Better Prequel than Crisis Core.

Mark Hamill

After thinking a while on the story of Crisis Core and what direction they went with it, I've come to the conclusion that the prequel they made was the wrong one. Given that Crisis Core is set pretty much right before FF&, and given that it had to stick pretty close to the whole storyline of FF& too, I don't think that even with a good writing team they could come up with a spectacularly good story. Most of Crisis Core is either alluded to in FF7 (and therefore pretty well known) or alluded to Advent Children or Dirge of Cerberus (and therefore had no business being there, cause they where crap story additions).

I think a far more interesting prequel would have been one set in the time of the Ancients, when Jenova first came to the planet. There's potential for some great scenes here I think: Jenovas arrival and discovery of her intention; initial attempts to deal with her; the decision of the Ancients to sacrifice themselves to create the dark and holy materias to destroy her (maybe the hero of the game is against this? maybe the idea was put forward by someone under Jenovas control? it could be very emotional); the failure of this and Jenovas subsequent freezing in the Northern cave (maybe the hero realises Jenova wants meteor to be used so she can absorb the lifestream?). Unfortunately this would require writing skill and imagination so I doubt the current team at Square-Enix could pull it off.

Any thoughts on this?

Retr0gamer

I think they should just leave it the hell alone. Leaving what happened before FF7 ambiguous only adds to the games story and it was pretty much self contained to begin with.

There's no lies in saying that the story of Crisis Core was utter drivel and added nothing to the games universe. You're proposed prequel would be a hell of a lot more interesting and would only add to the universe rather than confuse matters by changing details and trying to tie two pathetic sequels to the main storyline. There's a lot of room there for dramatic story telling and we know that the whole thing will end in tragedy, although this is the same as in crisis core but was never exploited.

However I still think it would be best that it never came out. It's very like my own feelings about the Panzer Dragoon games. I thought I'd love a prequel game to describe how all the strange organisms and remnants of the old civilisation came about and to explain just what caused the near annihilation of the human race. Thinking about it more I realised this would just spoil the storyline of the series. Most of the magic of that game was piecing together the fragments of information about what went on there and create your own theories. You would completely lose this if it was spelled out in a prequel.

Square Enix isn't totally devoid of talent and good writing teams just yet. Front Mission 5 which will never see a western release supposedly had a very emotional storyline about two childhood friends ending up fighting on different sides of a war. Also the team behind FFXII are very talented. FFXII had a dreadful storyline but this was mainly due to just how much of a mess the game was and the troubled development, you can see flashes of brilliance every now and again spoiled by unexplained plot jumps and the fact that the whole thing is a series of dul fetchquests. Just remember this is the same team behind Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story, two excellent examples of storytelling in videogames.

If they want to honour the FFVII legacy, remake it and don't touch a thing other than giving us the translation it deserves. But by god if Square Enix decide to rape FFVI I won't be happy. I'm still traumatised over what they did to FFX with FFX-2.