The sequel to Final Fantasy 7 Remake, which we now know is called Final Fantasy 7 RebirthStill at least a year to go. That long-awaited game is coming to PlayStation 5 next winter. What are Final Fantasy fans going to do until then? Catch up with Zack Fair on Crisis Core Final Fantasy 7 Reunion.
Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7 was a 2007 hit on the PSP, and after years of clamor from fans, it’s being remade on modern consoles as Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7 Reunion. It’s more than just a chance to play a 15-year-old classic, as Final Fantasy producer Yoshinori Kitase said, it’s also part of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake Project. In other words, the Crisis Core story is essential to the next two Remake games.
Here’s what you need to know about the upcoming game.
What is the Crisis Core Final Fantasy 7 Reunion release date?
Crisis Core Final Fantasy 7 Reunion dating december 13Square Enix revealed Tuesday, on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and Windows.
Is it a direct remake?
yes Final Fantasy 7 Remake, false to his name, ended in a way that deviates from the original PlayStation title. In fact, the main point of the FF7R ending was to indicate that what happens in the next two games will be different from what happened in the OG version. However, speaking to GameSpot, the developers at Crisis Core confirmed that no story elements of the PSP game would be changed.
“The Crisis Core Reunion story will actually be a very faithful retelling of the original story, so there is no additional story content,” said Mariko Sato, one of the game’s producers.
But the development team is doing more than give Crisis Core a polish: all dialogue will be voice-acted, and there will be adjustments to gameplay and combat, probably a good thing considering the game’s age.
Why is a new version of Crisis Core so important?
There are three reasons why you should care about Crisis Core Final Fantasy 7 Reunion. The first is the simplest: it’s an amazing game, especially if you’re a fan of FF7. It’s a long RPG that takes players through the towns, cities, and regions they first experienced when Cloud was just a bunch of purple and yellow polygons. It gives depth to the characters that were on the fringes of Final Fantasy 7 and shows a world before a certain soldier became a maniacal planet killer.
Second, Square Enix has been unusually coy about bringing the game to new consoles. Although the company has ported PS2-era games like Final Fantasy X and Kingdom Hearts to every console imaginable, Crisis Core has yet to receive any sort of remaster treatment. That’s unusual, because it’s not that it wasn’t popular: over 2 million copies of the game were sold. However, until Reunion, you had to have a PSP handy to play Crisis Core.
Finally, Zack’s story seems to be crucial for the upcoming Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth.
Zack tries unsuccessfully to play it cool.
Square Enix
Why do we need to know about Zack Fair?
This section contains spoilers for Final Fantasy 7, Remake, and Crisis Core.
In 1997’s Final Fantasy 7, Zack Fair was only seen in flashbacks. Anyone who has played that game knows that Zack was a mentor to Cloud and saved his life, but that he was shot and killed by the Shinra militia prior to the events of Final Fantasy 7. This is part of why 2007’s Crisis Core is so memorable. It made you care more about Zack and his relationships with other characters, which made his inevitable fate even more devastating.
But at the end of Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Cloud and the gang defeated the “arbitrs of fate”. you can read a full explanation on what that means here — but the short story is that the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy takes place in another dimension, and the enigmatic creatures “arbiters of destiny” were responsible for making all the events unfold in this dimension as they did in the original 1997. However, with them killed, there is nothing to keep the chronology intact. Aerith’s death, Cloud’s amnesia, Sephiroth’s final defeat: none of this is guaranteed.
Perhaps most importantly, that also leaves the fate of one Zack Fair unknown. At the end of Final Fantasy 7 Remake, we see Zack recover from the Shinra militia attack that had ended his story in other dimensions. In the ending of Final Fantasy 7 Intergrade, a DLC pack featuring Yuffie, Zack breaks into the Sector 7 Church to find Aerith, a past love, only to find that she is gone. So we know Zack is alive, though it’s unclear what dimension he’s in.