Materia and the DMW

Yes, FINAL FANTASY VII’s Materia will return, letting you customize Zack however you want him. For those of you new to the Final Fantasy franchise; Materia are magical orbs that are placed in special slots on weapons and armor, with which you can modify your character’s access to magic spells, summons, and special abilities. Like in the original, different Materia grant you different abilities to use in battle; magic and commands like Steal and Sense can only be used when their Materia is equipped. A new feature allows you to fuse two or more Materia together to make a single, greater offspring but you’ll have to limit your uses; Materia fusion consumes SP.

Your SP also comes into play in the game’s new battle system, which mixes traditional menu-based combat with real-time dodging and attacking reminiscent of Kingdom Hearts or Tales of the Abyss. The difference here is the new system - called the Digital Mind Wave, or DMW. It integrates a sort of slot machine that you can spin for a small SP cost. When either numbers or character portraits match up, good things happen that could change the tide of battle completely. Two or three matching numbers will level up Materia assigned to that slot, and triple lucky seven’s nets an instant level-up. When character portraits match, a Power Surge is activated. The equivalents of Limit Breaks from FINAL FANTASY VII, Power Surges are super-flashy CG attacks that deal massive damage to all the foes you are fighting. These new mechanics will change players’ strategies considerably; whether you want to blow your SP gambling on the DMW or ‘invest’ it in more powerful Materia is entirely up to you.

Technical showpiece

Crisis Core also showcases the PSP’s technical abilities quite well, with extraordinary character and enemy designs and fluid animations. Staying true to its roots, the game’s visual style manages to seamlessly combine massive industrial structures with the lush forests and mountains that are present in pretty much every FINAL FANTASY game. Even better than the environments and characters, though, are the absolutely stellar CGI cut scenes. The visual quality here is easily on par with Advent Children and allows for some breathtaking sequences. The game’s OST is equally good, with Takeharu Ishimoto carrying on the work of Uematsu, who composed for the original game. A full cast of voice actors, all who seem to fit their respective character, round off the game’s impressive audio/visual presentation.

A worthy successor?

If you, like me, were a fan of FINAL FANTASY VII and want to see the continuation of its mythos, look in to Crisis Core. In classic Square Enix fashion, we don’t know much about the game and it’s likely to stay that way until we get our hands on the final version. Even so, what we know is promising, and everything is pointing to this game being one of the PSP’s best, and the first FINAL FANTASY VII spin-off that can stand toe-to-toe with the original. We'll find out if that's true or not next week, when the game hits store shelves.