When there're no new stuff that attract me, I fall back to old stuff, cuz they're golden and classic.

This is like...the tenth time I'm falling back in love with ff crisis core. Or, Zack Fair, to be exact.

He's just such a perfect character

The first time I saw him (watching crisis core cutscene), he appear as a cute naive character with an awesome voice (suzuken is just that awesome, I recognized his voice in 1 second flat)

The second time I saw him, I was watching Advent Children with friends (Kadaj fans they were), and the last scene at the church broke my heart. It was supposedly to be heartwarming maybe, Cloud let go of his baggage etc etc, but seeing those two is just reminding me that they're gone, and the reason they're gone is because of Cloud, whom, from my first time seeing him in the movie give me the impression he was not treasuring his life enough. And it was like, they (Zack) gave their life up for this emo suicidal dude? Give me Zack over Cloud anyday.

Third time, my friend was playing crisis core, and I scooted over to watch the ending cg. Zack dying his hero death, and leaving behind the girl - whom I knew was going to die too.

That was when I decide to find out the whole backstory of Zack, and started watching cutscenes of crisis core, and trying to land my hand on the game to play it for myself.

I got my hand on the game, and played it five times. For Zack. The story was kind of cryptic at first, for someone without background knowledge of ff7, no idea who everyone else was (except sephiroth and genesis).

My understanding of Zack grew quite slowly actually

First playthrough: A typical hero, how he came to be, with before and after
Second playthrough: A guy with a hero dream who was forced to grow up but held on to his dream
Third playthrough: A guy learning about what it meant to be a hero
Fourth playthrough: How a hero came about, whether he want to be one or not
Fifth playthrough: The journey of how a happy-go-lucky guy got turned into a hero reluctantly, while trying to hold on to what was dear to him.

The whole story was kind of hard to understand, but I eventually did (wiki helped, a lot) and only after finding out a lot of the undercurrent back story of the other characters did I understand why some of them did what they did and how they actually had no real choice. Zack was pulled along for the ride, and how he tried his best, but sometimes a single person's best meant nothing at all. And the way Zack never gave up, never falter, and choose to see the best out of everything really made me felt quite touch.

This is why I like good Japanese anime/game sometimes, they have a plot, there are meaning, and deep feelings behind them. The graphic is good, and the emotion in the voice are genuine (unlike dubs, so fake; and unlike real life acting, so fake), the bgm are awesome too.

And after understand (or, what I understand from self-interpretation) the other crisis core main characters grew on me as well.

Genesis, who was a failed experiment product, and despaired at his short life
Angeal, who was a better experiment product, and despaired at his monstrous root
Sephiroth, who was a perfect experiment, grew up alone in a lab and placed under inhumane expectation as a product, but not a person

For many I think the most touching scene was when Zack faced an entire army and sacrificed for Cloud, but my favourite scene is "The price of freedom", when he was at Banora, and plucking dumbapples for everyone, but he was the only one who ate it, because the others can't. His mentor, his superior, his friend, even his enemy are all with him, but he was alone anyway, yet he appeared to be not despaired by it. Especially love how he said thank you, instead of sorry. The ending where he got Aerith's letter/goodbye to him is T^T