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Story
The Story of Dirge Of Cerberus is set three years after the events of Advent Children. This time instead of Cloud Strife, players will be able to control Vincent Valentine; a sub character in Final Fantasy VII. The Story starts off with a festival in Kalm Town: The Revival Festival. A group of soldiers known as the Deep Ground Soldiers are looking for Vincent and invade the festival letting loose many rabid creatures and capturing villagers. Vincent of course with the help of Yuffie goes to help the villagers and fight off the DGS.
Many years ago the Shinra company has been constructing these soldiers for a use unknown to the public. It seems it was being carried out in secret. Suddenly a halt in the production and engineering began due to the meteor that sephiroth summoned. They were stuck underground for a long time. The reason for the Deep Ground Soldiers are to lure out Omega Weapon, the ancient most powerful of the Weapons. To do this they need Vincent to help them....
Review
Before Final Fantasy X-2, the series was mainly 2 things: the numbered series with no direct sequels, and the offshoots such as Tactics or Crystal Chronicles. Then X-2 comes along and we get a continuation of a Final Fantasy story, a series first. Well apparently since then, Square got in an excited mode and released their plan for the "Compilation of Final Fantasy VII". First was Advent Children, the CG movie that was well-liked but had its detractors. There was also Last Order, an anime style short, then there's Crisis Core and Before Crisis. Next is Dirge of Cerberus, which focuses on Vincent Valentine. It's not that it's a terrible game per se, it's just that everything that's not the actual gameplay itself works.
Story: Set 3 years after Meteorfall(when Sephiroth summoned the Meteor but was destroyed by Holy and the Lifestream), there's a new group of enemies known as Deepground and they seem to be after civilians. It's up to Vincent as well as some cameos and appearances by his friends as well as new ones and enemies to figure what's the connection between the disappearing civilians and Omega.
Graphics: I'll simply state it: the FMV's are just simply gorgeous. Taking the lushness of the scenes from X with the fluidity and character detail of Advent Children and it makes a gorgeous background for the story. The in-game grpahics? Well not so much. While it's nice to see VII's locations in full 3D, there's a kind of blandness to it all. The in-game cutscenes though are nice and similar to X's look and feel.
Sound/Music: It's a very um...pretty soundtrack. There's many tracks here that are really nice to listen to. There's no real One Winged Angel or anything, that instant downloadable track but they're fairly easy to listen to. The voice acting is slight hit and miss. Vincent personally sounds way too gruff and I've never liked Cid or Cait Sith's accents. It does however contain nice work from Christy Carlson Romano(yes the Disney girl) as Yuffie and Lucrecia by April Stewart.
Gameplay: Essentially Cerberus is like a cross between Resident Evil 4 and Devil May Cry. You move Vincent around a 3D environment and pressing R1 will bring up a targeting area and you can use that to aim and shoot. Unlike RE4, you can actually run which seriously helps. Enemies pack quite a wallop, especially those machine gun wielding guys and your health can drain fast. You can turn into a demon using a Limit Break item and get more enhanced powers. The big problem is that the radar kind of sucks. Enemies have incredibly aim and they can easily nail you from a mile away and you can't tell where they are. The other major hiccup, besides the general stagnant feeling of the combat, is the items. Throughout the entire game, you're only allowed a specific number of items and you can easily drain your entire health meter before you even come close to another item vendor(oddly enough, it's a jukebox).
Is it a difficult game? Well it probably feels easy at times but then you find trouble spots. Like I said, enemies can pack quite a wallop and your health can go down considerably fast and when you're only allowed to carry 2 hi-potions, it gets really frustrating when you're overwhelmed. Speaking of which, there's many times in the game where you take on at least 6-7 soldiers by yourself, and you feel like "well that isn't fair". What does get points is the story. Seeing old characters is always great and the story is kind of interesting. In particular, the backstory between Vincent and Lucrecia is wonderfully fleshed out, making her a bigger presence(plus she's so cute). Only problem with the story is at times it doesn't make sense while other times it feels like an extension of Final Fantasy X. Maybe it's the presentation but it didn't really feel like VII, it felt like VII using an X template, if that makes sense...probably doesn't.
Should you buy it? If you're a HUGE Final Fantasy fan then go for it. As for everyone else, not really. It's a fine rental, which is kind of sad really.
Release Dates
Platform: Playstation 2
ESRB: Teen
Players: 1
Discs: 1
Genre: RPG
Media: CDROM |
 November 17 2006
 January 25 2006
 August 22 2006 |
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