Preview
Platform:
PlayStation 2Developer:
Square-Enix Co., Ltd.Publisher:
Square-Enix USAPreviewed by
Ash Paulsen on 2006-07-26
A couple of months ago, I wrote an E3 2006 preview of Square Enixís upcoming ìgun-action RPG,î
Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII, based on the demo I played on the show floor. Those of you who read that preview will remember that I wasnít all that impressed with the way the game played. Even though it looked pretty and promised to tell a good story, the game itself was just too slow and clunky for an experience that was supposed to make me feel like I was playing as Vincent Valentine,
Final Fantasy VIIís sleek, brooding gunman. Irritating oversights such as the fact that you had to go into a close over-the-shoulder viewpoint - during which you could barely move around - in order to fire at enemies made the game a chore to play, and did not do its title character justice.
Then, shortly after E3, Square made a surprising announcement: for the gameís impending US and European releases, they were planning to address the various gameplay complaints that had been leveled at the game following its Japanese release and, presumably, its E3 showing. This is not a move game developers often make, and with the quality of the gameplay already so questionable, I met this announcement with cautious skepticism.
Imagine my surprise then when, during my annual outing to the San Diego Comic-Con last week, I made my way to Square Enixís floor in the Exhibit Hall only to be presented with a new demo of a game that I could hardly recognize any more. Sure, the core game is still very much the same, but what I played at Comic-Con last week was at once both a new
Dirge and a much, much better one.
The first thing I should mention is the default speed at which Vincent moves and runs. Where Vincent used to take his sweet time making his way about the ruins of Midgar, he now moves at quite a clip. This is an instant improvement, because a character like Vincent lends himself to the motion of fast, fluid movement; just look at his high-flying antics in
Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children (as well as in
Dirgeís own cinemas) for an example of what I mean.
Next, we find that Vincentís midair agility has been augmented considerably. Now, not only is he capable of a genre-classic double jump, but he can execute both melee and gun attacks in midair (in the Japanese version, heís only able to attack while on the ground, a very limiting factor). This just makes the game feel even more right at home; very much the way I felt it should have been when I played it back in May.
But the most overwhelmingly wonderful gameplay overhaul has to do with the meat of the game: the gunplay. As I said before, hitting the R1 button in the Japanese version caused the game to switch to an extremely close, over-the-shoulder view where you would aim at enemies using a crosshair positioned at Vincentís firing point. There were two major problems with this: first, Vincent moved at a snailís pace and could not jump while in this aiming mode, which basically made him a sitting duck and really screwed up the gameís flow during firefights, where you had to stop moving around and go into this aiming mode every single time you wanted to fire at an enemy. (It goes without mentioning that the enemies never suffered from this problem, which unrealistically handicapped Vincent and hurt the game even more.) Second, this close, over-the-shoulder view basically obstructed the playerís view of the entire lower-left corner of the field, making for some awkward moments where Vincent would be taking damage without knowing where the attacks were coming from.
Since then, Square has thankfully and most beautifully addressed these major issues. In this reworked version of the game, hitting R1 still brings up a crosshair in the middle of the screen, but skips over changing the cameraís view entirely which means the flow of the game is not interrupted, and the playerís view of the action is not skewed. Hitting R1 again after bringing up the crosshair makes Vincent fire whatever gun he has equipped at the time, the properties of which change depending on what kind of gun youíre using (a shotgun, a machine gun, etc.). But hereís the real deal-maker: you now retain
full control over Vincent while in this attacking mode. You can run and jump freely while firing at enemies, giving you much more direct control over your shooting and dodging strategies. After playing both versions of the game, I canít even begin to express how huge a difference this one change makes. That is also not to say that the game is necessarily made easier because of it, either; on the contrary, the games poses a considerable challenge from what I could tell, but at least now the challenge isnít because of some shoddy gameplay decisions.
I donít want to give you the impression that
Dirge is suddenly shaping up to be some genre-defying, epic fusion of RPGs and shooters youíll remember forever. Itís nothing like that; itís still fairly apparent from playing this new version of the game that Square Enix is not a developer known for its fantastic shooters. Still, they must be applauded for taking a game that really had a lot of fundamental problems and attempting to turn it into something much, much better, and create a gameplay experience thatís much more cohesive and streamlined than what Japanese players originally got. Will all of this tweaking make a difference when the game proper is finally released in mid-August? I canít say for sure quite yet, but this improved
Dirge is looking a lot more promising than it was before.
