Dirge of Cerberus is obviously one of the most highly anticipated games of 2006 due to the fact that its link to the most popular Final Fantasy game ever. While not a true sequel featuring the entire cast of Final Fantasy VII, it does provide a semi sequel to the popular Final Fantasy VII game and Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children movie that Final Fantasy fans have wished for. However the interesting thing here is that Dirge of Cerberus focuses only on one of the main heroes of Final Fantasy VII and the change of gameplay from pure role playing to more of a shooter game with elements of role playing in it. This change of menu here is a bold move by SquareEnix in trying something new and different. Is this the kind of change that will please long time fans or something that will have an opposite effect? We're about to find out with this review.
STORY
A new war for Midgar begins..
So this is Omega Weapon.
Three years has passed since the events of the Jenova War back in Final Fantasy VII and 1 year has passed since Cloud fought against Kadaj resulting in the disappearance of geostigma in Final Fantasy VII Advent Children. But the days of peaceful times still seem a distance away as a new dark force threatens the world. A certain number of people have slowly started to disappear across towns and cities all over the world. In addition to the disappearance of individuals, a secret organization from Shinra past known as Deepground has risen out of the ashes of Midgar with intentions that are unclear and led by a mysterious individual named Weiss. Reeves Tuesti, leader of the World Regenesis Organization (WRO) and former Jenova War hero under the alias Cait Sith, suspected that the emergence of Deepground and the disappearances of individuals are connected together called on his old friend, Vincent Valentine to come to Kalm to begin an investigation into Deepground activities and where they are from. Though reluctant at first, Vincent agrees to the task assigned for him from his buddy Reeves and begins the task of tracking down Deepground and their origins. Soon past secrets are revealed as what Deepground seek is also bound to Vincent origin and his lost love, Lucrecia. As Vincent tries to save the world from Deepground, he must also come to grip with guilt from past sins and his inner darkness, Chaos. Dirge of Cerberus is the story of Vincent Valentine and his exploration of his grief, self loathing, and his love for Lucrecia Crescent when he was once a Turk working for Shinra. Final Fantasy VII storyline continues with Dirge of Cerberus.
Now looking at the overview of the entire Dirge of Cerberus storyline, you can clearly tell that its entire concept is base on telling the origin of Vincent Valentine. You got a bit of a small brief mention of his origin in Final Fantasy VII but here it's more in-depth than that. Most of the story cut scenes involves flashback of Vincent as his days as a Turk assigned to protect Lucrecia Cresent while she was working for Dr. Hojo. You also get to see a deeper insight into the three way relationship better Vince, Lucrecia, and Dr. Hojo and how Sephiroth may have come about. This is very insightful for the die hard Final Fantasy VII fans out there that wish to know more on what went on before Sephiroth was born and where Vincent came from. The problem is that despite the story best efforts in trying to portray this as a sad time for Vincent in losing his humanity and his love of Lucrecia, we don't end up caring too much for these two lovebirds and what happened to them. Vincent even in his early days is still too much of a one dimensional loner character that an emotional attachment for fans to connect to is hard to come by. You don't even feel a strong bond or chemistry between Vincent and Lucrecia even though the story tries very hard to do so. This is totally opposite between how Final Fantasy VII was successfully able to showcase the strong connect between Cloud and Aeris. When Cloud lost Aeris, we, the gamers, sense his lost and sadness and we feel for him and his sadness. This in turn marks the death of Aeris as one of the best emotional scene in rpg history ever. You don't have that same sense of feeling here with each scene between Vincent and Lucrecia. The flashbacks of the past are very insightful from an informative view point but have no emotion to them for us to care too much about the flashback as the final result. While the heart of the storyline is the telling of Vincent Valentine origin, the present day and adventure storyline is the mystery of Deepground and its special soldiers, the Tvsiets. On this side of the story things are very weak. The problem with the Deepground storyline is there's no backbone to it. The entire story never once really focuses much effect into developing the characters of Deepground and the origin of Deepground. Even villains need to be developed to the point where you can understand their goals and purpose in the story. The reason why a villain like Sephiroth is such a great villain is because in Final Fantasy VII, the game actually takes the time to develop his character so we, the gamers, can understand who Sephiroth was and why he's angry at the world. Here in this game the special soldiers of Deepground, Rosso, Azul, Nero, and Weiss, are all introduce one by one with no other purpose than to fight Vincent in this game. They all come out as one dimension cardboard characters that have no depth to them. In the end you don't really know anything about Deepground other than they have soldiers running around that you can shoot at. It's pretty clear the game developers created Deepground as nothing more than a tool for Vincent to fight in this game while they tell the story of Vincent origin. By the end of the story, you don't feel anything for it as the story comes off very flat. You spent most of the time going from one dungeon to the next, shooting at enemies while having flash back scenes. At the end of the story they give us a bit of a plot twist with a virtual reality matrix thing that comes off more stupid than believable. When you finish with the story, you don't have a sense of anything for it. The only excitements you have from the story are the few seconds of cameo appearances from the other Final Fanasy VII characters. That's pretty sad that the only exciting parts are scenes that last a few seconds from characters that don't play much of a role in the overall story. A major disappointment here.
Score 7/10
CHARACTERS
United together once again.
On the surface you would expect to see some of the now famous Final Fantasy VII characters making a return visit here as well as some new excellent characters introduce in this game. This is half true. The crew of Final Fantasy VII does make a return visit here but their appearances in this game are limited to a few seconds of cameo appearances at best. The new characters introduce in this game are something left to be desired. Let's overview the Final Fantasy VII characters first since this is basically the main attraction of this game. The main character in this story is of course Vincent Valentine who was one of the main characters in Final Fantasy VII but not the main hero of Final Fantasy VII. His character development in this game is excellent which is expected since the entire story is base on a history of how Vincent became the Vincent of today. The one thing I have to say is that even though his development is good for this game, his personality is too much of a loner with one line words that his character isn't really a main hero type of character but more of a supporting team member as what he was in Final Fantasy VII. This game clearly shows that Vincent Valentine isn't a main character for a main game period. I'm sorry to all the Vincent fans out there but it's the honest truth. He's an excellent supporting character just not ready for prime time as a main character. Two other Final Fantasy VII characters that play a more prominent role in this story are Yuffie and Reeve/Cait Sith. However in order to ensure that Vincent doesn't get overshadow by these two characters, they've been dummy down a bit to make Vincent more of an attractive main hero. You hardly can believe that Yuffie and Reeve are heroes of the Jenova war and can even fight base on their portrayal in this game. Yuffie has been dummy down to nothing more than comic relief to make people laugh at her stupidity in this game. Reeve has been made more into a leader giving out orders than a fighter now. And the doll that he controls, Cait Sith, has been reduce to nothing more than a puppet that is used for reconnaissance with idiotic attack moves in this game. The only other Final Fantasy VII character that has some decent screen time is Cid but he's been reduced to nothing more than a pilot with a couple of one linears. Cloud, Barret, and Tifa appearances only lasted for 30 seconds or less. It's almost pointless to have them in this game. All of these characters by the end of the story are left to being nothing more than cheerleaders for Vincent. It's understandable why their appearances were left as nothing more than cheerleaders as the entire group can easily overshadow Vincent in his own game but it would have been better to not have them in the game at all than making them show up for a few seconds of pointless scenes or dummying them down to being pointless characters. Red XIII didn't make an appearance at all during the story but there was a cameo of him at the ending scene. That's about it for the Final Fantasy VII characters. If you're a fan of Final Fantasy VII you probably won't be too happy with the overall portrayal of these characters unless you are basically a Vincent fan.
Now for the new characters, well….. From the good guys there are only two new characters in the name of Shelke and Shalua. Shalua works for the WRO as their scientist and the story really didn't spend too much time on her and she doesn't really last too long in the story as well so her character development is left to a minimum. Shelke plays a more prominent role in the story but her background development is a bit sketchy with certain areas being left unanswered. The game does explain her relationship to Shalua but didn't go into too much details as to why she still look young or what she's been doing for the last past 10 years with the Deepground Organization. Her personality overall is very plain. The rest of the new characters are centered on the Deepground Organization. More so on the special soldiers of Deepground known as the Tsviets. The Tsviets consists of Azul, Rosso, Nero, and their leader Weiss. This is where things are very disappointing in terms of character development. The development on Deepground as a whole is weak and the Tsviets are even weaker to point where these Tsviets have no true purpose in the story other than to be bosses for Vincent to fight. Who is Azul and where is he from? We don't really know. He's just some big lug that walks around that eventually Vincent has to fight. The same also applies to Rosso and Nero. They just show up and say a few lines than its boss fight time. Weiss the so called main bad guy in this story won't make an appearance at all until the very last part of the story where it's time to fight him as part of the end game boss. Who really is Weiss? Where is from? How did he become leader of Deepground? The story never shows us any of this. When it's time we just fight Weiss because the gameplay sets him up as an end game boss. After defeating Weiss you don't have any sense of accomplishment because you have no idea what Weiss is about. All of the bad guys in this game seem to be pointless bad guys for you to fight simply because you need to fight someone in this game. It's hard to top Sephiroth after Final Fantasy VII but boy they need to come up with better newer characters than these bunch.
When playing this game, I was interested in seeing the Final Fantasy VII casts of characters but I was so disappointed in finding out that they're either reduce to idiocy or their appearances were totally pointless. I found the new characters to be boring and randomly pointless too. Even bad guys need to have background development or else they are just nothing more than the usual nameless sprite you fight but just cooler looking. And unfortunately this is what the Tsviets are. In the entire cast of Dirge of Cerberus, Vincent Valentine is the only person that came out looking decent with good background development. Such a waste of a possible good cast of characters.
Score: 7/10
GRAPHICS
You cant beat me, I beat Sephiroth.
The graphical aspect of Dirge of Cerberus is very good to great. You'll probably notice during the preview trailers that this game has stunning FMV that is equal to what was seen in Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. And we have to say the preview trailers didn't lie about that. While there aren't a lot of purely render CG scenes, the ones they have are just stunning to look at. Some of these CG scenes don't have much purpose in the story other than to show cameo appearances by the other Final Fantasy VII characters just to make us fans squeal like little fanboys or fangirls at seeing them. Nevertheless it's still fun and great to see the other Final Fantasy VII characters in render CG. In terms of regular story cut scenes and gameplay scenery, the game looks pretty good but a bit unbalance. Everything looks big in this game. The realistic 3-D characters model look big and the background environment look big. Most of the scenes are close up scenes of the characters and surrounding areas instead of a wide pan approach where you can see everything around the main character that you are controlling and the surrounding areas. It's sort of like instead of having the camera guy filming everything from a distance, he's standing right next to these characters filming everything. Hence everything looks big due to the close of up camera view. Now in terms of the 3-D character models, all the main characters and supporting characters have excellent detailed and lifelike look to them that is close to their CG render look. Unfortunately this doesn't apply to the nameless extra characters such as the average WRO soldiers and the numerous nameless Deepground soldiers you face as enemies. You can tell the game designers got lazy here and just reused the same character model types over and over for these nameless characters in different scenery. It's almost like we have an army of clones here. In terms of the background environments, things look okay but a bit too plain and dull looking. Most of the areas that you travel around are basically dark dungeons and deserted bases. The game designers didn't spend too much time in making sure the environment look as realistic as possible or as flashy as possible. The unbalance here is that you don't have a sense that this is the same world as what you had seen in Final Fanasy VII and Final Fantasy VII Advent Children. It seems out of place with no one around but just Vincent. They pretty much got rid of all the people and made things a bit darker and dull just so they can adapt the gameplay into the environment for this game. Overall, excellent FMV and realistic 3-D character models but just standard quality for the rest of the game environments and none important characters.
Score: 8/10
MUSIC
Just want to hear your voice.
Although this isn't a pure role playing game, the music is pretty decent for a shooter game. There are up to 60 tracks used in this game. You can have access to these tracks in the Sound Gallery in the Extra Menu if you are able to unlock them from the Extra Missions. The tracks are divided into various categories such as Events, Characters, Battlefields, Organizations, ect. Despite the large number of tracks, the music itself is a bit uneven. Some of the tracks are very good such as the opening title track, Flicker, but at times other tracks are too quiet and not noticeable at all during the game. The story event tracks are the more noticeable ones in this game while the gameplay track seem to be oddly average to the point they are nothing more than sounds playing in the background that you barely hear with all the guns firing going around. The Boss Fight tracks are definitely the better of the tracks in terms of gameplay tracks. They have more of an upbeat tempo putting you in the groove of playing this game. But the gameplay music needs to be a bit better in order to help carry the music overall in this game. The music didn't really hurt this game but it didn't really help it too.
Score: 7/10
GAMEPLAY
Customizing your gun.
Taking a quick sniper shot.
Game Information
Genre: Shooter
Publisher: SquareEnix
Disc: 1 DVD Disc
Memory: 678 KB
Players: 1 Player Mode
Analog Control: Yes
Digital Control: Yes
Vibration Function: Yes
Rating: Teen
Release: August 2006
Even though the game carries the trademark Final Fantasy VII logo, the gameplay is far different from that of a traditional role playing game. This is a first person to third person shooter with elements of role playing. As a shooter game, it's okay and decent but there are far better shooter games out there. The unique thing is that you can switch back and forth between a first person shooter to a third person shooter depending on your taste. Now the gameplay is broken down into chapters' base on the story. Each chapter is set up with various stage missions inside the chapter for you to accomplish in order to progress the game and the story. Since this is a shooter game, your main means of fighting the enemies is with different types of guns. You can still melee of course. Add in the usage of magic follow by the leveling up of Vincent and you have your rpg elements in this game. At the end of each chapter or mission stage, you will be graded on your performance overall of that chapter. The grade you get can than be converted to experience points for Vincent to level up or can be converted to gil for you to buy and customize your guns. This is how getting experience points work in this game. You don't get experience from killing enemies but you get it as a final grading of how well you were able to accomplish each objective within the missions. Other than the features of some rpg elements inside the gameplay, this is pretty much a basic shooter that didn't have anything else to offer in terms of an innovative shooter gameplay. There are a few things I like to mention that made the gameplay a bit awkward to play at times. The camera angle in this game is horrible. While you are able to spin the camera around in a 360 degrees angle to whichever way you want to, it's not very pleasant to the flow of the game when you are moving around. You have to constantly manually move and rotate the camera in the direction you are moving or looking at all the times to keep the camera at a straight view. This becomes very troubling when you are constantly moving at a fast pace trying to shoot the enemies and you can't get a good view on them because the camera refuses to fix in on the direction your gun is aiming at. Another problem with the camera angle is the close up view point. If you ever get attack in a close up range, the camera angle gets screw up in a close up view that you actually lose your bearings that you can easily end up getting killed by the enemies as you desperately try to adjust the camera angle back to a view point that you can actually see properly again. There will be many times you will be cursing at the crappy camera angle in this game. Auto aiming and locking onto different targets is poorly done here. Even though the game gives you the option of manual to automatic aiming settings, those settings aren't very helpful at all. The automatic aiming doesn't really lock onto the next target as it implies nor is there an option where you can rotate through a cycle of different targets. It does lock onto a target but if it's a target you don't want to lock onto, you have a bit of a problem trying to maneuver around so that your gun will lock onto the target that you want. These are the kind of problems that make the flow of the game a bit off for a shooter game. In a sense you can say the controls for this game are pretty bad. And when the controls are bad than you're going to be spending a few times cursing at this game which leads to not having any fun. This will happen here for some of you. Another drawback is that the overall game is actually pretty short. If you don't really care too much about getting a good ranking grade at the end of each mission or even finding all the memory capsules, you can breeze through this game is about 10 hours or so. 10 hours of gameplay is hardly enough game time for the real gaming fans out there. But enough of that and lets overview some of the basic features of this game.
Customization: One of the good things about this game is that with each type of guns, you can customize them into the firepower type that you want base on range, magic, accuracy, ammunition and power. Kill Chains: Each time you kill an enemy in consecutive attacks without taking damage, you build up a chain. This is known as a kill chain. What's good about a kill chain is that the higher the chain is, the more damage your attack or gun will do to an enemy allowing you to even one shot kill or one hit kill even the strongest enemies out there. Magic: This game wouldn't be called Final Fantasy VII if there weren't any magic materia involved. Magic usage however is limited to only 3 types of elemental magic and they are fire, thunder, and blizzard. In order for you to use magic you first need to equip the materia onto your gun and have enough MP to use magic. Limit Break: Just like in Final Fantasy VII, Vince Valentine Limit Break is him turning into the Galian Beast. By turning into the Galian Beast, his HP gets fully restored while his defensive and offensive stats are greatly increased for a short time. Limit Break in this game is activated by using an item instead of low HP. Ranking Grade: At the end of each mission chapter you will be graded and scored by meeting or not meeting certain criteria that you need to accomplish for each mission. Whatever grade you get, you can turn those grades into experience points or gil. The higher the grade, the more experience or gil you will get. Memory Capsules: Memory Capsules are more of an extra feature than actual required game feature. Littered in various hidden areas of dungeons are memory capsules. If you find them and shoot them you will unlock event scenes that each memory capsules correspond to.
Now despite the bad controls and mechanic of the gameplay, the game is pretty decent once you finally get used to the controls and everything. Unfortunately by the time you get used to the controls and understand the mechanics of how this game is played, you probably reach near the end of the game. For a first time shooter rpg game, it's an okay job and there are certain things that can be improved upon in a sequel game if there is going to be a sequel game. That's looking at the flipside of things. But for the most part I find the gameplay to be very frustrating and unfriendly to people who are first time shooter and there will be a lot them since the fan base of this game is from those that mainly play rpgs. A second play through would probably give the gameplay a better score but I don't have the patience to do that and neither should a game require you to play it a second time to fully understand how the gameplay works. This game isn't all about Vincent however. There are certain areas in the game that you can play as Cait Sith instead. But believe me when I say this, playing as Cait Sith isn't a treat at all. Bottomline is that the gameplay fails to live up to the expectation of the name of the game, Dirge of Cerberus, Final Fantasy VII.
Score: 7/10
EXTRAS/REPLAY
Look at all the special features.
I have to say that the meat of the gameplay and the most challenging aspect of the gameplay come from the Side Missions that are available to you in the Extra Menu once you finish the game. The game does provide a lot of nice extra bonus materials for you to browse through and look at in the Extra Menu but unfortunately you'll need to work hard to unlock these bonus features. Extra features that you can unlock are Event Viewer, Character Viewer, Sound Gallery,
Art Gallery, and Extra Missions. You'll need to wait until after you finish your first game of Dirge of Cerberus in order to begin unlocking these features. Event Viewer, which contains all the FMV and story cut scenes in the entire game, can be unlocked during the first regular gameplay by finding memory capsules that contain these story cut scenes. The other extra features can only be unlocked once you start looking for memory capsules in the Extra Missions when those become available after the completion of your first game. The challenging thing is that there are 45 Extra Missions and each of them can range from medium to extremely hard in terms of difficulty. You'll be spending well over 30 hours trying to figure out how to solve each of these missions. Overall there are a lot of extra missions for you to do and a lot of extra features for you to unlock which is good. The down side is that due to the difficulty of the extra missions, some players may just plain give up on doing them just to try and get a complete game or unlocking all the bonus features. In addition to just the regular normal or hard difficulty setting in the story game mode, you can start a new game+ file by selecting the new EX Hard Mode that is unlock upon completing either the normal or hard story game mode. Ex Hard mode allows you to carry over your weapons and gil from the other game modes as an incentive of replaying the game again. That's about sums up the extras and replay feature of this game. This would have gotten a perfect score if it weren't for the difficulty of the extra missions.
Score: 9/10
Dirge of Cerberus is what you would call an excellent preview game. What this mean is that on preview trailers and sneak peeks at game shows, it looks great with the stunning FMV cut scenes and game footages being showcased around. However if you look pass the preview look of the game, you would notice that the substance of the actual game itself is nothing more than better than average. The problem with Dirge of Cerberus is that it fails to live up to the kind of expectation that you may have expected from the story and characters featured in the game due to being associated with one of the greatest rpg game of it's time, Final Fantasy VII. From a gameplay stand point, Dirge of Cerberus failed to produce a more original shooter gameplay mechanics that other shooter games have been shown to have done better. The end result is you have a shooter rpg game that is neither a great rpg game or a great shooter game. The game does have some nice moments and great scenes that it's still worth to pick up and look at. But just don't expect anything great simply because the word Final Fantasy VII is attach to it.
