Final Fantasy VII became an unbelievable success for Square. It basically secured the PlayStation’s status as the de facto console for hardcore JRPGs, leaving Nintendo in the dust. While the next few Final Fantasy games would also be successes in their own right, Square underwent major structural shifts internally and inevitably merged with Enix due to the legendary failure of Square Pictures’ cinematic ventures.
Hironobu Sakaguchi left Square and took all of the artistic credibility with him, leaving only Square Enix and a cavalcade of corporate mummies to extract everything they could from the IPs he established. Without anyone to stop them, the executive staff mandated the “Compilation of Final Fantasy VII“, a multimedia expansion designed to milk Square’s most popular Final Fantasy.
By the 2000s, shooters were hot, and it made financial sense to exploit Final Fantasy VII with a shooter spin-off. During this time, the pop singer Gackt was part of the cultural zeitgeist in Japan, and video games were becoming increasingly edgy. Was Dirge of Cerberus just a trend-chasing shooter, created to indulge a producer’s obsession with Western FPS games while damaging the Final Fantasy VII brand for endless sequel potential and pulling off a blatant cross-promotional cash grab with Japanese pop star Gackt… or did it have any redeeming qualities?
Three years after saving the world from Sephiroth’s Meteor, Vincent Valentine is yanked from his brooding session because a secret underground rave of military edge-lords called Deepground has crawled out of Midgar’s sewers to kidnap civilians. It turns out that while Sephiroth was busy trying to obliterate the planet, Deepground was waiting for the perfect moment to use Omega Weapon to suck up the Lifestream. It is completely unbelievable that an entire army of bloodthirsty, hyper-powerful soldiers sat silently in their basement through a corporate coup, a terrorist insurgency, a giant monster attack, a localised apocalypse, and a world-ending meteor strike without a single person noticing, mentioning them, or Deepground intervening to save their own lives.
To stop Deepground, Vincent shoots his way through miles of identical grey hallways, sits through twenty-minute slideshows of his ex-girlfriend Lucrecia crying about her bad life choices, and eventually transforms into a literal demon to defeat the cybernetic ghost of Professor Hojo. So much of Dirge‘s story relies heavily on rewriting established characters, retconning events, and narrative cheats that undermine the original Final Fantasy VII because it was never supposed to be more than one game.
Dead characters return with flimsy, unearned explanations, and if they don’t, they’re replaced by suspiciously similar substitutes that diminish the original characters’ value. By refusing to let its characters stay dead, Dirge of Cerberus has no weight to the original narrative’s sacrifices. Nothing in this universe ever truly ends if there is a corporate budget to bring it back.
The “Final Fantasy VII Compilation” was meant to expand and deepen its world, but ironically ended up making it feel smaller by forcing every major global event, hidden history, and catastrophic threat to centre around the same small group of people and locations. The planet’s ancient, mystical history becomes laughably small when it is revealed that almost every major player is directly related or has dated. Instead of an epic fantasy world, the lore collapses into a messy love triangle.
Dirge of Cerberus‘ gaping holes and sloppy connections to the real Final Fantasy VII could have been overlooked if it could stand on its own and tell a new story, but it doesn’t. It slavishly leans on the original and contemptuously dangles keys in front of players without ever respecting their intelligence. The most insulting aspect of this game is that it dares to claim to be a sequel to Final Fantasy VII.
The entire scenario and story might unfold like getting kicked in the teeth, but maybe the shooting action is fun, right? It’s not like Square Enix wasn’t capable of making quality action games, so maybe there is some hope? The nicest thing that can be said about Dirge of Cerberus is that it isn’t broken. It’s just unrelentingly dull. The original Gungrave had more going on, and that was a low-budget game with only six levels.
Based on the game’s cutscenes, one would assume that Vincent would be a demon with revolvers, dashing and leaping like Spawn and doing gun-fu. This is not the case when actually playing as him. Vincent is nowhere near as flexible or dynamic as he is in cutscenes. His playability is basic and controls like any garden-variety third-person shooter. His dash feels sticky and has a slightly longer cooldown than necessary, and his close-range melee is basically useless. The controls are stiff compared to the likes of other third-person shooters at the time, like Max Payne or its sequel.
A lot of Dirge of Cerberus’ mechanical shortcomings might have gotten by if the level design fostered interesting scenarios, but it was not meant to be. The level design feels like it was designed like a flat 1990s dungeon crawler, completely ignoring the basic principles of verticality, pacing, and tactical environmental design that modern shooters had already established. Almost the entire game consists of completely flat right-angled corridors, generic underground sewers, concrete bunkers, and heavily recycled industrial warehouses. The environment feels disconnected from the gameplay, with each room resembling a box linked to a hallway, leading to another box. This setup removes any sense of immersion, making it feel less like exploring the ruins of the grand metropolis of Midgar and more like being stuck in lifeless offices.
Interestingly, Dirge of Cerberus was worse before its Western release. There were plenty of gameplay tweaks to make it more enjoyable to play. One of these changes was adding double-jumping, which helps make Vincent feel better to play but is ultimately useless since the game’s foundation and geometry weren’t built around it. As a result, there are countless obstacles Vincent should be able to jump over, but collisions and invisible walls still prevent him from feeling any real mobility or encouraging exploration.
Shockingly, there was originally a full-on online mode that was ripped out for the Western release. To compensate, Square Enix smartly repurposed the assets and environments to make side missions. This is admittedly forward-thinking on Square Enix’s part, but it’s ultimately wasted on mediocre mechanics and tedious shooting. Vincent’s upgrade system, while promising in theory, ends up being pointless due to stiff shooting mechanics and brain-dead enemy AI. Levelling up Vincent’s base stats hardly makes a difference. The best strategy is to ignore upgrades altogether, convert everything to gil, and craft an overpowered, game-breaking weapon.
It should come as no surprise that Dirge of Cerberus is a pretty game with impressive character models and stylish cutscenes. Square and, by extension, Square Enix have always pushed the envelope with their visual presentation, and even this turkey doesn’t disappoint. The pre-rendered and real-time cutscenes look great. Character models are impressively detailed, animated and designed. The overall aesthetic leans on the Y2K-era of “mall goth”, and while it was considered pretty cheesy back when the game was new, it helps give Dirge of Cerberus its identity. Even the Final Fantasy remake series doesn’t capture this specific look and feel that perfectly puts players in the mopey and melodramatic mindset.
Unfortunately, the visual style brought with it the added downside of including Gackt, whose presence is blatant corporate sequel-bait. This move forced writers to retroactively alter the franchise’s history, elevating his self-insert character into a central, ever-present figure in the loathsome Crisis Core. Gackt’s intrusion of the Final Fantasy VII universe prioritised shallow celebrity promotion over authentic world building and ultimately diminished the series’ overall integrity.
Final Fantasy as a whole is in a very weird place today, and so much of its follies can be traced back to this game. Dirge of Cerberus became the model for their lost decade, setting the stage for prioritising corporate synergy, chasing trends, and indulging in shallow drama over the deep world building and narrative freedom that originally made them iconic.
