every scene with Cloud and Zack past the Nibelheim incident when he's helping Cloud along.
• Foe Yay: Genesis seems a little too hateful at Sephiroth most of the time...
• Foregone Conclusion: Zack dies. Known to everyone who played FFVII and saw the optional cutscenes.
• Foreshadowing / Futureshadowing: In the beginning of the game's Training Accident: Zack encounters Sephiroth, who attacks him, making it seem as though he was behind the attack on Midgar. However, this proves to be a simulation. Guess what happens in Nibelheim?
• Fridge Logic: A rare in-universe case. Zack receives missions from Yuffie, and after each one she sends him an email telling him where to go next. Eventually Zack stops and wonders briefly exactly how Yuffie managed to get his email address. The subsequent missions focus on finding out.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Zack says he swings the Buster Sword with the blunt edge to avoid damaging the bladed edge, and Cloud later comments he doesn't see Zack use it much. Of course, unless you stick to Materia you're definitely going to be using the sword since you can't equip different weapons, and in battle Zack clearly swings it to hit with the bladed edge.
  • Zack is free to take missions from Shinra right up until the final area of the game right outside the chamber of the final boss, even though by that time he's a wanted fugitive being pursued across the world.
• Gaussian Guy: Some of Cloud's memories of Zack at the end are shown in this manner.
• Genki Girl: Aerith, although an unusually thoughtful variety.
• Go Out with a Smile: Zack
• Gratuitous English: Zack says "T(h)ank You" to Cissnei in the Japanese Version, after she helps him and Cloud
• Grey and Gray Morality: If you played the original game you already know how bad Shinra is. With the villains meanwhile, Angeal is just trying to do the honorable thing between his childhood friend and his career, Hollander and Lazard want to bring Shinra down due to being overlooked in the hierarchy, and Genesis wants a cure for his genetic degredation and is just growing increasingly desperate.
• He Knows About Timed Hits
• Heroic Sacrifice: Zack dies to save Cloud.
• Heterosexual Life Partners: Angeal and Genesis, with Sephiroth joining them later.
• How Do You Like Them Apples?: Genesis plays this trope with his Banora apple.
• Hyperspace Arsenal: In the boss battle with Hollander, his appropriately named "Dimension Missile" has him reach into his satchel and pull out a missile bigger than he is.
• Idiosyncrazy: Genesis is not exactly a supervillain, but monomania is a very prominent aspect of his character. If something or someone ever catches his interest, he gets obsessed with it.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Seemingly at the beginning when Zack faces three enemy gunners opening fire with automatic rifles and not one hits him, but we later find out this is just a holographic simulation and thus, even if he was hit it wouldn't matter. Played straight in a later scenes which is nearly identical, this time with real gunners, and Zack still doesn't get hit while holding fairly still.
• Implacable Man: The sheer amount of abuse Zack takes before getting taken out is mind-boggling. Including a point-blank bullet in the face when he's down.
• Improbable Weapon User: Zack uses a large beach umbrella to wail on some frogmen Genesis Copies midway through the game, and it has the same attack power as his sword.
• Insurmountable Waist High Fence: Actual traffic barriers, in all the missions.
• Interface Spoiler: Provided you know the characters of the original game, with the exception of Cissnei (who is a new character, mostly) you can probably take a good guess as to who's who on the blank DMW portraits - the spiky hair on one such portrait isn't very subtle. Averted with Genesis, who is added to the DMW reels but has no blank portrait as a placeholder in the roulette prior to being acquired, although he does have a placeholder in the DMW menu... in the summons column.
• Interservice Rivalry: All over Shinra. With pretty much every department fighting for funding while sabotaging others and security forces almost incapable of cooperation, no wonder Shinra was in such disarray during FFVII.
• Just Add Water: Materia Fusion.
• Last Stand: And goddamn, what a last stand.
• Large Ham: Genesis. Could you possibly get any more emo?
  • Yes.
• Limit Break: controlled by a slot machine. We could write paragraphs about this mechanic, which is not actually random and integrates with surprising grace into both story and gameplay.
  • Death From Above: Meteor Shots.
  • Gunship Rescue: Air Strike.
  • Instant Runes: Apocalypse.
  • Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs: Rush Assault.
  • Spam Attack: Chain Slash and Octaslash.
• Loners Are Freaks: During their SOLDIER days, both Sephiroth and Genesis are described as rather aloof and averse to other people's company, making an exception only for each other and Angeal.
• Lost Forever: Once you leave for Nibelheim at the end of Chapter 8, pretty much every subquest you can take part in in Midgar, as well as numerous missions triggered by interacting with people in Midgar, cannot be completed.
  • Only for each time you play through the game. Still doubles as a huge Guide Dang It.
• Luck-Based Mission: Any mission that contains enemies with instant death attacks - remember, you have only one party member. At least until you get a way to protect against it, and to be fair, you can dodge just about all of them if you're careful.
  • The Magic Pot enemy in a later mission asks you to use four specific attacks on it, the last of which is a DMW attack. Since you have no control over it all you can do is sit there and watch the reels spin, hopping they stop on the attack you need before Magic Pot gets bored and flees. You can equip a certain Materia to boost the odds of getting the attack, but its still random. And of course, appeasing the Pot is the only way to get the Genji Shield.
• Marathon Level: The Missions can get really, really long.
• Meaningless Meaningful Words: Nearly everything Genesis says. Chances are he knows it too.
  • He does and admits it himself. According to the Word of God, Genesis only starts taking LOVELESS as the, well, Word of God somewhere near the end of the game, when both his desperation and insanity hit their peak. Before that his recitings are more of a Madness Mantra.
  • Here's a drinking game - play the game and take a sip every time Angeal says "honor" or "dreams" - and take two shots if he uses them in improper context. You'll be tipsy by the end of the second chapter.
    • Lampshaded by Sephiroth who makes mention of receiving "one of his famous lectures...discipline, honor, dreams, et cetera".
    • Genesis also makes light of it in the Backstory:

Genesis: You'd better do something about those plants in your room.
Angeal: Those plants represent nature. Some of us converse with nature to hone our spirit and honor.
Genesis: And some of us are getting bugs in our rooms because of those blasted things.

• Meaningful Name: Ange(a)l.
• Medium Awareness: Zack makes a reference to leveling up in a DMW sequence, and on a mission when he runs into Yuffie she shows him a save point, which Zack remarks he could use in case she steals something from him.
• Mood Whiplash: Angeal forces Zack to kill him, and in his final moments, passes the Buster Sword on to him. Zack is seen crying about this in the church in the slums afterward. It is arguably one of the saddest scenes in the game. The next thing that you do is go to Costa Del Sol, watch a short cutscene of Zack in swim trunks and Cissnei in a bikini, and fight some Genesis copies using only a beach umbrella.
• Money Spider
• My Sibling Will Live Through Me: Cloud to Zack in the ending.
• My Suit Is Also Super: Played straight when Sephiroth gets encased in a firey ball of doom midair and gets out, inverted when Genesis and Angeal degrade; their clothes degrade with them.
  • Although, when Genesis gets "better", his clothes get better with him.
• Mythology Gag: Oh so many. To name a few of the more blatant ones: Zack dropping through the Sector 5 Church's roof and offering Aerith a date, the rather familiar vehicles on display in the Shinra museum, Zack doing squats while on a mission in a snowy mountain to keep up his body temperature, and a carpenter in the slums who wants to build a bar managed by "a young girl with a big bosom and long legs".
• New Game+: and the gratuitously-named New Game++ which behaves the same.
• Nice Guy: Zack.
• One-Man Army: Zack. Even setting aside the monsters and enemy troops he slaughters in random encounters, Shinra sends an entire army of soldiers to bring him down in the game's finale. When the battle finally ends, the three of them still standing finish him off.
  • Serial Escalation in the Missions, where one series of missions consists of Zack fighting off hordes of Shinra infanty, culminating with him fighting off 1000 soldiers.
• One-Winged Angel: How could it be otherwise?
• Only Sane Man: Angeal, when compared to Sephiroth and Genesis. Made especially obvious during the 1st Class Fun cutscene in which Genesis duels Sephiroth in a mock battle that goes horribly out of hand; by the time Angeal steps in to stop them from blowing up the building they're in, neither of the combatants are holding back.
• Ornamental Weapon: The Buster Sword, when it was in Angeal's possession. Zack makes fun of him for hardly ever using it.
  • Then, later, uses the exact same words as Angeal to explain how he keeps it such good shape, and why he only uses the flat edge of the blade (even though animation specifically shows him using the sharp edge...).
  • Actually, if you look closely you can see Zack rapidly spinning it around as he strikes, so that it does hit on the blunt side. He doesn't do this whenever he does a downward slash or DMW move though.
• Overly-Long Fighting Animation: the summon movies are actual movies now. No more in-game machinima: pure pre-rendered cutscenes! Luckily, it's possible to skip some all of them. Considering the shortest is twenty seconds, that's a very good thing. If, however, the summon is used against you, well...get some popcorn.
• Palette Swap: And how!
• Pet the Dog: Despite Sephiroth's air of aloofness and arrogance, it turns out that before the Nibelheim mission, Sephiroth could actually be a pretty nice guy - he has friends that he 'plays' around with, he tries to talk to and/or save Angeal before Shinra could hunt down Angeal, he tried to help Genesis when Genesis is injured during a VR session, he gives permission for Zack to go back to the Midgar Slums to protect Aerith, and he even reassures Zack that they'll meet again. All of which makes Zack's shock and disbelief over Sephiroth's later Face Heel Turn even more poignant.
• Point of No Return: The end of chapter eight.
  • But at least you can still run missions for the company trying to hunt you down!
• Power Degeneration
• Prisoner of Zenda Exit: Genesis after your first fight against him proper.
• Punch Clock Villains: Since the game is now from Zack's POV, you find that most Shinra employees, including SOLDIER, are just normal, decent guys with day jobs--they worry about getting promoted, discuss company hotties, and the higher-up members of the infantry are concerned with trying to get their division more funding.
• Psycho Prototype: Played straight with Genesis, and averted by Angeal.
• Random Number God: The DMW. While it is possible to influence the results (and character level is eventually guaranteed), the fact that players only have limited control over the process invokes this trope.
• Retcon: Several, most notably the nature of Zack's death and how Cloud ends up the way he was in FF7.
  • Most of the iconic scene at the Nibelheim Reactor was changed, though the end result is the same, and the parts that Cloud sees are left unchanged. Oddly enough, this is the second retcon of the scene; the first happened the cellphone Turk-centric game Before Crisis and was reused in the OVA Last Order. Crisis Core is a compromise of that version and the original game's with Cloud tossing Sephiroth into the mako pit but with the location changed to Jenova's chamber rather than the cat-walk outside.
  • A more subtle instance: In the original game as well as Advent Children, the iconic scene of Sephiroth in Nibelheim's flames had him emitting a Psycho Smirk. However, in this game, the Psycho Smirk is absent, and instead he looks slightly angered or remorseful.
  • Word of God says that FFVII gave us Cloud's perspective of the scene, Last Order and Before Crisis gave us the scene as reported by the Turks and Crisis Core is what Zack perceived as what happened. The only thing we know for certain is that the Turks got it wrong about Sephiroth jumping into the Lifestream and Tifa waking up when Cloud arrived in the Mako Reactor.
• Retirony: Sephiroth is seriously thinking of leaving Shinra and SOLDIER (implied to be out of guilt for the deaths of his friends and growing distrust for the organization) just before the Nibelheim mission (where his madness began).
• Sad Battle Music: "The Price of Freedom" could be considered this, due to the nature of the event you're fighting to it.
• Self-Made Orphan: Played straight with Genesis and subverted with Angeal. Angeal was initially believed to have killed his mother, and lets Zack believe it, but it is later revealed shortly before their battle that Angeals' mother actually committed suicide because of the strain of knowing her part in creating Angeal and Genesis.
• Set Swords to Stun: Arguably done in the literal way with Zack's second sword.
• Shinra Army Ending
• Show the Forehead: Zack changes his hair to this partway through the game to show that he's gotten serious.
• Shut UP, Hannibal: Sephiroth's delivers one hell of one to Genesis: "Whether your words are lies meant to deceive me, or the answers I've been searching for all my life -- you will rot."
• Single-Stroke Battle: One of the Sephiroth DMW memories has Zack do this. Sephiroth then tells him to try again with a harder target.
• Skyward Scream: Cloud
  • And Angeal, arguably.
• Stages of Monster Grief: Angeal hates his nature and defies it, while Genesis fully embraced The Dark Side and Sephiroth is inbetween (its hinted that he hates his nature upon finding out, but ends up embracing it anyways).
• Start of Darkness: The game shows that Sephiroth's mental breakdown was not a sudden out-of-nowhere snap but the result of a series of emotional traumas and betrayals with several days of sleep deprivation in addition to the discovery of a devastating half-truth about his origins being the straws that broke the camel's back.
  • The sleep deprivation part was, however, already there in the original game: "Sephiroth didn't come out of the Shinra Mansion... He continued to read as if he were possessed by something, and not once, did the light in the basement go out..."
• Super Soldier: Sephiroth, Genesis, Angeal, Zack, and all the other members of SOLDIER.
• Sugar and Ice Personality: Sephiroth, of all people, is a male version. He is aloof and coldly professional but also cares about his friends, is hurt enough by their loss to consider quitting his job and allows Zack to return to Midgar to check up on his girlfriend, showing that he at least understands the value of these kinds of relationships. This helps to nudge him out of Draco in Leather Pants territory and toward Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds.
• Swiss Army Weapon: Wutai troops carry some polearm-gun combination.
• Talk to Everyone: Absolutely necessary if you want to uncover much of the info relating to the world and characters.
• Talk to the Fist: You can interrupt small enemies' attacks by attacking them first.
• Take Your Time: Sure, the director of SOLDIER is waiting for you in his office, but you've got time for another thirty or forty missions first.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Level 5 limit break against a Mook you'd normally kill in one hit? The DMW makes this possible!
• Time Skip: After Angeal's death, the game skips a year and three months. And after the events in Nibelheim, it skips four years.
• Transhuman Treachery: Genesis and Sephiroth.
• True Companions: Zack has this with a lot of his SOLDIER comrades. Kunsel even sends him messages after the Zack escapes from Shinra Manor, saying that he will come save him.
• Unnecessary Combat Roll: Subverted in that it's extremely necessary to dodge attacks, granting you invincibility while rolling. With proper timing Zack can roll into explosions and spells and the like and not take damage.
• What Have I Become?: Out of all the Jenova project and it's many variants, only Angeal manages to hold on to not only his sanity but humanity through the whole ordeal. To the point that his copies and monsters went out of their way to help Zack.
  • He nearly lost it early on, it seems, considering some of his words and actions. He must have been using a lot of will power to hang on long enough for Zack to be able to kill him.
• What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome?: You get scenes of Materia creation to battle music. The squatting minigame does the same.
  • The Bahamut Fury summon ranks right up there as one of the most outlandish animations in the series. Bahamut flies through space, fires his wing-spikes at the moon, destroying the moon and turning it into a conduit for a giant laser beam that blasts down through the atmosphere.
• Wicked Cultured: Genesis, though really, it's more like Wicked Pretentious.
• Wife Husbandry: A very minor example of this trope plays when Zack talks to a small girl in the Sector 8 slums. She mentions a kind, rich uncle whom smiled in agreement when the girl said that she wants to marry him. This goes straight into Squick territory when you realise that said Uncle is Don Corneo, the pervert mob boss in the original game.