THE PLOT:
The town of Kalm is holding a celebration, so Vincent Valentine is there to... um, brood in an inn. His reverie is cut short when the town comes under attack. Vincent does his best to save as many people as he can, but most of the town's population is abducted.
Reeve, head of the World Regenesis Organization (WRO), tells him that the attack was the work of "Deep Ground," one of entirely too many dirty secrets of the Shinra organization. The WRO has done its best to keep things quiet to avoid panic, but Kalm is not the first community to be attacked. Deep Ground has a plan - one that could lead to the end of the world!
 |
| Vincent Valentine investigates a series of abductions. And pauses to pose under the full moon, of course. |
CHARACTERS:
"That was my sin. This is my punishment."
-Vincent broods portentously on his angst over his tragic backstory.
Vincent Valentine: Dirge of Cerberus gives the spotlight to Vincent Valentine, the original game's cool-looking, sort-of vampire-like party member. And it proceeds to... turn him into a Cloud knockoff, as he spends the game obsessing over his past. Something the original game's Vincent did only when it directly came up. Steve Blum is a fine voice actor, but he doesn't have anything to work with beyond grave pronouncements and angsty quotes.
Shelke: A Deep Ground operative who specializes in finding information through "Synaptic Net Dives" (SNDs) - so, basically a computer hacker. Vincent and the WRO capture Shelke relatively early in the game, and we learn that she was actually captured by Deep Ground as a child. Her treatment has left her all but emotionless - but freed of the influence of her captors, she gradually bonds with Vincent and the others. Her arc is entirely predictable, but still reasonably effective, and she emerges as probably the best of the game's major characters.
Shaluah: Shelke's sister, who has been searching for her ever since her abduction ten years earlier. She lost an eye and an arm during her quest, but the first thing I noticed about her wasn't that: It was her outfit. "Fan service" female outfits are sadly part and parcel of most science fiction/fantasy anime, but this is the most bizarre example I can recall. She wears a lab coat to denote her status as a scientist, but it only loosely drapes off her shoulders, leaving her tight, midriff-baring crop top and tiny skirt on full display. If it stopped there, it would be normal bad anime fan service - but she also wears a strange sort of cloth wrap that tightly encircles her upper thighs, leaving me to constantly wonder how she manages to walk, let alone fight. I can also only assume that the lab coat is held in place with superglue, as it would otherwise fall off when she so much as breathes.
The Team: One thing Dirge of Cerberus does well is to shift focus to characters who are usually on the periphery. Cloud, Tifa, and Barrett only appear briefly. Instead, we spend a decent amount of time with Yuffie (Mae Whitman), Cait Sith (Greg Ellis), and WRO head Reeve (Jamieson Price). These three actually come across pretty well, the lightness and energy of Cait Sith and Yuffie a welcome relief from the deadly serious Vincent. Yuffie gets what may be the only good character moment in the game: After rescuing Vincent from the bad guys around the midpoint, she makes a show of demanding thanks for her heroics... only to become flustered when Vincent actually does thank her. It's a throwaway bit, but it rings true in a way that none of the brooding of the rest of the game manages.
 |
| Vincent vs. the Dragonfly: one of the game's first boss battles. |
GAMEPLAY:
Dirge of Cerberus is something unusual for Final Fantasy: A third person shooter. The player (mostly) controls Vincent as he rampages across twelve chapters, each of which involves killing enemies by shooting them, by pulverizing them with melee attacks, or by using magic - er, "materia" - to burn, freeze, or shock them to death.
As a shooter, it's pretty standard. You get three guns: your standard pistol, a machine gun, and a sniper rifle (a couple additional variants you'll likely never use are added for the final two levels). You loot bullets, along with the occasional health potion, from dead bodies and crates. You also will come across a ludicrously generous number of stations dispensing all of these needed items. Never mind Vincent's adventures with Deep Ground; I want the story behind the enterprising entrepreneur who's installed these health-and-bullet vending machines in abandoned mansions, reactors, and sewers!
While unexceptional, the actual gameplay is reasonably engaging. There are a few clunky elements. Melee attacks are downright broken. Unless Vincent is literally overtop of the target (and occasionally, even then), he is at least as likely to spin away from the enemy as toward it. If the sniper scope is attached to your gun, it's far too easy to bump the control stick and engage it at the worst possible moment. I think I took more damage due to those two issues than to anything else.
The rest of the controls are fine, though, particularly once you learn the game's patterns. In fact, at least on "Normal" difficulty, I'd rate this as an easy game, but most of the time spent playing is at least somewhat fun.
No, the problem here isn't the gameplay. It's the story - and given how long some of the cutscenes are, the story becomes a real problem...
 |
| Shelke identifies Vincent for Deep Ground. |
THOUGHTS:
"So Rosso the Crimson told you that Protomateria is the key to controlling Omega?"
-just a sampling of the sparkling dialogue propelling the scintillating story of Dirge of Cerberus
Oh, dear. And the whole Final Fantasy VII Chronology seemed to be going so well...
I was originally going to put a disclaimer in here about how shooters are not my genre, meaning that Dirge of Cerberus starts at a disadvantage with me. However, as I noted above, I actually found the gameplay to be fairly enjoyable. It's the story that's the problem. The plot is mainly advanced through cutscenes, both in-mission and between missions. These scenes are frequent, and some of them run quite long - in a few cases, longer than the levels themselves. This would be fine if the narrative was of high quality.
It isn't.
Most story information is delivered by characters making speeches. Dialogue is bad, often laughably so, and is stuffed with the sort of pseudo-philosophical nonsense that bad anime scripts seem to think is profound. The unfortunate voice actors - many of whom have done fine work elsewhere, including in these roles - are left gravely intoning nonsense while inserting enough pregnant pauses to fill a nursery.
Oh, and you know the talking villain cliche? Chapter Eleven delivers not one... not two... but three (!) villains who monologue at Vincent, one of them at such length that I half expected him to break out flowcharts!
I'll add there's a little skeeviness in the epilogue, which suggests that Vincent's "reward" will come in the form of hooking up with a teenage girl who has been drawn to look particularly young throughout the story. Just thinking about the final look the two characters exchange makes me want to go wash my hands. Vigorously.
 |
| Vincent meets Shaluah, whose outfit is distracting in ways the developers probably didn't intend. |
VISUAL DESIGN
The bulk of the game is set at night, and "Playstation 2 washout" is very much in evidence. It's particularly noticeable when Vincent visits the abandoned mansion from the original game. Despite the capabilities of the PS2, everything in the mansion looks drab and almost featureless. Should the textures in a PS2 game look less detailed than those in a PS1 title?
Outside of this level, the game generally looks decent, and the anime cutscenes are of particularly high quality. I just hope you like blues and greens, because that's most of what you're going to see here...
OVERALL:
I have been generally impressed by how the various Final Fantasy VII spinoffs - both games and anime films - have developed and expanded the world created in the 1997 original. Until Dirge of Cerberus. This game's story does not expand the world. It doesn't even tell a good story; bad anime clichés mix with nonsense to create something that borders on incoherence, and that fully crosses over into stupidity.
On a gameplay basis, I'd probably rate this a "5." The shooter mechanics are generic, but there is fun to be had in blasting through the levels. As a bonus, the game has the courtesy to make its cutscenes skippable.
However, as is likely apparent by now, I am far more of a "story-and-characters" gamer than a "hack-and-blast" one. And on a story basis, I'd have a hard time awarding more than a "1."
Finally, even speaking as a non-shooter fan... There are far, far better shooters out there than this.
Overall Rating: 3/10.
Preceded by: Final Fantasy VII - On the Way to a Smile - Episode: Denzel
Previous Main Series Game: Final Fantasy VII
Next Main Series Game: Final Fantasy VIII
Previous Release: Final Fantasy - Crystal Chronicles (not yet reviewed)
Next Release: Final Fantasy XII (not yet reviewed)
Review Index
To receive new review updates, follow me:
On Twitter:
On Threads:
No comments:
Post a Comment