Meh.
While I agree that the fighting scene atop the canon is gratuitously over-the-top, one could argue that it's all set in a VR environment, so one could claim it has the same amount of plausibility as some scenes of the OG..
My problem with this are two-fold :
A.) the entire VR thing in CC is much like the ridiculous technological gap between the prequel Star Wars films and the original.
That VR thing does not belong in the FFVII universe.
B.) It's entirely consistent with the non-VR fight-scenes you see in the game and other compilation titles like AC.
As for CC ending, I don't believe that replicating the OG scene to make the conclusion of the story where Zack is the main protagonist would have worked; it would have been at least underwhelming or anti-climatic..
To which my reply would be - Maybe that's something they should have considered before making that game to begin with.
Nobody forced them to ret-con the original game, or write a story that would demand such a thing.
If we accept that Cloud is standing in for Zack in the Nibelheim flash-back, then Zack should have been relatively weak - weaker in fact than Cloud by the beginning of the original.
With that being the case, they should have just written the entire story to fit around that, and designed the game-play around that again.
Not doing this make CC an perfect example of the "DBZ problem" which riddles most Japanese shonen media -
I.E the more you overpower your heroes, the more ridiculous you need to make their challenges in order to create tension, but once you've powered up your heroes to a certain point you start writing yourself into plot-hole corners because the ordinary scenarios usually associated with story-telling revolving around overcoming physical obstacles become obsolete due to the ridiculous nature of your cast.
That's why I loath this kind of fighting in fiction. People who can practically fly and cut concrete in half are not supposed to get killed by generic soldiers, thrown into prison, or cornered in elevators period.
Yet, that's what happens, because unless you plan on making ever enemy in the hero's way a super-villain in their own right, that's what normal story-telling looks like.
If they'd just kept Zack in tune with the original game, then he'd still be, by that standard much stronger than any ordinary squad of Soldiers (with HP around 150 or whatever and a base attack enough to take out a grunt with one or two strikes), and it would still be reasonable that he'd be killed by two Soldiers or so if he was in a weakened state.
Put him into the power-hierarchy of the compilation however, with the rest of the Z fighters of that universe, and suddenly you need a 1000 grunts to take him out for it to make a semblance of sense.
Of course it would be anti-climatic to have him shot down by 2 at that point, but as Octo pointed out - that's because you've made the mistake of over-powering him to begin with, despite the fact that it's painfully inconsistent with the lore the game is supposed to be based on to begin with.
If you ask me, that's a bigger failure.
IMO at then end of CC, Zack deserved to end with a bang, not being shot by 2 random grunts in an unremarkable ditch.
"Deserved" based on what? He's not a real person.
Whatever he deserves is determined by what role he serves in the story. His original death, like a lot of the deaths in FFVII, is short and brutal. I would say that serves a much more important, significant, and indeed realistic point than an overly dramatic "Soldier's death".
After all, Zack was a person who dedicated his life to working for the Shinra, which by all accounts, thematically represents something quite horrible - a private military complex that terrorizes people for the greedy ends of its share-holders.
I'd argue that Zack's death in the original is karma - an example of the fates of people who get entangled with Shinra.
And what other scenes would be anime-action-wank-fests in CC, which would be deemed "kewl"? I don't know. You say the vast majority of the game reeks of it, but where? Or is it automatically "kewl" as soon as there's Genesis on screen?
And as I said - Do you really expect me to run you through every scene I consider cringeworthy in that game?
I've provided you several examples to give you an idea of what I consider styles that fall under that term.
If you still don't get it, that might be a short-coming on my part, but I'm getting a feeling it might also be because you haven't actually bothered to look at what sort of aesthetical choices and trends of cinematography and writing run through those scenes, and whether they are representative of the rest of the game, because you don't agree with the underlying argument to begin with, because you personally don't have a problem with any of the scenes I've already mentioned?
If the latter is the case, this is wasted argument. It's a matter of taste ultimately. I just don't like overly polished, and overly dramatic "cool" things.
To make an example -
Let's say we all agree that people doing back-flips is cool.
Now, in this world there are people who'll make that observation and go "Okay, if back-flips are cool, then if I'm gonna make a cool movie, I better have people doing back-flips all the time! Better yet, triple back-flips!"
And that's when, to my mind, it stops being cool, and starts being kewl.
Crisis core, everything from it's cinematography and writing, to me seems like it was done by people who looked to what was considered cool at the time in popular media, and thought that if they just did a lot more like that, then that would make the game cool too.
You also mention that OGs scene stand in stark contrast to CC scenes, namely on the matter that the OG had camp humor and wasn't taking itself too seriously at times, and I'd argue that you get the same vibe of humor from CC as well (with Yuffie's side missions, the "fun in the sun" missions, or even the Tonberry DMW, to name a few).
So... I do maintain that saying that the OG is cool and CC is kewl is an unfair call.
Except that you're now changing my argument and moving the goal-post.
We were specifically talking about the action sequences at the point you refer to here. You can't cancel out the enormous stylistic differences in the OG story scenes featuring displays of strength or acrobatics, by pointing to silly side-quests.
I could just as well then raise you silly main-quests from the OG story-line, like dressing Cloud up as a woman, having Nanaki wear a sailor uniform, jumping on a dolphin.
CC has humor in it - it does not however have anywhere close to the same level of camp as the original so I still think that's a moot point.
The reason OG is "cool" and CC is not, is because the OG shows restraint most of the time when it comes to its serious elements, and when it doesn't, it just as often tempers it with camp as when it provides the pure drama.
CC does not do such a thing, and you know it.
You really want to make the argument that stylistically speaking the OG and CC has more in common than not?
Or that the balance between over-the-top "kewl" stuff in CC is anywhere remotely close to that of the OG?
