Famitsu gives Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII, the mediocre shooting game starring a big, rat's-nest-haired man from Final Fantasy VII, a score of 7 7 7 7. Going by what we have already established as the "Four-Point Famitsu Scale" (where 7s are 1s and 10s are 4s), this game scores a total of four points. Last week, if you remember, I said I was rather enjoying the game. I guess I was enjoying it because it looked very pretty.
The interesting part of the game (which consisted of my constantly thinking, "Yeah, this looks about to get interesting") ended around hour four, and I just became disenchanted with it all. For one thing, Vincent Valentine, the enigmatic hero, seldom speaks a full sentence, though I suppose his "Sumanai" could be translated as a full sentence ("I am sorry"), though it's just one word.
Vincent is too cool, even, to ask a bizarrely misshapen human being "Who are you?" Rather, he just says "You are..." and leaves it up to the best to proclaim his name. Characters yell at each other, things explode, and every time one character speaks another (currently off-screen and yet-to-be-introduced) character's name in front of a character who's never heard of that person, a Cerberus somewhere in Hades grows a fourth head, and then promptly vomits another million dollars into Square-Enix's Swiss bank account.
And on top of all that, Vincent has BULLETHOLES in his hair, for crying out loud! In the CG animation, his hair is fluffy and straight; it looks like he's been applying prudent, manly use of a flatiron. In the actual game, it's rugged and raw, which is alright, too. Only -- why are their these big round orifices in his should-be-flowing strands of hair? It's weird, and vaguely yucky.
Remedial difficulty
Another thing that strikes me is the remedial level of difficulty, like the producers are concerned first and foremost with educating Japanese players about what an FPS is without encouraging them to ever play one again. In the early stages, I could see a basic intelligence to it. Perhaps making an FPS without ever having played one is the best way to revolutionize the genre, I was thinking. I liked the aiming. I liked the attention to character and detail. I liked the way the story was being told -- less like Half Life, where the story and the game happen at the same time, Dirge was, in the beginning, more of a game with a story courteously peppered in at the right moments.
Then the whole thing slid off the tracks, the story decided that the events it was foreshadowing just weren't going to be worth it, and I'm left standing in a room somewhere just shooting, shooting, shooting, and getting shot. I must get shot a hundred times, and still I'm not half dead. I shoot the enemies once and they die. I kill all twenty of them, and then get the card key. The door is literally five steps in front of me.
It's a little jarring, from a design perspective. It reminds of . . . well, it reminds me of Kingdom Hearts II. See, in Kingdom Hearts II, every major battle has these "reaction commands" that you need to activate with the triangle button. The problem is, you need to wait until the triangle button displays -- right above your menu -- in order to use these commands. Then you execute some "spectacular," environment-based attack.
It's a good enough idea, because videogames are, at their core, about entertaining people through slick visuals. However, that executing these triangle-button attacks requires you to stare at the menu in the corner of the screen when you should be enjoying the bouncy visuals on the other 80% of the screen is just kind of a bizarre design decision.
This whole trend of "press the button really quick to do something -- hurry!" in games lately is a little frustrating. Sometimes it's done well, like in Sega's yakuza brawler Ryu ga gotoku. Resident Evil 4 is all about jagging the button at prudent moments, to the point where it can't not work.
Made up minds
As with Kingdom Hearts, though, no matter what I say, people who will like the game will like it. I'd like to further encourage you all not to encourage the people who make such games, though I realize full well those who have already made up their minds have made up their minds.
Case in point: Dirge of Cerberus was the top-selling game this week, with 365,495 units sold. The new Onimusha game is in third, Ar Tonelico (a rather bland RPG with funny dialogue) is in number 7, and the rest is all DS, with the English Training game (which will probably not be released in America -- call it a hunch) debuting in number two.
Next week, Dirge will no doubt plummet down to the mid-twenties, and English Training will stick right where it is. I guess this kind of tells you exactly how Nintendo's and Square-Enix's strategies differ; they are without a doubt the two most interesting games publishers in this country. Square-Enix puts out big games with big budgets, meant to sell fast and fade fast; Nintendo aims at sticking around as long as possible. Five of the Nintendo DS games in the top ten have their total sales numbers displayed in red: this means they have sold more than a million copies. The only other game with a red total sales number is Kingdom Hearts II -- which fell from 12 to 25 this week.
Kingdom Hearts II's retail price is, um, three and a half times that of Brain Training. So, needless to say, the industry on the whole is doing kind of well recently.
In one month, it will get much better, as Final Fantasy XII will be released. Famitsu amazingly does not hype it at all this week, nor do they include it on the back page preview of next week's issue. It's not necessary at this point, and I quite frankly don't want it spoiled. Square-Enix expects to sell 2.5 million in a month. I can only hope that the game's innovations as regard system and story will be respected for what they are, and not just consumed wholesale because "It's Final Fantasy."
In two weeks, I will talk in much detail about the game, its cursed design history, and why it might just end up being a bona fide masterpiece despite the fact that its producer stood up and disappeared about a year ago, half its crew defected to another company, it stars no characters from Final Fantasy VII, and its hero apparently doesn't know how to wear a T-shirt.
