RECRISIS REVIEW (69/100)
Lesson Learned: I Am Much More Likely To Play A Game Without 'Cosplay' In Its Title

Cosplay Crisis is a game by SorceressKrysty Puddor that I never had any interest in playing or even closely looking at the gamepage of. I had no interest in a game that was about or had anything to do with cosplay, and at a glance the game looked like a super-derivative "stuff a teenage girl thinks is cool" fangame and had such emphasis on stylized depictions of "hot boyz" that I was afraid it might contain or elude to yaoi/slash, a major personal yuck factor for me (note this is not exactly homophobia; when Clive Barker, a gay man, writes gay characters it doesn't bother me, but when a straight woman like Mercedes Lackey exploits gay characters in her stuff, it is super squicky to me for some reason). /tangent

Keep in mind that all of the above impressions were formed without ever looking directly at anything Cosplay Crisis related for more than maybe 30 seconds (oh yeah, and it was made in XP, and I'm biased against XP, so there was that too).

ReCrisis is apparently a "non-fangame remake" of Cosplay Crisis and also "effectively the official prequel" to something called ReVolution which I know nothing about. ReCrisis was released by Puddor SorceressKrysty as part of the Halloween 2014 Revive The Dead event, so I figured I'd try it and see what I thought. Was it really a remake of Cosplay Crisis? But this game didn't seem to be about cosplay at all. Did Cosplay Crisis have nothing to do with cosplay at all, either, this whole time? Well then why did it have cosplay in its freaking NAME?

Story

Full Disclosure: From the age of 12 through the age of 16 I pretty much thought that Final Fantasy VII was the greatest damn thing ever. The reason that I had such a huge "crush" on FFVII was almost certainly because its stylized combination of cyberpunk and magic strongly reminded me of Shadowrun, my primary fandom for my entire life, a franchise which I would later go on to actually write for, a lifelong dream.

Anyway, not FFVIII, FFIX, nor even FFVI really did it for my imagination the way that FFVII did. And to this date, FFVII is the only Final Fantasy game I have ever beaten. Ever. Even by the age of 18 (wow, was 2004 really ten years ago now?) I was still actually saying things online like that "Final Fantasy VII is the greatest story ever told in any medium", a statement I now recognize as ridiculous, but I could still probably come to the defense of a toned down version of this statement.

So yeah, I really really like Final Fantasy VII. And it turns out that ReCrisis contains everything I thought was cool when I was a teenager. Most of those things, actually, I still think are cool now.

Everything about this game, including the story, gave me major Final Fantasy VII vibes and kicked the teenage nostalgia centers in my brain into overdrive. The story immediately reminded me of FFVII without being openly derivative of FFVII. I didn't realize it until I just now read on the Cosplay Crisis page that "THIS IS A FINAL FANTASY FAN GAME WITH ELEMENTS OF RESIDENT EVIL", but the other thing it was reminding me of was Resident Evil.

What I thought was cool was that the writing and worldbuilding here actually seemed to IMPROVE on some elements of the Final Fantasy VII lore/setting: for instance, using healing items called Cytostimulants, Neurostimulant, and Adrenaline seems much less conspicuously hand-wavy about the futuristic world's magical elements than having the healing items be called Potions, Ethers, and Phoenix Downs.

You play as Kumo and Levi, two teenage mercenary prodigies (both experienced mercs by the insanely tender age of 19) who are taking a contract from a mysterious client through their "fixer" to investigate a biotech facility abandoned by a shady megacorp called Omniax Industries. (Wow, that plot synopsis itself is awesomely Shadowrun-y.)

Omniax is one of those names that seems like it literally came from an "Evil Megacorporation Name Generator", and maybe it did, but it's still perfectly appropriate here. Anyway, they're being sent by train--the game opens exactly the same as my old 2005-2006 game Eldritch, weirdly enough, with the two protagonists on the train with one looking out the window and the other seated as the train rocks loudly back and forth--to meet their contact and find out why the facility was abandoned.

There's not much to the story--it's only a teaser--but what there is left me very much wanting to know what happened next. Kumo and Levi seemed to have quite a bit of personality, although personally I was always forgetting which name went with which guy. The writing, while not stellar by any means, included some very good moments and some instances of genuinely good and clever dialogue--which is sadly, more than I can say for the multi-billion dollar blockbuster Destiny. The writing in ReCrisis is better than the writing in Destiny. Seriously. I'm not sure if that says something depressing about the AAA game industry, something uplifting about amateur game development, or both.

SCORE: 75/100

Gameplay

The gameplay, likes the story, reminded me a lot of Final Fantasy VII.

This area could really use some work.

First off, there shouldn't be any battles before the PCs enter the facility proper and meet up with their contact. Those random encounters hamper the story and pacing, because it's totally unclear, unexplained, and uncommented upon what the things are the party is fighting, or why. When the party seems surprised to find rogue bioweapons later inside the facility, that felt weak to me, because they had nothing to say about the rogue robots they were fighting on their way to the facility's front door.

Now let's discuss the battles themselves. First off, PLEASE add a 'Wait' option so that players can have the time to think about what option to select in combat rather than just getting pummeled in real time. If you aren't very quick at navigating the menu in ReCrisis, you will get hit by enemies again and again as you try and explore your options and decide what to do, which is especially annoying early on when you're just first learning what your skills do. Speed of entering a command--any command--was more important than tactics or strategy in combat, and that was pretty lame. Tactics and strategy are what I want from RPG battles, not speedrunnning a menu to spam whatever commands I can before I waste my turn.

Besides the fake difficulty of this, most enemies were too easy, except the horrible sasquatch things you could avoid by sneaking, which were much too hard, and the security mech boss, which was just around the right difficulty for a first boss.

There are some balance points for specific skills. The character with the SMG (I want to say Kumo?) had an attack command that was three times as effective as Levi's, because it attacked three times for about the same damage. The guy with the pistol (I want to say Levi?) should do more damage per shot. Kumo's spell damage was very underwhelming compared to his attacks. Critical Drive would be a better balanced skill if Criticals had a higher damage multiplier such as x4 or greater or if it lasted more than one turn. As of right now, it's kind of a trap option that does almost nothing.

My main issue was with the limits. You know how in Final Fantasy VII when you hit your Limit Break, it's EXTREMELY OBVIOUS that you have a Limit to blast out, because it replaces your attack? Well here your Limit ability is kind of "hidden" under Attack, Skill and Magic. Additionally, there's no 'Limit Break' sound when a character's Limit bar is filled. More importantly, in Final Fantasy VII limits are awesome because they do really flashy and impressive amounts of damage. In comparison, Limits in this were really underwhelming piffles. Blowing off BOTH characters Limit Breaks was not enough to defeat a single Sasquatch-thing enemy which I thought was super lame.

Outside of battles, I have the quibble that...why is 'Cellphone' the necessary or appropriate option for merely switching the order your dudes are walking in? Are they calling each other from two feet away to say 'you walk in front, no you'? : P

Anyway, so this section isn't all negative, I'd like to say that the battles gave a real Final Fantasy VII vibe that I dug on, and that I really liked the way the game played around with on touch encounters, and used lighting as something important to gameplay, not just aesthetics.

SCORE: 55/100

Visuals

Menu graphics and so on gave me a real Final Fantasy VII vibe, like the story and gameplay, that I enjoyed.

The graphics in this game are great. I really liked the mapping, really good use of the VX Ace Future Tilesets to create a cramped and dark underground facility, splattered with blood and hastily erected makeshift barricades. Lighting was also very well used, with a really neat 'Torch' effect that added a lot of atmosphere. On my monitor, though, at least, the screen was a little too dark most of the time, especially during battles where I could barely make out the enemy graphics. Adding a brightness adjust feature, if possible, would be really good. I thought the enemy graphics were cool, by the way.

One thing I was disappointed with were the battle animations, which like in the other game I reviewed today, seemed to be pretty much completely unchanged from the RPG Maker VX Ace Defaults. I could be wrong, though, and again, the screen was pretty dark.

SCORE: 80/100

Audio

The music and sound effects were cool and well used, and like the story, gameplay, and graphics, they gave me a definite Final Fantasy VII vibe, which I liked. Have I mentioned lately that FFVII is one of my favorite RPGs of all time, and that when I was a teenager, I'd have omitted the "one of" part?

SCORE: 80/100

FINAL SCORE: 69/100 (Not An Average)
BOTTOM LINE
ReCrisis Episode Zero is well written and pretty, and everything about it gave me a pleasant Final Fantasy VII nosalgia buzz. There wasn't much here and what little there was left me wanting more. I could tell even from this short demo that the battle balance could definitely use some work, though. And if you were wondering, this incarnation of the game at least seems to have nothing to do with cosplay at all.