The culprit: Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII (PlayStation 2)

I’ll always regret the £5 I spent on Dirge of Cerberus. Yes, it’s a used copy, yes, it was cheap, yes, this was four years ago. But none of that changes the fact that it’s a terrible game. I’d heard the bad reviews before, and I really should have listened, but a sort of morbid fascination guided my hand, like watching an imminent train wreck. Mind you, I hadn’t yet played Crisis Core at that point, so I had no precedent as to what to expect. Vincent was my favourite character in Final Fantasy VII, and the simple fact of him being the protagonist of his own game felt like he was finally getting some much-deserved limelight.

Well, he certainly didn’t deserve this.

The first reason why DoC doesn’t work is because it’s a third-person shooter derived from an RPG. While it probably makes sense on a theoretical level, since Vincent’s weapon of choice is a gun, after all, it fails in execution. First of all, you immediately start to wonder why the rest of the FFVII crew isn’t helping him. There’s a world-threatening crisis, surely they don’t all have better things to do? He does get some minor assistance from Yuffie and Reeve/Cait Sith, but that’s it. The latter actually features in a short infiltration sequence, but it’s terminally useless, thoroughly out of place, and the only worse character they could’ve picked from the original FFVII cast is Aeris/Aerith. Good thing they couldn’t. Mweheh. Anyway, I guess the rest of the old crew were having a BBQ party. Or a massive case of indigestion. Who knows?

Be that as it may, the shooter format feels like a simplistic downgrade from the RPG one. Corridor-riddled maps with invisible walls all over the place, no exploration to speak of, and character interaction reduced to cutscenes, often including idiotic dialogue. Still, shooters can be entertaining, when they’re well-executed, but this is most definitely not the case here. Everything looks and feels stilted, clunky and unwieldy. Combat is slow and extremely repetitive. Movement…well, Vincent can jump, but he’s either carrying bricks in his pockets, or those metallic toe-caps of his must weigh a ton. Possibly both. And this is the English version of the game; I’m told the original Japanese release was even worse.

To further damn the gameplay, some RPG elements still remain: the game is broken down into 12 chapters, which are further subdivided into stages, each with its own (frequently asinine) goal to achieve, and Vincent gains a certain amount of EXP at the end of each according to his performance. This can be used to level him up or transformed into money he can spend on supplies, such as ammo or potions (of which he can only carry a ridiculously small amount), or spare parts to upgrade his guns (of which he has three different models). The latter can quickly become expensive, meaning that you either have to sacrifice a significant chunk of EXP to be able to afford them or pray that enemies will drop wads of cash. Needless to say that this is a restrictive system, which penalises people who aren’t good at shooters. Scratch that: people who aren’t good at DoC, because the only less user-friendly gun mechanics I can think of are in the original Silent Hill.

Vincent can also use a melee combo if enemies manage to get up close and personal, but I’ll let you guess how often that comes in handy. He also has access to materia (it wouldn’t be an FFVII game without it), but there’s such a small selection of it that, once again, you’re left wondering where everything else went. The same thing happens to Vincent’s trademark shapeshifting Limit Breaks, of which he had four different ones in FFVII. In DoC, he can only use the Galian Beast. There’s a (largely implausible) storyline reason why he can’t use Chaos, but what happened to the other two? Did he suddenly incur partial amnesia? We shall never know. Be that as it may, the Galian Beast does pack a wallop, but also looks terminally silly, with Vincent’s cape serving as a loincloth. To trigger it, he must use a consumable item mysteriously named Limit Breaker. Is it drugs? Steroids? Red Bull? The game certainly doesn’t tell you, and Limit Breaks didn’t work that way in FFVII, so the mystery remains complete.

I’m not actually a stickler for smooth gameplay, and I can disregard quite a lot if the storyline and/or characters compensate for it. But by that reasoning, DoC would have to be nothing short of a literary masterpiece. As you can probably guess, this is far from being the case. Sequels are tricky to manage at the best of times, even when the original story deliberately leaves loose ends that would allow for one. FFVII certainly didn’t, and DoC isn’t any better in its premise than Advent Children was. It even references the abomination that is Genesis, the Sephiroth-wannabe and sorry excuse for a villain introduced in Crisis Core. The result is an insipid mess, as full of plotholes as a slab of gruyère, involving a super-secret, heretofore unknown and nefarious branch of Shinra, which performs human experiments and whose goal, once again, is to destroy the planet. My only interest was to get some insight into Vincent’s past, and more specifically, Lucrecia’s side of the story, which went largely ignored in FFVII. DoC does delve into these questions, but it loses itself in a morass of retcons, additions, thoroughly implausible developments…and stupid outfits. An example would be the introduction of Vincent’s father as a character. Fair enough, but 1) he’s essentially nothing more than a plot device and gets about two minutes of total screentime, 2) why the hell is he called Grimoire?! (which is a kind of spellbook), and 3) why is he dressed like Van Helsing, when he was supposedly a scientist? And for that matter, what kind of scientist wears a frilly blouse and asymmetrical frilly skirt? *points at Lucrecia* Don’t ask me where she got a change of clothes before encasing herself into that crystal she’s in, either (how did she manage that, by the way?)

This brings us to the character department, which is just another nail in the game’s coffin (get it?…Vincent…coffin…ok, I’ll just let myself out). Lucrecia gradually becomes appropriately deranged, and Hojo is his usual psychotic self. That’s about all the positive I can dredge up though. Vincent gets all his emo dials cranked up a few notches and is reduced to about half a normal human being’s width. It’s a wonder he doesn’t snap in half whenever there’s a gust of wind. Yuffie’s just as annoying as ever, Reeve is useless at best, and the rest of the FFVII team features in a horribly cheesy cameo at the end of the game. Other than that, the character lineup features such wonderful highlights as a set of villains redundantly named after colours. Eg. Azul the Cerulean: ‘azul’ is ‘blue’ in Spanish, and ‘cerulean’ is a type of blue…so the result is Blue the Blue…*facepalm* There’s also a half-robotic female scientist wearing what can only be described as remnants of clothing (where did they ever see a scientist like that?!), which would seriously not look out of place in a strip club, and her sister, who suffers from the Presea syndrome: arrested development due to scientific tampering, which left her as a 19-year-old in a 9-year-old body…who fights with a laser skipping rope. This is already creepy in and of itself–what with the ‘sexy’ pose she strikes on her official render–, but the game pushes the creepiness further by introducing a storyline development whereby she gradually takes on Lucrecia’s personality traits. While this may presage the worst, I’m happy to report that Vincent manages to avoid Pedobear-worthy territory. But just barely.

The game features some extras, such as well-hidden memory capsules which you can shoot to unlock an artwork gallery, and G-Reports, which you can collect to obtain an extra ending scene. However, it’s essentially a piece of self-insert marketing by Gackt, a Japanese artist, who also penned two songs for the game, so it’s really not worth the effort. Apart from that, there are also 40 side missions which unlock progressively as you complete them. I made a half-hearted attempt at them, only to promptly give up. They bring absolutely nothing to the storyline–not that there’s anything interesting about it to begin with–, and I couldn’t find any valid reason to subject myself to more of that gameplay. As for the music…um, I guess the best I can say is that it fits the dark atmosphere of the game? It’s mostly a series of orchestral musings with very little in the way of catchy melodies; a couple of tracks at best. And then there are the two Gackt songs, the existence of which I keep trying to forget.

The best thing I can say about this game is that the cinematics are beautiful. Except they’re few and far between and  are achieved at the expense of in-game graphics, which are blocky, blurry and usually either grey or brown. Bottom line? Do yourself a favour and stay very far away from this mess. Even if you like Vincent. Or, should I say, especially if you like Vincent.