Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII - hands-on

What we can figure out, though, is that the main antagonist is actually Genesis, another Jenova-infected "first-class" SOLDIER member with red hair and red coat. To make matters even more confusing, Genesis seems to have the ability to copy himself and send those copies into battle. In fact, in the demo, we were able to fight and easily defeat one of those copies.

So: to the playable demo. There are two demos, in fact: both contain exploration and battle, and gave us a good chance to explore the game and learn about how it works. The game has an over-the-shoulder camera, which rotates freely using the L and R buttons on the PSP. The levels are very detailed and evoke the world of FFVII as seen in the other recent compilations of Final Fantasy VII projects (Dirge of Cerberus, Advent Children ). The first demo we played has Seph and Zack in Shinra HQ when Angeal intrudes. Seph is instructed to search for and assassinate him, so he and Zack split up and you can explore from that point. There are machines and soldiers invading the building and you can fight them.

The battle system is a mix of action and non-action elements; it's a bit unusual. Though Zack's movement is free and responsive - you can run with the analog stick or D-pad, and roll out of the way by hitting the Square button, it's still got turn-based elements. At the bottom of the screen there's a menu which contains your different attacks and skills - such as a regular attack, magic such as Thunder, or Cure spells. You switch between actions by hitting the L and R button (no camera control during battle.) Whatever action you have highlighted is performed by hitting the X button. If you hit the several times in a row, the actions don't come out immediately - meaning, if you hit X again while Zack is in an attack animation, he will attack automatically again when he completes the animation, rather than ignoring the command. You can queue up multiple actions this way. It sounds stilted but it's a heck of a lot better than a boring simple combo-string attack would be, we feel, and may add some strategy to the final title.

Your attacks and spells can be interrupted by enemy actions - so you have to be careful to avoid attacks. In fact, at one point an enemy cast an ice spell on us which we were able to physically dodge by running out from under the falling block of ice. You can also slash multiple enemies at once; Thunder will also arc from one enemy to another if they're close. As you'd expect, elemental weaknesses are in effect: machines are very weak to Thunder spells. And if you get behind an enemy, you get an increased chance of critical damage. As we explored Midgar, in a moment reminiscent of Dirge of Cerberus, we were able to rescue trapped townspeople from marauding enemy mechs. Most encounters with enemies seem to be random, actually, and they will simply appear (and Battle Mode is engaged.) When we rescued the townspeople, they gave us gear as a reward. Nice.

While we couldn't really tell if the equipment affects what Materia you can equip - you have two accessory slots and that's it, it seems - you definitely can equip Materia to gain powers, just like in the original game. These Materia (you remember, those colored orbs) contain either spells, abilities, or stat upgrades. In CCFFVII, green orbs contain magic (such as Cure or Fira), yellow contain abilities (like Steal or Jump) and blue contain power upgrades like HP Up.

The second demo featured battles on the highway around Midgar, which featured heavily in both FFVII (Cloud's motorcycle escape) and Advent Children (the motorcycle battle scene.) This time, Zack's on foot and fighting - as many as seven enemies at once. One function of the battle is the slot machine style gauge in the top left; periodically it becomes available, and if you stop it and match up the faces, you get a special attack: Tseng of the Turks called down an airstrike when we matched him up. But it was too tough to figure out the variables of this battle ability and why it even showed up sometimes... so we won't try. If you completely fail your slot machine, you don't get any effect; a partial success seems to give a stat boost but no special attack.

What else? There's not much! We're very impressed with just how good it looks and how well it plays - and we're really excited to dive into a story that seems to have much, much more to do with the core story of FFVII than any of the other spinoffs. This is the one that seems to matter, and the unfinished game (due to release in Japan in August) looks very polished from what we've seen so far. Of course, it's also likely that the demo (which was ridiculously easy, for example) doesn't reflect the final game in some ways. But we're very optimistic that the PSP is getting the smash hit it needs from this game, and Dirge of Cerberus syndrome is being avoided.