ow much do you love Final Fantasy VII? If your answer is anything more enthusiastic than “It’s okay,” then you absolutely need to play Crisis Core. Even more so than Dirge of Cerberus, this addition to the Final Fantasy VII universe expands the fiction and has a significant impact on how you view the events of the original game.

The price you pay for this illumination is about 12 hours of your life spent mashing one button on your PSP. As far as I’m concerned, it was worth it. Throughout the course of the story, SOLDIER 1st class Zack develops from a bit player into a full-fledged character, and you see the prominent role he played in setting the stage before FF VII began. The plot also gives off a unique vibe that only prequels can provide; like the recent Star Wars movies, there is a constant sense of tragedy looming over the protagonist because we know his eventual fate. Unfortunately, the path you travel to guide Zack to that fate isn’t exactly full of excitement.

Crisis Core is intriguing from a story perspective, but the mechanics of playing the game are far less engaging. You tromp through various maps, encounter enemies at every node, and slash through them using one-button combos. Magic and other special attacks are accessed by cycling through materia, but you’ll usually do just fine with only your sword. There are dozens of side-missions to undertake, but they’re all essentially the same task – wander a map, kill a specific monster – over and over. You don’t even get experience from this grinding; all of the game’s progression, from character level to materia strength, is done through random slot wheels. This arbitrary system also governs when you execute a limit break or a summon, though the specific move you perform is also random. This essentially robs the combat of any strategy, but it keeps you barreling headfirst through the action. The sooner you cut down the bad guys, the sooner you get to the next cool plot point.

An interesting side effect of playing Crisis Core is a twinge of disappointment at the fact that those FF VII remake rumors haven’t amounted to anything. Seeing how Crisis Core breathes new life into the captivating characters and locations from the classic RPG proves that it could be done phenomenally. Sadly, spin-offs that expand the FFVII mythology will have to suffice, but I sure wish they were more fun to play.