Completed - Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core (PSP)

This was the first weekend of the NFL Playoffs, and as a result I didn't want to play anything on my good TV (so no more progress on FF13). Instead, since I didn't specifically care about any of the teams on Wild Card Weekend (is that a proper noun at this point?), I half-ass paid attention to them while I played the last 5 hours or so of Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core-- my current play at work selection. I knew I was near the end, because it had gotten too hard to play at work without constantly pausing the game and forgetting what I was doing mid-boss fights, which were getting increasingly longer. I decided it would just be time to plow through the rest.

FF7:CC is an action game, not a traditional turn-based RPG. I play a lot of action games, so I was able to clear the last few bosses with little to no trouble. I imagine if all I played was RPGs and then tried this I might have found it hard, but instead I think this was one of the easiest games on the Backlog. That isn't to say it wasn't fun, I think that if you split the game into halves, there was a good half, and a kind-of-boring-yet-sometimes-interesting second half.

The good half was the main story and the levels surrounding it. These levels were fairly long, and other than a few painfully boring mini-games you had to complete (the sniper gun one was awful), I thought they moved along well. This part of the game told the story leading up to Final Fantasy 7, so I was impressed that while I knew how it would end in the big picture, I still cared about Zach and was still driven to play through the story just to see what would happen. It's also pretty great that you got to see more of how Sephiroth became the enemy in 7, and didn't make it too sappy and melodramatic (well... not too badly at least).

The "meh" half was the "optional" missions. There are 300 short missions that you can take at any save point in the game, and they will reward you with new items and materia. At first, I didn't mind these, but after doing over 100 of them, I decided that I couldn't bear to go through the same 5-6 maps over and over killing random dudes. Did that mean I ended the game without the best items and missing some of the random-summons that you can earn? Sure... but it wasn't worth it to me. Like I said, I had no problem on the last couple hours of the game, every boss was attack, dodge, attack, dodge. Other than fully powered Blizzaga (ice damage) spells and defensive spells, I pretty much beat this game with my sword and a bag of potions-- but I definitely had fun doing it.

COMPLETION STATS :

Hours to complete : 26 hours, 39 minutes
OCD Completeness Percent Achieved : 35% (of the "optional" missions)
Outside Help Used : A small check on Gamefaqs because I am blind.
Will I play this again? : I'm not sure, it's definitely interesting, but I don't know if I can make myself do 100% of the optional missions, which I would have to do to make this worth playing again.