Seeing this dinky little PSP game get injected with these extremely high fidelity assets only to have the same exact stiff animations is lighting up the Yakuza-center of my brain like Kamurocho on a Friday night. That is to say this is a very Yakuza-esque remaster, which makes sense given the Yakuza-ness of the Final Fantasy VII Remake. I think this approach to a remaster/remake is great though, just polish up the textures and throw in a better combat system and call it a day.

Crisis Core looks pretty damn good now during the segments that feel like they have any sort of identity at all. There's still large chunks of game that take place in gray hallways or barren wastelands, but in the brief moments where you're in Banora or Gongaga I was taken aback by some of the beautiful scenery. The other noteworthy change is the combat, which I'm gonna say has gone from "one of the worst action RPG combat systems ever devised," as I said in my review of the original game, to pretty decent. It obviously feels much less stiff than the original, and you have way more options available at all times, but at its core I still hate the DMW system and no matter how much you improve the things around it, that system still persists.

Replaying this really did make me realize that Zack is one of my favorite FF protagonists, and that Genesis is one of my least favorite antagonists in anything. Zack is just such a loveable idealistic goofball, while Genesis is a cardboard cutout posting song lyrics on your facebook feed in 𝔱𝔥𝔦𝔰 𝔣𝔬𝔫𝔱 motherfucker.