Constant Sense of Progression, Epic Boss Battles and Gorgeous Visuals.
I was a huge fan of the original FFVII and I was one of those guys who bashed Dirge of Cerberus for being a shooter, but after waiting years for a true sequel I learned it was never gonna happen, so I decided to give it a chance since it's the only sequel after Advent Children, so I put this game on my wish list last year and bought it a few months ago.
To my surprise it's still an RPG, you still get exp points to upgrade yourself or your weapons. And you still use some basic elemental materia.
The first thing that surprised me was the graphics, this game is just beautiful, it's obvious they used all of the PS2's horsepower for this game, it gets a bit of hiccups when there's too many enemies on screen though, but nothing game breaking.
The story is what you might expect from a Final Fantasy and it gets the job done, you truly feel the FFVII universe expanded after the ending.
Finally, I think this game is very unique, it does not feel like any other game I've played before. Most of the buttons can be mapped to your preferred configuration, which is surprising for a PS2 game. You can even change the camera view to FPS and it really works, but I'm not a huge fan of FPS, so the 3rd person view worked just fine.