Crisis Core absolutely shouldn’t have worked. By the time it finally released, the rest of the Compilation of Final Fantasy 7 anniversary series had already done everything it could to trample all over the memory of the original game to the extent that you couldn’t help but wonder if you ever really loved it at all.
Dirge of Cerberus was a poor-man’s Gungrave starring the most boring FF7 party member. Advent Children was a garish, incoherent epilogue that softened the original game’s ending and helped push the world further into the more generic anime aesthetic it finds itself in today. After all of that, the proposition of a prequel was downright threatening. A sequel you can ignore, a prequel presents real risk of irreversibly damaging the source material.
On paper, it sounds absolutely abhorrent. A soundtrack of industrial metal remixes? A bizarre slot machine subsystem? A Sephiroth origin story? Confidence in Square Enix’s ability to deliver a Final Fantasy game with real-time combat after Dirge of Cerberus was nonexistent. Admittedly, there were those at the time who strongly felt that it all didn’t work – that it was just another tasteless and superfluous cash-in that needlessly complicated an already bloated saga. Not content with merely fleshing out Zack and Sephiroth’s history, Crisis Core introduces a litany of new characters and secret projects and clone armies and weaves them into the already labyrinthine tapestry of organisations and mad scientists that drove FF7’s story.
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