Final Fantasy 7: Dirge of Cerberus
At first I was a bit hesitent about purchasing Final Fantasy 7: Dirge of Cerberus. It didn’t fit the traditional turn-based style of role-playing games as the games before it. But after playing only an hour of this game. I was sucked in to the world of Vincent Valentine. A gunman who’s as serious as Auron from Final Fantasy 10 and just as emo as Cloud.
When I started playing the game I went through the Turk training as young Vincent. It was difficult at first to work the camera angles and they didn’t readily tell you how to use the materia you collect and attach to your gun Cerberus. Before the game start you relive Vincent’s past efforts to clear out Midgar and get the people to safety apparently after the Meteor fall events from the original game took place. You know, the scene where the planet called upon Holy to deflect the meteor Sephiroth summoned. Just as Yuffie (my favorite) clears out the last of the civilians living near the old Shin-ra building a life is detected near the mako cannon. Running up to see who is up there Vincent runs up the stairs to find *foreshadowing* Doctor Hojo. *End foreshadowing.*
The movie ends and you beging the tutorial of learning how to control Vincent by going through the turk training simulator, when your done another movie begins and you find yourself in a motel in the center of Kalm. People dancing in the street, ladies doing their shopping and children playing … that is til Deepground crashes the celebration, that’s when Vincent’s journey begins. You take out the deepground soldiers terrorizing the civilians and so on. For me, it was irritating at first especially having to deal with camera angle constantly. If you don’t straighten the camera out by hitting L3, you find yourself running into walls, one of the beasties kicking your butt and you can’t seem to turn the camera in time to take them out before you run out of life. Another annoyance is the babbling Cait Sith. If you thought the big fat pink blob was annoying in the original game, the scrawny alley cat that road on the blob is even more annoying with its bizzare irish accent. You’d almost believe it’s Lucky the Leprechaun in a cat suit.
The artificial intelligence used in this game were average, not too many dummies to deal with. The visuals are quite pleasant and you find yourself pushing yourself to the end of the chapter to learn more about Vincent’s past. The real connection between him and Lucrecia – how they first met to how Vincent became the man of mystery he is today – which gets deeper with each chapter. I found myself so involved in the game I simply just could not put it down yelling at the game: “WHO IS VINCENT VALENTINE?!? I WANT TO KNOW!!!”
But as the story goes on you also learn of another Valentine and the relationship between Vincent and Chaos unfolds and you fall in love with Vincent as you near the end of your journey. And you thought chaos in the original game was awesome, you’re gonna find yourself triggering Galean alot through out this game and waiting for the chaos transformation. And when Chaos makes his presence known you’re screaming with glee.
But to end each chapter you have to fight the bosses, each one getting harder and more challenging than the next. So level up as much as you can. The good thing about this game is you can go back to find secret items that will unlock several character bios, movie clips from the game, extra missions that will help you level up and a secret movie at the end you will have to find yourself. So be prepared to kiss the ground alot and popping open that can of soda in celebration and playing it again. So let’s wrap this up.
PROS: Deep storylines. Loveable and hateable characters. Challenging bosses. Somewhat decent enemies to fight. The ability to change or upgrade your weapons during battle. Challenging sidequests and CGI movies.
CONS: Irritating camera angles. The inability to carry more than two or four of any health potions or ether at any given time. When you activiate the map, you can’t see what your doing especially when it pops up after you use a potion. Any scene where you are playing or listening to Cait Sith.
