Cloud Monday - Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII - Reunion - Not Recommend To Stream From The Cloud

This week's Cloud Monday video is part 2 of playing Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII - Reunion on PS4 via the PlayStation Plus Cloud Streaming Service to my Japanese launch model PlayStation 4.

Part 1, https://youtu.be/rUNzRtmKoQk, ended with the PlayStation Plus Cloud Streaming Service terminating my connection so in this part we got to see when the last save was. thankfully, it wasn't as bad as i feared. it looks like there is an auto save feature so i probably lost 5-10 minutes of the mission i was currently on rather than 20 minutes or more it would've cost me if the game relied on my manual save instead.

there's more than one reason reason why i've come out and said i do not recommend streaming this game from the cloud. the save system is one of those but there's other things. a bizarre one i don't think i've seen before was when the poor connection logo appeared but it covered up the game's controls right a moment when i needed to guard. i hadn't used guard up to this point, but i was facing off against a boss level character and had to try and dodge whilst i waited for the logo to disappear so i could finally read how to guard. 

another little thing that i noticed more in this part than the first part is how it affected the music in the game. i'm a big fan of the Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII soundtrack so i found it very distracting when there were, admittedly rare, audio issues. The overarching issue that became more apparent in this part was how it interfered with how cinematic the game was trying to be.

The game is full of cutscenes and they look much better than the rest of the game. but when there's an issue with the stream, because these videos are of such a high quality it becomes quite noticeable and distracting and ultimately detracts from the cinematic presentation of this game. this also occurs when you're racing to get to an auto save or a manual save. as you can skip these videos, you're choosing to skip either some cool cinematics or important story stuff.

Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII - Reunion does have some useful game design that makes it good to stream from the cloud, but they're only small aspects when compared to grand overall game itself. personally, i don't recommend this game as something you should stream from the cloud and instead you should download it and play it that way,

Cloud Monday - Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII - Reunion - Couldn't Save Before Being Disconnected

This week's Cloud Monday video is part 1 of playing Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII - Reunion on PS4 via the PlayStation Plus Cloud Streaming Service to my Japanese launch model PlayStation 4.

The title is the real headline here. unlike the PS2, PS1, and PSP games that have been released on PS4 and PS5 via emulation and can therefore save at any point by pressing the options button, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII - Reunion is not one of these so i am reliant on the game's save system. in this video, you'll see that i'm stuck in the middle of a mission with no save point in sight. this game uses specific save points instead of manual saves via the pause menu or options menu. so when the 20 second warning came up, there was nothing i could do. i do have a save, but that was from before the mission i was doing.

In some respects, this version of Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII is worse than the original because the PSP version could be put to sleep and continued at a later date or the game could be paused and the screen turned off. because those features were PSP hardware features and not software, there's nothing equivalent to them when you stream a game from the cloud.

Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII - Reunion isn't a 1080p game, but the quality of the stream meant that the videos looked great regardless. from what i remember, the main game is basically an HD skin over the PSP version and in places it didn't look as high quality. playing the game, i noticed character movement was stiffer than expected and the faces often looked poor. But that's the game itself and not from the streaming from the cloud.

Another example of this was in combat. the character animation has priority, so i had to wait for one animation to finish before i could do another move. you can see in this video i was often pressing buttons to attack other enemies as i was expecting it to be more fluid. i didn't notice any delay due to this being streamed to me and a key example of this was the rumble, it always felt accurate to what was happening on screen and of course the original version of Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII didn't have rumble as the PSP didn't have the hardware for it.

So streaming the game from the cloud felt great, until the disconnection happened. thankfully the last save point was only before the mission so it's better than Sonic Frontiers which took nearly an hour before i could manual save or other RPGs like Scarlet Nexus which also had fixed points i could save at but it's save points were more than 30 minutes apart. we'll see in Part 2 next week if save points become more frequent as we go but in an age of cloud streaming and when other Final Fantasy games have made it easier to save, it's a little disappointing that Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII - Reunion wasn't updated.