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Game Title: Dirge of Cerberus Final Fantasy VII
Platform: PlayStation 2
Developer: Square Enix
Publisher: Square Enix
Genre: Third Person Shooter/Role Playing
Age Rating: BBFC 15+, CERO: B, ESRB: T for Teen
Release Date: 26th January 2006 (Japan), 15th August 2006 (US), 17th November 2006 (EU)
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Game Score: 4.0/10
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Summery:
Dirge of Cerberus' mix of Third Person Shooting combined with Role Playing Mechanics is just wasted potential from it's overall execution.
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I'm going to be very honest about this the original Final Fantasy VII is a gem of legends on the original PlayStation, well known for it's fantastic storyline, characters, unforgeable moments and challenging combat which still makes the game enjoyable to this day. Every way you look at Final Fantasy VII it's considered alongside FF6 and FF9 to be one of the best games of all time and also one of the top games in the franchise, so when Square Enix brought out the compilation of Final Fantasy VII it helped expand on the universe of FF7. While some stayed in Japan we English speaking fans were eventually treated to the feature film Advent Children which was okay when it got to scenes near to the end. Eventually we the release of two other Final Fantasy VII games and these were Dirge of Cerberus on the PlayStation 2 and Crisis Core on the PSP. Dirge of Cerberus wanted to like some other of Square Enix's recent games wanted to try something that the series never did before and for this game it was a Third Person Shooter that utilises Final Fantasy style RPG elements. Mixing the two together looks and sounds like a brilliant idea on paper but Dirge of Cerberus has plenty of problems that really make the game a complete waste.
Set after the events of the original game and the movie Advent Children the game follows Vincent Valentine as he finds himself against a mysterious army called Deepground who plans to awaken Omega to destroy the planet. The villain responsible is a man named Weiss who commands both Deepground and also the Tsviets which cause chaos to the citizens of the world. The problem dispute the amount of back stories that the game tries to throw at the player some of these moments tend to wear out it's welcome. The game's villains aren't really all that interesting and some of the cutscenes have moments that don't make much sense at times. There is some great voice acting and you do get to see Cloud and his friends but only in like 2 or 3 cutscenes which is rather sad. Most of the screentime focuses on Vincent and his back stories which honestly stretches out too much and it doesn't tell us anything new about Vincent if you played the Vincent sidequest in the original FF7. He's guilty about not being able to save Lucretia as well as stopping Hojo in the past but it's not really groundbreaking news for us. Final Fantasy is usually a franchise with some great character development but it's surprising that in Dirge of Cerberus there is little to no character development what-so-ever.
As I said Dirge of Cerberus is a Third Person Shooter in which you control Vincent through 12 of the game's single player chapters. In gameplay you roam through different areas shooting down enemies and eventually taking down a boss. The enemy variety is very poor, for the majority of the game you will mostly be fighting against enemy soldiers that have only a basic pattern and only in small instances you can fight off against small beasts which their AI doesn't improve from the human targets. The game also tries to have mission variety as well and objectives involve assisting ally soldiers, rescuing citizens, eliminating squads of enemies and lastly acquiring keycards so that you can move to the next part of the area. You can tell that not a whole lot of effort was put into the overall missions and that is because many of the missions tend to repeat throughout the game making the gameplay very repetitive on top of the enemy variety.
What tries to save the gameplay is Vincent's range of guns even though there is only a small number available. First up his trusty side arm called Cerberus which does decent damage at the cost of firing 3 shots per trigger which can easily consume ammo for it if you're not careful, you also get a machine gun called Griffon which acts a little inaccurate even at short ranges but when it decides to hit it's target it does become a more reliable weapon for dealing with enemies in the game. Lastly there's the Rifle where it is very slow but does great damage. There are some unlockable weapons but they only act as weaker alternatives to their standard counterparts making them rather worthless. Vincent also has a melee attack which is rather decent I guess but you can customize your weapons with different parts you find throughout the game. Parts range from different barrels which either improve faster firing, increase damage or range as well equipping as accessories, weapon parts like sniper scopes for zoomed aiming and Materia. Materia gives Vincent the ability to either use Fire, Ice or Thunder magic and there is a part which increases it's power but using magic costs MP which can be replenished with items which I will go over in a moment. Vincent's weaponry is very small and it's made up for it with different customization options and it isn't too bad once you setup the right combinations for gunplay. Save for Death Penalty which you don't get till the end of the game you'd just wish that Vincent could have Shotguns like he did in the original FF7.
Vincent also has access to his Limit Breaks which is an item you use to activate it. Unfortunately there are only two available in the game, both are Gaulf Beast and Chaos in which the second one you don't get until the last stage of the game. It's a shame his other two Hellmasker and Death Gigas aren't in the game which is rather disappointing. At least his limit break transformation helps out a lot when you are low on health or in a bad situation.
What really hurts the combat in the game is the controls, you move, look around and aim with the two Analog Sticks which is fine but to fire you have to press the R1 button by default to bring up a crosshair which brings you into aiming mode. From what I understand the Japanese version of the game had aiming where it was behind the shoulder and in the English release the developers changed it so the camera in aim mode wasn't too close to your character. Oh yes I forgot to mention that the English version of the game had some tweaks before Square Enix released it in US and Europe. Alongside the aiming they also added the ability to shoot while in mid-air and also there is a couple of extra missions which I will get back to. Although one thing they didn't include in the English release but the Japanese release did have and that is the online multiplayer which would have made the game more enjoyable. Getting back to the controls you can also go into a first person view which does make the aiming helpful especially for sniping but using melee attacks or get sent flying deactivates aiming mode and you have to press the fire button again to bring it back up. It's rather a pain to get used to and it would have been better if the gameplay stayed in aiming mode the whole time, also why not have it that melee attacks do not bring you out of aiming mode which would have been so much better. I had instances where enemies with explosives and swords that knocked me flying all over the place and forced myself to reorientate myself to facing the enemy and getting aiming mode back on again. By then the enemies would be doing plenty of damage which is sure to give you a death if you're not careful.
The controls are worse with the USB Keyboard and Mouse. The game does support them and as much as the Keyboard controls aren't half bad but the Mouse looking controls horribly, I'm serious it controls like the right analog stick looking even when you bump up the sensitivity to the highest. I'm guessing Japan doesn't know how mouse controls work in a shooting game so it's best to play the game with the standard controller if you want the best out of the game.
You can use items to heal yourself like potions to restore your health and ethers which restore your MP but however you can only hold a small number of items to heal yourself with. For small Potions it's 4, for better healing Potions and Ethers its 2. You only hold 1 Phoenix down which revives you automatically after death which is fine, for everything else the capacity is very low for a lot of situations and will find yourself stocked down quickly. They must have done this to try and make their system like that to be challenging but the amount of times you'll frequently take damage means you'll quickly go through all your recovery items without notice. Compared to other Final Fantasy games where you have plenty of recovery items for any situation Dirge of Cerberus limits the amount of each item to use.
Since it's also a Final Fantasy game Dirge of Cerberus uses some small RPG elements to it. After you complete a stage you are tallied with experience points and gil (the ingame currency) but however it uses a system similar to Lunar Genesis where you can only chose between having experience so that your character is stronger or by having gil so that you can upgrade your equipment. It's really a dum system more then anything else and it makes upgrading a chore, I get that you can also get some gil during the stages but I honestly just find it stupid that they made the levelling system like that. For the entire game I chose to just relay on experience and just gain the gil throughout the stages instead because I can easily ensure I get my character stronger to deal with most the challenges but still will still die a few times regardless of what you go for.
The difficulty in Dirge of Cerberus doesn't stand for how much damage you take from a single regular enemy but from large groups of enemies that you could end up fighting against. You could be taking fire from about 5 or more enemies at once and they could also possibly attack from sides you don't see coming as well as spawn near you where you least expect. This will force yourself to do the shoot and cover tactic which really isn't fun at all or just spray your way out of each fight and hope that enemies drop items that will help you recover. In terms of enemy spawning and placement it feels like a really cheap way to make the game harder and you can lose plenty of health from the amount of large enemy encounters you face. You'll probably end up dying a fair bit because of it. The difficulty also affects the character menu as well for some reason, on the Normal setting it pauses the game allowing you to use items or do customization without interruptions but however on harder settings the character menu does not pause the game meaning that they could shoot your character whilst you are making your customization making your character helpless or during time based missions wastes seconds of your time.
In one of the levels towards the end of the game you face off against soldiers who become immune to gunfire so you left with either using melee attacks which by that point it does little damage to them or by using magic on them. Again if you're going to use magic spells to fight then you'd best ensure that enemies drop Ethers so that you can fight back at the enemies effectively. There is also a stealth section with Cait Sith where you have to avoid fighting against enemies and make your way to the end without taking too much damage. It's only there for one moment of the game and as much as the stealth part is poor you take about 3 minutes to pass that part and go back to Vincent.
The boss fights are mostly forgettable at best, they mostly have a simple pattern that is easily exploited and the only thing making them hard is if there are multiple enemies at once or one boss in particular which has high defence against gunfire. The does recycle the boss fight against a combat plane 3 times throughout the game which is kind of lazy.
The single player campaign which will take you about 10 or so hours depending on how many retries you burn through or the amount of cutscenes you're often forced to watch you can skip them if you want. After you sit through it there is also an Extra Missions mode where you take on various challenges like making your way through a level within a time limit, kill enemies with only magic spells or get a certain number of points to complete it. These missions do not use the levelling system from the single player mode and also it suffers with the same problems. Also some of the objectives are just tedious and you can expect to fail dozens of times due to some ridiculous enemy placement and spawning plus they also throw in tough enemies just to try to make these unfair and unbalanced.
Square Enix's Final Fantasy games usually have top quality and that can nearly be said for Dirge of Cerberus' presentation. The CGI cutscenes do look spectacular while the rest are rendered with in the ingame engine and they show up rather frequently which can be a pain. Visually the character models and particle effects are really nice but the environments look rather generic with a few areas having simplistic looking environments with straight looking corridors. Sure the Shinra mansion and the WRO building are decently big but really the environments are just uninspired at best. The character animation is decent enough but however the reloading animations on the rifle and machine guns are laughable. Vincent doesn't take the used clip out and place in a new one but instead he just cocks the back of the weapons instead. Also for the character models you can expect to see the same kind of soldiers on the WRO and Deepground sides throughout the whole entire game. This also makes me think that the units have family twins or something. On the plus side the game is the smoothest Final Fantasy game I have seen on the system, it runs at 50 FPS (60 FPS in NTSC hardware) very well during gameplay and cutscenes till you come across dozens of enemies on screen and explosion effects which is when the frames drop. Dispute that the action mostly stays consistent at the most intense moments.
The music doesn't feature tracks from the original FF7 not even the battle and victory themes which is a shame and it's own music tracks aren't really something you would care to write about. The sound effects on the other hand are good and the English dub voice acting for the characters are good but Cait Sith's voice is the best so far with a more likeable tone then how his voice was in Advent Children.
It's obvious that Dirge of Cerberus is a desperate cashin on the shooter genre which is populated by bigger and better titles while in this case third person shooters like Gears of War and Max Payne. Dirge of Cerberus Final Fantasy VII doesn't raise the bar against other games in the genre and most of it's ideas that it could possibly have going for it just feels like wasted potential. In all fairness this is the currently the franchise's only title in the shoot em up genre but however the weak and effortless storyline, lackluster and repetitive gameplay and poorly designed missions and leveling are just extra weights that poor old Vincent has on his shoulders. Even if you are a hardcore fan of the FF7 universe Dirge of Cerberus is a poorly executed third person shooter and a hard Final Fantasy game to recommend. If you want a third person shooter to play then the Max Payne games and Gears of War are the best recommendations but if you really want a good Final Fantasy game to play on the PS2 then my suggestion is Final Fantasy X.
Speaking of which I think the PlayStation 2 didn't have the best shot at the franchise like the the PSOne did. The only good Final Fantasy game I can think of that is good is Final Fantasy X, not only does it actually play like the old games even with the change of it's levelling system but it also has good characters and an enjoyable turn based combat. As for the others X-2 is just mediocre at best and the game where the franchise slowly started it's downfall with it's uncomfortable soundtrack, poor minigames and female characters having revealing outfits. While I can't make any comment about the PS2 port of FFXI due to the game being online and the servers for the PS2 version being down now but however I find Final Fantasy XII to be the worst of the PS2 Final Fantasy roaster with a terrible battle system, weak storyline and characters, horrid gambit system and a worthless license system. Dirge of Cerberus as I already mentioned is second to the worst Final Fantasy game on the PS2 with all the points I just already mentioned and overall I would skip this game and just stick to the original Final Fantasy VII game instead. Even with some small tweaks Square Enix made to the game before releasing in the West it lacks the power and magic that made other Third Person Shooter games come together well. An online component that the Japanese version had would have at least made the game somewhat enjoyable if they kept that in the English but alas they didn't which would ruin anyone's reason to purchase this game but the servers are down now it really doesn't matter. Dirge of Cerberus Final Fantasy VII is a poor Third Person Shooter that will disappoint hardcore fans of the Final Fantasy VII universe and fans of the shooter genre.
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The Good Points:
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1. You can customize your weapons with different accessories, barrels and materia
2. The graphics are smooth and the CGI cutscenes and characters look great
The Bad Points:
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1. Effortless storyline and cutscenes
2. Lackluster weapons, missions and repetitive gameplay
3. Awful levelling system
4. Harder difficulties with main game and Extra Missions can be unfair and cheap
5. No online multiplayer for the game's English Release
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Reviewed by: Anthony Hayball (AQWBlaZer91)
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