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Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII gameplay journal update 4

By Heath | October 1, 2007 at 11:22 pm

One of the things about doing a game blog which is rather nice is having the opportunity to vent a frustration in a public forum. During tonight?s session, I came face-to-face with one of my least favorite RPG sequences: the hide-and-seek. Now, this isn?t a technical term by any means, like say a fetch quest would be, but I?m not sure how else to describe it. It?s a sequence of play where you have to run around an area almost aimlessly, talking to people until you trigger the right event, then run around some more and find someone else, rinsing and repeating for a good 20 minutes. It?s a fairly common occurrence in RPGs, this scene, but I ask you of the general public: do any of you have fun with it?

Crisis Core threw me into this ridiculous section tonight that had me almost searching online to find out if I was doing something wrong. Fortunately I got through it, but for awhile there I was seriously questioning my fortitude towards playing further tonight. I?m really not sure why RPG developers put these sections into games, since they seem like artificial playtime lengtheners, and as I was discussing in my last post, this game already has more than enough of those with the Missions. Sections like the hide-and-seek make the game less fun, they take you out of the story and bore you to tears.

Much to Crisis Core?s advantage, however, is that it followed up this scene with a fairly cool section. My entire playthrough up until the time of writing this tonight has been in areas of Midgar that were pretty big factors in Final Fantasy VII. I?ve been all around the slums and highways and now into Shinra headquarters (a different section from before). I?ve said before I?m not the biggest fan of VII, but seeing some of these areas rendered in nice 3D and with a little more pop and pizzaz to them actually has me wanting a remake. I?m generally against remakes, but Square has shown that they are quite capable of breathing some real new life into this world.

I encountered a few characters from VII that I was pretty certain were coming, and I have to say that we in North America are really missing out on something that the Japanese are very fortunate to have. Say all you want about the ridiculousness of Gackt doing the voice of Genesis in Japan, but at least Aeris won?t be voiced by Mena Suvari. No disrespect to Ms. Suvari, but I just don?t see that pairing fitting at all. So the Japanese have a, in my humble opinion, superior voice actor for Aeris; but what else do they have? They have Hojo. Nachi Nozawa?s voice job on Professor Hojo is almost worth the cost of importing the game. The actor playing Hojo is the same guy who provides the Japanese voice in Die Hard for Bruce Willis and C-3PO in Star Wars. Paul Eiding is doing Hojo?s voice in the English version, and he?s had a few notable roles as Zeus in God of War and Roy Campbell in Metal Gear Solid, but he doesn?t have the 1-2 punch of Willis and C-3PO on his resume. I mean, if someone had told me about this before I had played the game, I wouldn?t have believed that someone could play both of those roles. Now I really want to now how he managed it.

Level: 18
Playtime: 7:04:22
Materia: 32 (out of the 7 new Materia, 4 are Poison)
Mission Completion: 8%
Final Fantasy VII Characters Met: 7
Summon Monsters Fought: 3
D.M.W. (Slot Machine Faces): 6/18
Materia: Lv2 Firera, Lv3 Cure, Lv2 Attack Up, Lv4 HP Up, Lv3 Jump, Master Revolve Attack

-By Ryan Mance

Topics: Uncategorized