Crisis Core Reunion: An endearing experience of camp (Gaming)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Sunday, January 22, 2023, 09:28 (454 days ago)

Both Final Fantasy 7 and its remake aren't games that take themselves 100% seriously all the time. They know when to be goofy and embrace it, but at the end of the day they are earnest and serious in the themes and presentation.

Crisis Core Reunion though… it's a game of constant unintentional hilarity. Mostly, this comes from the transition from a handheld game to a full console update. The PSP that the original ran on was somewhere between the PS1 and PS2 in terms of power, and coupled with a small screen led to a certain design for the game, animations, and the visuals. Models were better than what was possible on the PS1, but still of objectively lower fidelity than PS2 games. The visual design took this into account, with exaggerated features and animations, almost similar to FF7 for the PS1 which had overly broad gestures to convey emotions. Not all of the dialogue was voice acted. Because it was handheld, it was meant to be played in short bursts.

When updated to Unreal Engine 4, and with the models from FF7 remake replacing the characters and environments, the result is something supremely campy. The higher fidelity models look hilarious performing the same exaggerated animations, and then look incredibly stiff and unnatural when idle during the autocutscenes or areas that lacked animation and relied on camera movement alone. Lines of dialogue never meant to be spoken out loud stand out as completely funny when done so. Zack excitedly saying "Yeah! I'm getting pumped!" during the squats minigame is perhaps the most funny example, but almost every other interaction has with it a stilted quality with awkward cadence. These are not motion captured actors performing naturally; these are people recording lines one at a time and the audio being timed and played in between janky animations.

The result is emotional moments that play out totally over the top. The faces cannot convey anything like in FF7 Remake, the the voices compensate. And it's hilarious. Try and keep a straight face when the villains talk about being monsters, or start quoting poetry from an in universe play.

The levels are the same, complete with their handheld style segmentation. It's a world that looks big but feels small; the abstraction of the PSP graphics now replaced with the rendering of the remake.

And yet… it feels endearing and honest. Play it through to the end, and it's clear the game has the same level of earnestness as the games it was spun off from.

This game end up being true camp. And I liked it.

Too bad the 'missions' system sucks ass.