I picked up Crisis Core the other day after reading the review over on Evil Avatar. My PSP up until just the other day was in some kind of weird stasis as I had left it plugged in and on the “sleep” screen once I got Days of Ruin. Up to that point I was playing Disgaea “Afternoon of Darkness”, I’d played the PS2 version back when I had a PS2 and I enjoyed it but I liked advance wars more so enter the aformentioned stasis. So yeah I read the review and I was interested mainly because I really enjoyed FFVII and since I have no means to go back and play it again this is going to have to be good for now.

I’m about 6 or so hours into the game and I’m really enjoying it. It looks really good and the control is pretty tight. Thus far on the PSP my favorite game had been Daxter, a super good game, real good control, fun game play. So every other game I’d tried that wasn’t a direct port of some other game I liked has been measured up to that. A few games have been pretty good but I think Crisis Core has met that bar (to this point). The combat system is interesting. Its not the turn based huge group combat from FFVII, this one is kind of like real time but with a hint of random encounters. You’re running around and the combat encounter will start, no spinny flashy woosh screen as you go into combat, just a simple thin bar across the screen that says (effectively) “Combat is going to start”. Then you run around and hacky slashy the bad guys. Combat is pretty simple, X attacks, Square Dodges, Triangle Blocks, Circle cancels. At the bottom right hand of hte screen is this list of Materia and other things (Attack, Items, etc..). Lets say you want to cast fire, well you just use the right shoulder button to scroll over to fire, then hit X. Fire is cast. You want to go back to hacky slashy, you use the other shoulder button to move back to your weapon and you use X to attack. There is this whole…slot machine thing that is constantly going on that I don’t quite understand yet…but its there and that’s how you level and do other things. It seems more that the game decides when do to other things. I think there was one time that I leveled 2 times in one fight. I’ve read a few things about what people thinks is going on and I’m not entirely sure anyone knows. But that I don’t care so much about, I mean I’m enjoying the game so, random crap or not, its fun. Oh yeah, and there is Materia. It levels just like the Materia in FFVII but in this one you can fuse materia together to make different kinds of materia…I just unlocked that feature so I’m not completely sure how it all works. Looks like its time to head over to Game Faqs.

Its really neat playing as Zack as I liked his character but he was always a bit part. If you read the other review from EvAv you’ll see they mention Sephiroth is in it and he’s not a power hungry crazy guy (yet). That’s neat too. I’ll get back to you about if I still like the game and I’ll fill in a few more spots that I didn’t touch on here in a bit. It’ll more than likely be what keeps me going on the flight to China.