It didn't take long for me to realize that something was off with Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII, when I was controlling Vincent Valentine as he used a Gatling gun to fire at a horde of dogs chasing a helicopter.
Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII is a third-person shooter that was released for the PlayStation 2 in 2006. The game stars Vincent Valentine from Final Fantasy VII, who is thrust into a conflict with a military organization called Deepground. Dirge of Cerberus is a polarizing game, as it feels as if Square Enix wanted to make a shooter and slapped the Final Fantasy VII face onto it to make it sell more copies. It's time to look at the last game in the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, which is also the one that has the least to do with its source material.
Final Fantasy Shooter
Dirge of Cerberus is set three years after the events of Final Fantasy VII and a year after Advent Children. Reeve (the former Shinra executive and controller of Cait Sith) has founded the World Regenesis Organization (WRO) to help people in need following the chaos caused by Sephiroth and the Geostigma outbreak. Reeve asks for Vincent's help in discovering the origins of a mysterious military organization called Deepground, which has been slaughtering innocent people around the world. As Vincent learns more about Deepground and its connection to the Shinra Corporation, he starts to uncover more secrets about his own past and that of his lost love, Lucrecia.
Dirge of Cerberus gives Vincent the starring role as well as a range of firearms, melee attacks, and magic spells to take down enemies. Vincent can traverse the environment using his double jump ability and can dash to escape enemy gunfire. It's possible for Vincent to temporarily use his Galian Beast form from Final Fantasy VII with the help of Limit Breaker items, which allows him to fire blasts of homing energy and perform vicious melee attacks. The game is broken into twelve chapters, which consist of levels filled with gun-wielding enemies that Vincent has to kill or evade.
Gameplay & Story Segregation
The gameplay of Dirge of Cerberus is just an average shooter of its era. The gunplay is decent and feels satisfying, even if Vincent himself is slow and doesn't dodge very well. There are a lot of moments where the player takes damage because enemies immediately fire as you enter a new area, which comes off feeling cheap when it happens for the hundredth time. Fortunately, the game gives the player an abundance of healing items and the people who just want to experience the story shouldn't have much of a problem finishing the Normal difficulty. The game is also pretty generous when it comes to auto-aiming and Vincent still hitting the enemy even if the crosshair isn't totally aligned with them.
It feels as if the developers were in love with the idea of Vincent Valentine, as he looks like the most badass anime character ever in cutscenes. The cutscene version of Vincent pulls off the kinds of moves that you would see in The Matrix. It's just a shame that the gameplay doesn't match the cutscenes, as all of Vincent's boss battles involve him running around slowly in a circle and repeatedly firing at damage sponges. This gameplay/story segregation happens throughout the whole game and it makes you want to play as the cool version of Vincent from the cutscenes, rather than the guy who slowly ice-skates through the levels.
The Bad Stuff
In terms of gameplay, Dirge of Cerberus is a generic shooter with a couple of enjoyable moments. As a follow-up to Final Fantasy VII, it's a total disaster.
The Compilation of Final Fantasy VII had a problem with introducing new elements that don't gel with the established story of the original game. In the case of Dirge of Cerberus, it's the Tsviets of Deepground. It turns out that the Shinra Corporation had ANOTHER secret military organization filled with super soldiers, who no one knew about except for the top Shinra executives. The Deepground members were sealed up so well that it took them a couple of years to escape from beneath the old Shinra HQ and start causing havoc in the world.
The Tsviets are the most powerful members of Deepground, whose ostentatious designs and outfits are matched by their lack of personality. The Tsviets are generic villains from the big book of anime stereotypes and the battles against them are completely forgettable. They are not worthy follow-ups to Sephiroth or the Shinra executives.
Dirge of Cerberus also has the absolute worst thing in the Final Fantasy franchise. It's not Genesis, it's not Final Fantasy XIII, it's not even The Spirits Within, no... Dirge of Cerberus has extended scenes with Cait Sith and his stupid Scottish accent.
Cait Sith was one of the worst things in Final Fantasy VII. It was stupid that a secretive terrorist organization would hang out with two ostentatious robots that attract attention wherever they go, just so that it could betray them to further the plot later in the story. Dirge of Cerberus has voice acting, which is mostly decent, but the annoying Scottish version of Cait Sith is horrendous and needs to die. It doesn't help that you actually control this version of Cait Sith in one of the worst stealth levels in video game history. The producers of Dirge of Cerberus somehow managed to make Cait Sith worse than he already was, which is certainly an achievement.
The Pointless Secret Ending
The players who track down the G-Report items can access a secret ending that gives fans their first glimpse of Genesis Rhapsodos from Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII. The secret ending shows Genesis finding the body of Weiss the Immaculate (the main villain of the game) and flying off with it, claiming that it's not the time for slumber.
This secret ending has never been followed up on. Dirge of Cerberus never had a sequel and the only canonical event after this point is the ending of Final Fantasy VII, which happens five hundred years after the events of the game. We still don't know why Genesis took Weiss' body, as the Crisis Core Complete Guide said that he reappeared to protect the world, but from what? Sephiroth, Jenova, Shinra, the Weapons, and Deepground were all gone at this point, so why did Genesis return after they had been defeated?
We will likely never know that Marty Stu nonsense Genesis got up to after the events of Dirge of Cerberus, as Final Fantasy VII Remake has seemingly abandoned the new elements from the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII. This is for the best, as Dirge of Cerberus is a game best scrubbed from the canon of the series. There are some enjoyable moments in Vincent's adventure, but it fails at being a successor to Final Fantasy VII. We can only hope Square Enix uses this chance for a do-over and creates an actual worthy follow-up to Final Fantasy VII in the future, once the remake series is completed.