There's a lot going on in Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7 Reunion. We're introduced to a dizzying array of new characters alongside more than a few familiar faces. Newcomers receive and conclude entire arcs while returning icons of the RPG industry get an intriguing prequel. While not everyone's in love with the script itself, the notions behind it are pretty good.
Yet for all that's resolved within the game, Crisis Core also leaves room for several big mysteries. And, with the arrival of Final Fantasy 7 Remake, we've somehow acquired more than ever. Here are our picks for the most glaringly unfinished pieces of the puzzle.
Spoilers abound for not only Crisis Core, bu🧔t also Final Fantasy 7 Re♒make!
5 🅷 O Cissnei, Whܫere Art Thou?
Possibly the first thing to dawn on players after meeting her is the fact that Turk member Cissnei is nowhere to be found in the original Final Fantasy 7. From a logical point of view, this absolutely makes sense: Cissnei didn't exist as a character in the minds of the game's creators back in 1997. From an in-universe perspective༒, however, the complete lack of notabꦯle send-off is tougher to reckon with.
The most likely explanation is that, for one reasꦏon or another, Crisis Core (and Before Crisis) heroine Cissnei is simply assigned to a different team of Turks afterward. These games do emphasize the group is a bit larger than FF7 indicated, even if that, too, sort of clashes with initial canon. But why would Cissnei ditch Tseng, Reno, and Rude — is FF7-only Turk Elena a raw enough recruit to replace her, while Cissnei herself goes and leads another squad?
4 What's Up With Zack?
Back when Crisis Core Reunion was first announced, many fans felt convinced that the ending would shift in some sizable fashion to accommodate the endgame revelation in FF7 Remake that Zack Fair, or at least some aspect of him, in some universe's timeline, did not perish as he did in Final Fantasy 7 and (far more theatrically) in Crisis Core.
Nope. Nada. Not a thing. Nothing whatsoever has shifted for Crisis Core Reunion, which is an interesting decision on the developers' part. It demonstrates that for whatever occurs within Remake's burgeoning new continuity, we don't see its ripple effects cascade back to the Zack whose fate we see irrevocably altered for presently-unknown reasons. This is arguably more of a Remake-only mystery, but it is so intrinsically tied to Crisis Core's most memorable moments.
3 Destination: Dum🔯bapples
Okay. So. We know what you may be thinking here. "Banora isn't on Final Fantasy 7's world map because it's blown to smithereens, you silly heads." Sure, that's honestly a pretty good point. But the smoldering ruins of the place might rather stand out in the Mideel archipelago region where Banora is confirmed to have been. It becomes a crater, after all. Not the crater, you know the one, but a crater nonetheless.
Less excusable is Modeoheim, the largely-deserted town that is said to be slightly south of Icicle Inn. Cloud and the team, sans one recently-departed soul, head due north from the Forgotten City en route to Icicle Inn. It's only a few years after the point in the timeline that Modeoheim is introduced, so they ought to have bumped into the place along the way.
Yes, as with Cissnei before this, we're ignoring the logical elephant in the room that FF7 doesn't show this stuff purely because it wasn't a thing yet. But let us have our fun, right? If nothing else, Remake might give us a few iced-over houses.
2 No Love For The Loveless ☂
Set aside the semantics we've previously argued. Never mind the craters, the missing Turks, or any of that jazz. This one's truly hard to handle. Genesis, as we know, is not entirely dead. Crisis Core sets this up when two Deepground members fetch his would-be corpse, and Dirge of Cerberus not only establishes their identities as Nero and Weiss; its secret ending confirms that Genesis is scheming toward some future, allegedly planet-saving, endeavor.
When Compilation of Final Fantasy 7 essentially wrapped up shortly after Dirge of Cerberus' release, fans were left hanging as to what would happen next. For some, that was a relief; Genesis isn't exactly the most popular character in the Final Fantasy franchise, nor is Compilation especially beloved overall. But a cliffhanger's a cliffhanger, and with Square Enix bringing Loveless' biggest fan back into the limelight via Reunion, it will be interesting to see if the Remake games happen to cross paths with him somehow.
1 Minerva? We Barely Knew 'Er
So, uh. The planet upon which the Final Fantasy 7 universe is set has a goddess-like manifestation of... itself. She's called Minerva, and Genesis believes she exists, and lo and behold, she does, in fact, exist. And this is a big deal, yeah? Big enough to spring up again in other media, surely including the flagship Final Fantasy 7.
It's easier to excuse the lack of Minerva there, not just because she's a creative afterthought but also because the deepest the game goes into the will of the world is through less tangible matters: namely the Lifestream, and the gigantic Weapons the world wields in times of strife (sorry). Yet in Remake, there's suddenly a massive manifestation of fate, an arbiter and its bizarre timeline-obsessive minions, and stop us if this is why you prefer the original FF7, we get it, but it's nothing if not expansive.
Pretty hard to imagine a game that showed us that wildness won't make room at some point in its sequels to at least give us more Minerva than an optional boss fight...