R.I.S.story

Why do I hate Genesis you might ask?

The simple answer, for me I think, is timing. For me, his story unfolded in an uninteresting way chronologically speaking, and it left me feeling unsatisfied with him overall.

My first experience was learning that he was a secret character at the end of Dirge (one I never got to see for myself because Dirge was not fun to play for me. I got so far, hated the shooter aspect, and quit). I was interested in this potential sequel hook character.

But instead of appearing in a sequel, he appeared in the Crisis Core prequel, a game I expected to be more about Zack, Sephiroth, and maybe Cloud but was, instead about the "new guy" we saw at the end of Dirge. Much, if not all of the presented Crisis Core story revolved around Zack dealing with Genesis and his degradation, betrayal, and antagonism in Genesis' pursuit of finding a cure to his affliction. Zack had to deal with Angeal having similar issues (with his being the more heart wrenching of the two for Zack), but the bulk of the conflict was Hollander and Genesis. And that annoyed me.

It was not a bad story on paper, but the execution left something to be desired because, for me, Crisis Core should have been more about Sephiroth as the person he was or at least had more of him and Zack as associates. However, instead of that, we got Genesis, Genesis, Genesis which just left me, overall, exhausted with the character and annoyed. It wasn't that the character was bad...just...kind of redundant? Genesis felt like his story should have been its own thing instead of tacked on to what could have been a Seph, Zack, and Angeal narrative.

I would have gladly accepted him had more of the Seph, Genesis, and Angeal trio been a bit more front and center instead of being tacked on as the side story to Zack's adventure of hunting down and dealing with Genesis because Sephiroth did not want to. If Zack had been closer to all three characters, we might have gotten more, and I would have been fine. Unfortunately, that just did not happen. What we did get was, overall, fine, but, for me, it just left Genesis feeling shoehorned into the story because they needed to put him in something somewhere and explain how/why he ended up where he did at the end of Dirge.

And it all left me feeling unhappy with him in particular from a narrative perspective.

Genesis' character is fine and works great...for any other setting or story for me. And that's really the gist of it. For me.

Please. Do not be offended or bothered or try to change my perspective here. I will get tired and annoyed about it. There are other, more personal reasons for why I dislike Genesis too, but they have nothing to do with the characters or Crisis Core. So, I won't bore anyone with those details/that opinion.

I have wanted to type this up for a minute...but so many folks love the guy, and I'm a hater.