Creating a spin-off of a beloved story is a tricky task, one that usually results in failure. For every prequel that’s fleshed out the original work’s backstory and deepened its characters, you can name a dozen that merely tainted their inspirations by association. To date, Square Enix hasn’t done very well trying to expand on Final Fantasy VII; its offshoots to date run a very small gamut from completely lame (Dirge of Cerberus) to completely wretched (Advent Children). So by all rights, Crisis Core — the latest effort to expand the FFVII universe — should be painful, a disaster that further cheapens the good name of the landmark PlayStation role-playing game.

Surprisingly, it’s not.

Instead, Crisis Core rises above its grim heritage by carefully balancing nostalgia, a dialed-down narrative tone, portable-friendly gameplay, and gorgeous production values. Newcomer director Hajime Tabata has avoided ridiculous cinematic excess while also taking care to actually make the game fun to play, which immediately puts Crisis Core miles ahead of both Advent Children and Dirge of Cerberus, respectively. But its success as a game runs far deeper than simply being not as bad as its predecessors. Like the best prequels, it stands alone on its own merits while adding considerable substance and context to the original; it is, in essence, the expanded, definitive rendition of a crucial flashback sequence in FFVII. Granted, someone unfamiliar with the original game will be somewhat confused about the incidental details that constantly appear about the story’s edges, but the heart of the game — the coming-of-age tale of an aspiring hero named Zack Fair and the relationships he develops along the way — holds up even if you don’t know the eventual fates of the cast, or the way things are destined to play out once you reach the town of Nibelheim.

Crisis Core’s narrow focus makes for a game that’s quite unlike anything that’s ever borne the Final Fantasy name. The story is strictly about Zack rising through the ranks of Shinra’s SOLDIER corps rather than a ragtag team of heroes seeking to save the world. Likewise, the action is all Zack, too. Square Enix has done an admirable job of transforming the series’ RPG-style combat into a solo action experience: It feels button-mashy at first, but somewhere beneath the surface, it’s essentially turn-based. Learning to capitalize on both Zack’s and his enemies’ respective turns is a crucial component of the game’s strategy.

A fair amount of depth is tucked into both combat and the character-building systems. FFVII’s Materia system carries over into the game…and actually works better here than it did originally. Where the emphasis on building Materia power transformed every single member of FFVII’s multicharacter party into duplicates in all but appearance, here it simply makes for an extremely adaptable hero. Most of the franchise’s familiar tactics are rendered perfectly in Crisis Core’s dynamic style — Zack casts elemental magic, uses healing items, leaps like a Dragon Knight, sacrifices health for bonus damage like a Dark Knight, and summons monsters.

The game’s structure is perfectly suited for portable gameplay. Once you get past the two rather talky introductory missions, cinema sequences become more compact, and combat sequences (especially in the side missions) are ideally bite-sized. The side tasks may be undertaken at any of the omnipresent save points and offer a compulsive sense of progression. Following any one of the mission trees to its conclusion yields not only a steady stream of increasingly difficult battles, but fantastic loot as well. The rare goods Zack earns from side quests combined with the Materia Fusion system (which allows you to custom-build your skills and stats) offers far more flexibility than you’d expect from something that, on the surface, seems to be a lightweight, story-driven action game.

Crisis Core isn’t without its faults, though. The Digital Mind Wave (DMW) system — the spinning slot-machine reels that constantly pop up during combat — is difficult to understand and feels maddeningly out of control even once you get a sense of how it works. Leveling up comes down to what is essentially random luck of the draw, which makes Zack’s progress far less satisfying than it should be. The flashy DMW animations can’t be skipped, either, which is maddening; Square seemed to have learned its lesson about forced animations way back in 2000’s Final Fantasy IX, making Crisis Core an eight-year step backward.

And while the side missions are quick fixes that work beautifully for a portable game, the main story sequences aren’t actually much more elaborate. Progress through the chapters feels almost like it’s on rails as you move from Point A to Point B in a maddeningly linear fashion. It’s not until the end of the game that the level structure truly opens up; the final dungeon is a massive, open, multipart affair that offers a tantalizing taste of how much more substantial the quest could have been, if only the developers had let it.

Still, the lingering disappointments of the game’s missed opportunities really do melt away in the final hours, as the story builds to its inevitably tragic climax. The insertion of new details into Zack’s journey through a familiar series of events never feels forced, and the finale is truly excellent — the finest blend of gameplay and narrative the Final Fantasy series has ever seen. It even justifies the existence of the DMW, which is no small feat.

And therein is the crux of Crisis Core’s success: It’s a game designed to feed on your nostalgic memories of Final Fantasy VII, and in that regard, it never falters. From the faithful 3D reconstruction of Midgar’s slums to the fateful standoff in the Mako reactor, Crisis Core does a better job of putting players in FFVII’s world than even the original game did. And it manages to be a worthy experience in its own right rather than an empty bit of filler riding on a classic’s coattails. It’s a flawed, but nevertheless impressive, prelude to one of the most influential games of the past decade. As far as prequels go, it’s one of the good ones…maybe not quite a Godfather Part II, but certainly miles better than your average Phantom Menace.

Originally from 1UP