A Hero’s Burden

Zack Fair might just be the poster child for the “tragic hero” plaque in the Final Fantasy hall of fame. Picture him: the cheerful kid clutching dreams of glory, yet every battlefield photo op starts etching the hard lines of a soldier. He dances on the edge, holding onto high-school-day light, minutes away from living the worst backstage story ever. The original Crisis Core on the PSP in 2007 blew passionate moons of Final Fantasy fans away, adding sweet backstage gossip to VII’s opera. Trouble was, the tiny screen, slow-moving pre-Facebook frame rates, and zero second chance meant the rest of the world kinda never came. Jump to now, and Crisis Core – Final Fantasy VII– Reunion swings the door wide. Think of Reunion as a homeroom reunion in your old science lab. The beaker’s updated, the teacher and glasses kid from ’97 arrive in 1080p, and new kids still can drool at the lab-kit lava lamp and decide to love science the same way. For anyone who buy cheap PS5 games, it’s a chance to experience the updated magic without paying full price. Reunion’s not just rolled textures and half-earned shader physics, though. They rerouted the emotional dartboard. Why? Because Zack’s story burned itself into memory, and yet pops with new sparks every decade, centre frame. Let’s chat about the reasons it now owns your screen time minutes, and why Zack the eternal soldier becomes an empath ROI every voluntarily cried moment.

Okay, let’s be real—Zack starts in Crisis Core acting like every over-confident kid in a shopping mall fight scene: sword bigger than his brain, a grin that’s practically a trophy, and one-liners lined up like students at a pizza slice lunch. When he decides he’s on a quest to “become a hero,” it’s about as subtle as a megaphone at a library. We should roll our eyes, and maybe we do a couple of times, but that’s the gag. The more we cringe, the more we lean in.

As the story kicks in, that heroic toupee gets ruffled by Shinra's perfidy, stolen memories, and friends who can’t even trust their own pasts. Seriously, these aren’t the Normal Everyday monsters your grandpappy hero used to fight. Zack can’t banish a spacetime god in a single cutscene, and he isn’t fixing kingdoms, either—his victories happen in the size of a handshake or a single “we keep going, alright?” That sort of bravery feels radioactive in the normal hero world. Since the opening cutscene is practically a funeral with fun sword tricks, every grin and every goofy victory starts to sting. You watch a kid polishing an empty trophy that’s stacked with irony, and it sticks in your throat.

Crisis Core’s Place in the Final Fantasy VII Saga

Every good mystery needs the backstory before the first page, and that’s what Crisis Core provides for the Final Fantasy VII saga. You could say FFVII Remake is the director’s cut that adds wild twists, but Zack’s flashback game is the groundwork you stumble over if you skip the prequel. Without it, the series’s story looks like a puzzle with missing blue sky pieces that never click in. For those who buy cheap PS4 games, it’s the perfect way to catch up on the essential prequel without spending extra.

Cloud’s split Self makes a lot less sense until you meet Zack. The blade and bark in the kid’s one-man-soldier act resolve into a lad frozen in the shadow of a faster, brighter friend. Aerith warms up, too. You realize the smile traded in Midgar is a lost kid sister wave to the regular, not yet epic, ex-soldier who never left public school. Zack is camera filters and a foil, and his goodbye is every high school farewell the cutvy teenager writes in a poem never typed. Even Sephiroth’s tease of perverse comic book villainy looks extra tragic. The legendary insane one first steps out as an underpaid intern who still believes in saving the flowers, whom the kid swears makes a good role model for ten minutes.

That’s the part that sends the whole story into overdrive—Reunion isn’t here to simply polish the old script. It rewires the story from the ground up, pushing the parts that used to be just footnotes to the front page, and suddenly the whole Final Fantasy VII story seems to rest on one guy’s thankfully spiky hair. Zack’s the guy who keeps the whole thing from flying apart, and Reunion doesn’t let any of that go unnoticed. Instead of just the handsome stranger with Cloud’s spare sword, he’s now impossible to forget—the guy who made the heaviness of this story stick to your chest.

Growing up right in front of us: Zack’s Transformation

Most stories don’t pull off a glow-up like this without losing half a character along the way. Balance is this kid’s superpower.

When we meet him, Zack’s a wide-eyed SOLDIER 2nd Class with more swagger than ranks and more simulator scores than sense. He flexes his way through practice missions only because the real battle is waiting for him on the scoreboard of people’s hearts. Underneath the bravado is a kid who only ever wanted applause. He messes up, runs too fast, and burns the stage. He’s never mean, just over-eager, and the over-eager part gets kicked and kicked again until shiny joints and shiny morals start to fracture. Watch the colors change: the hard truth, the emptied friends, the mask that shatters the loudest—step by step, the fearless guppy learns to swim in a tank full of stories no one wants to tell. The brave little fire that chased the banner on the mountain learns to carry a mountain’s weight without ever putting the banner down.

And still, Zack never lets that tiny spark of hope go totally cold. Even after the system he backed turns its back on him, even when the few people he trusts bail or break under the weight of what they’ve done, he keeps dragging his ideals along. That’s the moment he goes from hero to unforgettable: he clings to his code while staring down the bills it keeps racking up. This change isn’t him dumping his past—it’s taking the same impossible dream, polishing it until it hurts, and still managing to see it glow.

Why Reunion Had to Happen

When Crisis Core hit the PSP, it felt like a jewel locked under glass in the back of a thrift shop. Players who loved Final Fantasy VII knew Zack’s name like a pop quiz answer but never met him on the page. His journey played like a six-second YouTube trailer: hints in the code, guard-straight wordless hints shoved into cutscenes that you felt the buzz glow but never the complete buzz. For almost a decade and a half, that disc only opened for travelers willing to juggle a library of misshapen UMDs and tiny screens.

Reunion fixes the problem in a big way. It runs on phones, PC, and consoles, and it’s got shiny, new character models, a freshly recorded script, and a battle system that’s been smoothed out to feel more like the hybrid action-RPG vibe of Final Fantasy VII Remake. It doesn’t scrap the old design, but it tightens the flow—blending that cool PSP Digital Mind Wave thing with snappier, flashier combat this time around.

The key thing is that it lets new players meet Zack the way he was meant to be met: not as an old side thing, but as the main event. If Reunion didn’t exist, the heavy emotional layers of Final Fantasy VII Remake would feel a little lighter. With Reunion, the stitching in the whole tapestry makes sense.

Honor and Choice in the Air

Crisis Core is really about loyalty. Shinra puts up a dazzling facade— that shiny-future corporation promising order and a big win— but the rot is everywhere once the story gets rolling. Zack’s connection to Shinra is a lock, but the little decisions he makes are still his, every day. When everyone else cracks—Genesis lost in ego, Angeal in despair, and Sephiroth lost in his own identity—Zack chooses to trust. It’s not blind trust; it’s trust held up by a stubborn sense of honor.

In Crisis Core, the whole idea of “honor” isn’t just something Angeal insists you memorize—it’s the backbone you lean on the whole game. Honor isn’t a single rule, though. Is it obeying orders from a Shinra guy you know is dirty, or sticking to a promise that might kill you? Zack doesn’t waver. Orders from a system are one thing, but a promise to a friend or a teammate is a whole other level. That’s why the guy who just wanted to be a hero ends up being one without the title. He bets everything on people, goals, and the belief that they matter more than the company that trims lives like weeds.

That same choice makes the crash even worse. Zack steps up so many times that the game practically echoes it. It insists that heroism gets counted when you lay something down willingly—when you walk away from the life you might have had for a dream that isn’t guaranteed to matter to anyone else.

In a universe filled with ancient powers, war that doesn’t end, and planes of existence colliding, Zack’s is the fight that somehow feels the closest to us: one dude trying to be the guy he looks up to. Crisis Core – Final Fantasy VII – Reunion replays that mission with sharper graphics and a roar you can feel right away. No chapters to skip; you just jump in with heart already pounding and hope the hero doesn’t fall right in front of you.

Look, Crisis Core Reunion isn’t perfect. You can still see the old PSP skeleton underneath the mission design, and a few cutscenes stumble when they should flow. For folks who have bashed through a bunch of action RPGs, the combat might seem a little light on strategy. But honestly, those little hiccups don’t matter once you pay attention to what Zack is really going through. The game takes the “we know how this ends” spoiler and flips it, grabbing you so that you feel every step of his journey instead of bracing for the fall.

Zack Fair is the guy who thinks the world needs heroes. Play through his story, and you realize the noblest ones are often the ones who never wear trophies and don’t stick around to bask in the light. Their bravery is a last, quiet push that lets someone else walk those flaming steps for them.

So, Zack isn’t just a character you boot from a menu and forget. He’s the steady thump that reminds the entire Final Fantasy VII world what it really needs to keep living.