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Now that I have played through Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus I will present my review.
Being a huge Final Fantasy fan from day one on the orginal Final Fantasy on that classic grey box and being a rabid Final Fantasy VII fan I was waiting and waiting for Dirge of Cerberus to come out. Reading all the previews and articles building up to the release I was in for a third/first person shooter with awesome videos and familer characters, and that is all I got. While most are complaining about the fact that chracters like Cloud and Tifa are only in the cut scenes and we get stuck with the more annoying characters you didn't use in the regular FFVII. I can notice that Dirge of Cerberus is a side story game with side story characters. Through out the game we get enjoy/loath the hijinks of those two great FFVII personalites known as Yuffie and Cait Sith. I did think it was a little amusing when you got to play a smaller side level as Cait Sith. From a character stand point there are only two strong characters in the game, Vincent Valentine and the new characer Shelke.
While the gameplay is that of a point and shoot there could have been way better improvments with the controls. My two biggest hang ups about the controls. Number One, while you can use melee attacks you can not lock onto a character like you could in another Square Enix game, The Bouncer. Number Two, unless your aim is on Manual mode you cannot change targets. If you are on Semi-Automatic or Automatic whatever target it locks on first you have to shoot that target first until it dies or blows up. Now this is a mjor problem when you have multiple targets on teh screen at once, which happens mostly through out the game. It would be so much easier to be able to switch to the target you wish to shoot. How could they have done this? How about useing the Down on the D-Pad? Why that button? Well, that button is not even used at all in the gameplay. Knowing that this game was just going to be a shooter, that is all I was really expecting and boy did they deliver.
I found myself not caring much about Vincent's stroyline and his past and wanting more of the Shelke storyline. They do give you a lot of Shelke's and her older sister Shalua, who is defenitly not as strong of a character as Shelke is. The other characters and the rest of the Tsviets are yawnable and as most, typical. It was not made to be a compeling game and it really isn't.
The best aspect about the Dirge is that of the FMVs. Square Enix does it again with the almost as good as Advent Children videos through the cut scenes. These videos are just gergous, and the voice acting has the cast of the Advent Children movie doing all the voice work, which is nice. Sometimes it looks like a bad dub on a Godzila movie but what can you do? The in-gmae graphics are up to par with these types of games, but not up to par with what we expect from Square Exix. The updateing and custimization of your weapons is a nice style. But the problem is that everything costs gil and you can get gil in the regular game play but you get the most gil after every stage. Now the problem with this is that you can either choose the gil or take the experiance. You don't level up as you kill enimes, which would have been another typical FF event that was not included, but you just get items or gil or nothing. I was till able to level up high and get good weapons by only taking the gil twice and leveling up the whole time.
The boss fights are a joke. I only had to use two Phoenix Downs through out the entire game, and one of them was during my fight with Shelke. As long as you can keep moving and use materia when you need to and have plenty of items to replenish your hit points everything will just roll on by like a tumpling snowball that just keeps getting bigger before impact. But Dirge really has no impact. It is a fun game to play and the FMVs are amazing but nothing too compeling to make you want to play through it many times. I would rent it and then wait until it hits the $20 price drop to pick it up. Unless you're a psycho fan like myself who had it on reserve and got it day one.
Score: 7 out of 10
Being a huge Final Fantasy fan from day one on the orginal Final Fantasy on that classic grey box and being a rabid Final Fantasy VII fan I was waiting and waiting for Dirge of Cerberus to come out. Reading all the previews and articles building up to the release I was in for a third/first person shooter with awesome videos and familer characters, and that is all I got. While most are complaining about the fact that chracters like Cloud and Tifa are only in the cut scenes and we get stuck with the more annoying characters you didn't use in the regular FFVII. I can notice that Dirge of Cerberus is a side story game with side story characters. Through out the game we get enjoy/loath the hijinks of those two great FFVII personalites known as Yuffie and Cait Sith. I did think it was a little amusing when you got to play a smaller side level as Cait Sith. From a character stand point there are only two strong characters in the game, Vincent Valentine and the new characer Shelke.
While the gameplay is that of a point and shoot there could have been way better improvments with the controls. My two biggest hang ups about the controls. Number One, while you can use melee attacks you can not lock onto a character like you could in another Square Enix game, The Bouncer. Number Two, unless your aim is on Manual mode you cannot change targets. If you are on Semi-Automatic or Automatic whatever target it locks on first you have to shoot that target first until it dies or blows up. Now this is a mjor problem when you have multiple targets on teh screen at once, which happens mostly through out the game. It would be so much easier to be able to switch to the target you wish to shoot. How could they have done this? How about useing the Down on the D-Pad? Why that button? Well, that button is not even used at all in the gameplay. Knowing that this game was just going to be a shooter, that is all I was really expecting and boy did they deliver.
I found myself not caring much about Vincent's stroyline and his past and wanting more of the Shelke storyline. They do give you a lot of Shelke's and her older sister Shalua, who is defenitly not as strong of a character as Shelke is. The other characters and the rest of the Tsviets are yawnable and as most, typical. It was not made to be a compeling game and it really isn't.
The best aspect about the Dirge is that of the FMVs. Square Enix does it again with the almost as good as Advent Children videos through the cut scenes. These videos are just gergous, and the voice acting has the cast of the Advent Children movie doing all the voice work, which is nice. Sometimes it looks like a bad dub on a Godzila movie but what can you do? The in-gmae graphics are up to par with these types of games, but not up to par with what we expect from Square Exix. The updateing and custimization of your weapons is a nice style. But the problem is that everything costs gil and you can get gil in the regular game play but you get the most gil after every stage. Now the problem with this is that you can either choose the gil or take the experiance. You don't level up as you kill enimes, which would have been another typical FF event that was not included, but you just get items or gil or nothing. I was till able to level up high and get good weapons by only taking the gil twice and leveling up the whole time.
The boss fights are a joke. I only had to use two Phoenix Downs through out the entire game, and one of them was during my fight with Shelke. As long as you can keep moving and use materia when you need to and have plenty of items to replenish your hit points everything will just roll on by like a tumpling snowball that just keeps getting bigger before impact. But Dirge really has no impact. It is a fun game to play and the FMVs are amazing but nothing too compeling to make you want to play through it many times. I would rent it and then wait until it hits the $20 price drop to pick it up. Unless you're a psycho fan like myself who had it on reserve and got it day one.
Score: 7 out of 10