I’ve got a friend playing Crisis Core: FFVII. Overall, he likes it. It’s a fun game, even if he’s sort of confounded by getting all his level-ups via a random slot machine.

Still, the game has a strange sort of logic that both of us are struggling to get our heads around.

At a point in the game, you’re travelling with your good buddy Sephiroth. You find your path blocked by a locked door. Sephiroth sees a switch one level below, and tells you to go press it.

Now, this is all pretty reasonable by itself. The problem is that in the previous cutscene, Sephiroth was carving up a building like sashimi with nothing but his sword. And that was when he was missing. A locked door shouldn’t even slow him down.

Secondly, as demonstrated by the same cutscene, Sephiroth can fly. Ordering you to make your way down the building manually is probably the least efficient way to get the job done.

It’s probably just be an extreme example of the “red key syndrome,” where a game’s designers make you jump through hoops to overcome an obstacle despite the fact that you’re playing a virtual demigod. The last time we saw this was in Bioshock, where your handler instructed you to (SPOILERS!) permanantly mutilate yourself into a Big Daddy to get through a locked door, despite the fact that you were carrying more high explosives than God. (End spoilers)

My friend and I, however, like to think that Sephiroth is just being a dick.

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