Set a year after the events of the CG movie Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, and three years after the conclusion of Final Fantasy VII, these cinematics provide the latest adventures of everyone's favorite Final Fantasy VII characters. Among these, Vincent Valentine receives the most screen time, he is, after all, the star of the game, but Yuffie and Reeve are also heavily featured. Every cinematic can be skipped and feature optional subtitles, and the non-CG cutscenes can also be paused at any time, all welcome features that aren't nearly as prevalent in gaming as they should be.

Throughout the game, players take control of Vincent as he runs and shoots through various Final Fantasy VII locales. But already, there's a problem. The levels here aren't nearly as interesting as they sound. Each time the game would load up a location from Final Fantasy VII, I'd end up disappointed. In fact, I doubt it's even accurate to call them locales. Instead, let's just say each level is a series of narrow hallways and cramped corridors with the occasional room from Final Fantasy VII. These trappings are generally just slightly wider than Vincent himself, and it's not uncommon for a series of rooms and hallways to repeat multiple times throughout a level.

Furthermore, these levels are often confusing in design. Take, for example, a room in a multi-tiered office building. In this one singular room, there are multiple stairways that lead to higher stories, and each story has a waist-high railing overlooking the center of the room. But when the player needs to go back down to the ground floor, an invisible wall prevents them from jumping over the railing, forcing the player back down the stairs. Other levels also feature jumps that look and seem possible but aren't, while some other jumps that look and seem possible, and even some that don't, are actually possible. It's all very confusing.

Luckily, the focus of the game isn't on jumping and platforming, but shooting. With a variety of control and aiming options available, Square Enix has gone to remarkable effort in attempting to make the game suitable for players of all different skill levels and preferences. Like most first-person shooters, the default controls put player movement on the left analog stick and map camera and aiming on the right analog stick. Additionally, players can also opt to use a USB mouse and keyboard for movement. Three different types of aiming assistance are available, with the highest setting automatically targeting any on-screen enemy, the medium setting auto-targeting enemies within a certain reticule, thus requiring players to do a bit more aiming, and the lowest setting, which forces the player to manually aim and provides no assistance whatsoever.

Again, there are problems. Precise aiming, especially with multiple enemies in a small area, is all but impossible with aim assistance enabled. If two enemies are crouched in front of an explosive barrel, the barrel is usually the last to be targeted, even if the player puts the cross hairs directly on it. At that point, the only surefire way to hit that barrel is to manually aim by zooming in with a long-range weapon, which can leave players vulnerable, especially if they're not the type to play first person shooters.

On the same note, those that aim manually are out of luck in certain scenarios as well. There's a segment in a large area that requires players to pick off snipers, but unless aim assistance is enabled, it's almost impossible to locate them due to the enemy uniforms blending with the colors of that particular level. Thankfully, the game allows the level of aim assistance to be toggled at any time from the option menu, but that should be something the player only needs to configure once, not something that's dependent on a given situation.

But the main problem with Dirge of Cerberus is that nothing really changes from the first few minutes of gameplay. Sure, each stage provides a couple different missions, but it all boils down to shooting every bad guy in sight as quickly as possible and finding the necessary cardkey to pass through the next barrier. Most bosses make multiple appearances, which wouldn't be so bad if the strategy changed with each encounter, or at least each boss, but running in a circle and shooting will defeat almost every boss. The closest thing to variation in these encounters involves the style of attack used, one fight requires the use of magic instead of bullets and another the use of physical attacks, but that's it. Unfortunately, two ever-so-slightly varied strategies out of somewhere around a dozen fights don't do much to help the situation.

A similar problem also extends to most of the game's enemies. Up until the later levels, when enemies that are impervious to bullets appear, there's no real strategy to their defeat beyond mindless shooting. Unfortunately, these shielded foes are introduced so late in the game, and so rarely used alongside the traditional enemies, that it does little to resolve the repetitive gameplay. Likewise, additional guns and barrels that add just a bit of variety to the game don't show up until the last few levels. But at that point, you've spent most of the game using the same few guns and barrels provided in the early areas. Only the distribution of materia, with a new magic spell acquired every few chapters, bears a semblance to good pacing, but the game never requires the player to use anything beyond the first spell they acquire. Enemies that were only vulnerable to a certain type of materia would have changed things up a bit.

It's sad because the potential for Dirge of Cerberus to be a better action game is there. At the end of each chapter, the game evaluates the player's performance and assigns a number of experience points based off this. These experience points can then be used to level up Vincent or can be converted into money for additional items. However, there's no in-between with this choice, which feels very restrictive and really limits the level of customization. Other games have allowed the player to divide these points through the use of a slider, but not Dirge of Cerberus.

With the ability to level up, one would expect Vincent to gain new attacks and combos as he gets more powerful, right? Wrong. Apart from an increase in Vincent's health, there's no noticeable change when Vincent obtains enough experience to gain a level. Why not provide a number of new attacks and combos as Vincent gains a level? One in-game cinematic shows Vincent stylishly taking out a flying soldier with a series of aerial kicks and gunshots, why not let the player do something like this once they've reached a certain level? Instead, the game inexplicably opts to stick Vincent with the same moves and abilities throughout the entire game, which not only hampers any sense of progress, but gets really, really repetitive.

Another problem is that though Vincent can customize his guns with stat-changing items, there's no real strategy involved. One item can simultaneously be equipped on all three guns, so there's no need to acquire multiple copies of a powerful item, no compromise in trying to maintain an arsenal of three powerful weapons. In fact, outside of the few scenarios that required a long-range sniper scope, I never really paid attention to which of my three guns I was using. Each seemed equally as effective at taking down enemies, and I'd only bother to switch when one ran out of ammo.

Given the above issues, Dirge of Cerberus ends up as little more than a mindless shooter. But it has pretty cinematics featuring the characters of Final Fantasy VII, and for some, that'll make all the difference. Yea, the game isn't all that noteworthy, but once the Final Fantasy VII fan service factors it, it goes from a mindless shooter to a bearable title featuring the latest happenings in the Final Fantasy VII mythology. Luckily for those folks, the game can be easily conquered within the span of a rental.

Meanwhile, those who don't care about the further adventures of the Final Fantasy VII crew shouldn't bother. The Final Fantasy VII branding is the only real incentive to play, and while a mindless shooter with pretty cinematics isn't the worst fate for a game, it also means there's no reason to bother with it outside of an interest in said cinematics. And when one's interest in cinematics is used to gauge whether or not a game is worth playing, well, that certainly indicates something is quite wrong.