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If you got into the original game through Crisis Core...

Roundhouse

Pro Adventurer
I'm really curious when I hear about people who got into FFVII through Crisis Core. Starting the story off that way must feel really strange -- it reminds me of starting Star Wars through the prequels. If you got into FFVII that way, could you tell us a bit about what that felt like, and if it changed how you view FFVII (both the original and the remake) compared to other fans?
 

Obsidian Fire

Ahk Morn!
AKA
The Engineer
Thinking about it... what gets recontextualized the most is Sephrioth's role and overall character arc. Taking just the OG into account... Sephiroth is ultimately a very static force... he's... barely even a character at times. He's just this thing messing with the world and one character in particular. He's got a ton of style while doing it, but the OG hardly builds up who Sephrioth was before he went crazy... I don't want to say you could ignore what happens to him at Nibelehim... but you almost could and Sephrioth as he is in the OG wouldn't be any different. This leads to a kind of game with dynamic protagonists and a very static antagonist. Which was... pretty par for the course in the 90's.

Going into FFVII from Crisis Core to the OG... I don't want to say the OG feels like an epilogue... but it kind of does. At least when it comes to Sephrioth. Crisis Core... essentially gives the player four different characters who all find out they got screwed over by Shinra in very similar ways and all four of them react differently. It's just that three of them manage to get their reaction arc completed faster than the fourth does. And those three former characters ultimately don't really want to destroy everything while the fourth actually does. The OG is ultimately about how the fourth character tries to destroy the world because of how they reacted to finding out their origins and how they are stopped.

Crisis Core is a bit of a narrative hinge in the entire Compilation. It really sets up that the intersection of Jenova with... the native life of the Planet leads to some very weird and unnatural biological problems. And how that came about was also really wrong and screwy too, so that's not helping either! Just about everyone who gets personally involved in that union gets put through the wringer physically and mentally. Not surprisingly, most of them don't react well to all of this... but most of them aren't a danger to the life on the Planet at large either.

The OG is... pretty much tying up the narrative loose ends of Crisis Core. Angeal and Genesis's arcs both ended in them making peace with what they are in ways that aren't going to end with the Planet getting destroyed. Zack is well... Zack. The people we don't know about are Sephiroth and Cloud and that is who the OG is about.

Remake... makes this a bit more interesting... As now Zack isn't dead as of the time of the OG (and Genesis was never dead at this time to begin with). There's now the potential for all the surviving main characters of Crisis Core to interact with each other again and see the fallout of how they reacted to finding out about Jenova. Which... would make Remake feel even more like an Epilogue to Crisis Core than the OG did.

Sephrioth ultimately is a more dynamic character with CC because we get a much better idea of who he was before he snapped at Nibelehim. We see him being close to people and how when those people leave him behind, it hurts him... and how right as he and Zack are forming a friendship... he finds out something that confirms everything he almost seems like he was trying to ignore about himself. And it's... sad to see the side of Sephrioth that actually cared about people be thrown out. While OG Sephrioth admits he knows exactly what Jenova is while he's trying to destroy the world, CC Sephrioth didn't know that yet when he goes crazy. You can see the tiniest sliver of hope in CC that Sephrioth might snap out of it because he used to care about people, but he never does... and when you put that together with what Sephrioth says in the OG, you realize that not even knowing the truth about his origins would curtail his drive.
 
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