Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII

Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII is an action role-playing game developed and published by Square Enix. It is a spin-off of the Final Fantasy series and is based on the seventh entry in the franchise.

Plot
The game's story takes place three years after the events of Final Fantasy VII and one year after Advent Children. It follows Vincent Valentine, an optional character from Final Fantasy VII, who is being targeted by a mysterious organization known as Deepground, which is planning to destroy the world.

Why It Sucks

 * 1) Like all the Final Fantasy VII follow-ons, it retroactively ruins the ambiguity and poignant nature of the original ending, where it was left unclear if using Holy to save the world had destroyed the human race.
 * 2) Ridiculous disparity between what Vincent is capable of in cutscenes versus gameplay. In cutscenes he is an emo superhero who can broodingly jump a hundred feet in the air and bring down attack helicopters in a single shot from his pistol, in gameplay he trundles around plinking at enemies and sometimes can't jump over an ankle-high obstacle.
 * 3) The game is filled with invisible walls. Park benches are infinitely tall walls, Vincent can't even walk under an awning. This is only emphasized by the laser barriers that block off areas only being slightly taller than Vincent himself is: the first one encountered even has a box beside it that allows Vincent to clear the top of it by a good five feet, but he still needs to find a keycard instead.
 * 4) * As well as being full of invisible walls, the levels are boxy and linear, and filled with copy-paste level geometry that makes the map more or less essential. There are rarely multiple routes to follow, and on the rare occasions there are, there is usually no meaningful difference between routes.
 * 5) Uninteresting gunplay: Vincent's weaponry feels meager, and foes hardly respond when they are struck with them: the default gun shoots around once per second, takes 2-3 bullets to kill a basic enemy, and must be reloaded every six shots. Even his magical attacks are meager and unappealing to utilize. Guns, too, have an artificial maximum range beyond which their projectiles cease to exist.
 * 6) * Even more dull melee fighting. Vincent only has one melee combo, and while it does a decent amount of damage, most enemies in the game have guns, and a good portion of the ones who do have guns are hidden behind invisible walls where he can't hit them, and the enemies who don't have firearms are far too dangerous at close range for melee to be a realistic option. Because there is no lock-on for melee combat, Vincent's strikes frequently stray off target throughout the combo motion.
 * 7) There is also only one sound effect for Vincent's melee combo ("hoo huh haaah!") which very quickly gets grating.
 * 8) The ammo counter in no way accounts for all of Vincent's guns firing three shots at a time, so the player only has one-third the number of shots that it would suggest.
 * 9) The plot is a complete mess that, among other things, retcons it so that, in addition to Shinra building a city on top of Midgar, they also built another city beneath it, filling it with a secret army of soldiers in ridiculous sci-fi looking armor and a massive Mako reactor that the bad guy is attempting to use to mess with the lifestream in order to trick the planet into destroying itself. Furthermore, the bad guy is a digital ghost of Hojo produced by lightning striking his mysteriously de-mutated corpse, which had gotten to a computer terminal despite the fact that he was "dead," commanding some white-haired shirtless spiky-haired anime dude. No, understanding the background isn't helpful.
 * 10) The interactions between Reeve and Cait Sith at best make absolutely no sense. Cait Sith is introduced controlling a robotic version of Reeve (so this is a man controlling a robotic cat which is controlling a robotic version of himself) and at one point Cait and Reeve are seen in the same room and both react to seeing Vincent.
 * 11) There are some very odd issues with tone: most obviously, the goofy stealth mission as Cait Sith is immediately followed by a scene of the mass-murder of kidnapped civilians, including children, by dropping them into a lake of raw lifestream-juice (made of previously slaughtered civilians) containing the Omega Weapon.
 * 12) With the exception of Steve Blum's excellent voice performance as Vincent Valentine, the English dub is very poor in general: Yuffie is incredibly unpleasant to hear, while Shelke talks in a bored monotone and always refers to Vincent by his entire name. The lip-synching is likewise atrocious, with Azul's "A worthy opponent!" phrase being one of the most notable examples. There is also no option to use Japanese voices.
 * 13) The stage ranking system is bizarrely set up, requiring the player to do extremely unfair "stage assignments" such as escorting suicidal NPCs into locations infested with snipers or exploding barrels in order to get a high rating. The "stage missions" themselves are sometimes exceedingly vague: for example, one of the goals in stage 1 is to "defend the citizens!" However, there are several situations where Deepground forces are scripted to instantly kill civilians, which do not qualify as part of this operation.
 * 14) Although the pre-rendered cutscenes are equivalent to Advent Children 's, the game itself isn't especially appealing to the eye: the rendering is dubious, levels are largely drab and brown, and there's a type of dirty fog that's commonly employed to cover draw distance difficulties. As previously stated, assets in levels are frequently copied and pasted; the same is true for regular NPCs, with only three WRO soldier models, for example, giving the impression that the player is facing the same individuals over and over.
 * 15) Despite several gameplay enhancements over the original Japanese version, the multiplayer was omitted from the NA/EU editions, as was some extra background material about why the Tsviets came to power and how Deepground escaped from their captivity. To make matters worse for Western fans, the International version published in Japan in 2008 included all of the story segments from the Multiplayer. Furthermore, a complete chunk of the story between stages 4 and 5 was hacked out of the game and transformed into a smartphone game called Dirge of Cerberus: Lost Episode. As a consequence, Vincent finishes speaking with Reeve in the WRO Headquarters and then emerges in a sewer beneath a building on another continent with no transition whatsoever. Square Enix provided no explanation at the time of the game's release as to why this plot aspect was removed from the game.
 * 16) The frequent tight corridors do not interact well with the game's third-person camera: often, Vincent's character model will obstruct the player's view of what is in front of him unless a weapon is drawn. If a weapon is drawn, there is no quick-turn command, and so no way to quickly respond to the game's tendency to spawn enemies behind Vincent.
 * 17) Vincent's commitment to being brooding and emo means that he adds almost nothing to any scene he is in: often he just stands by silently while other characters have entire conversations without involving him.
 * 18) Inconsistent pacing.
 * 19) Poor enemy AI.
 * 20) Boss fights are not really creative. The first boss, the Dragonfly helicopter, is encountered a total of 20 times throughout the game.
 * 21) Incredibly easy, even on the highest difficulty.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) It is absolutely hilarious watching as the game repeatedly gives a dead-serious exposition about how Vincent was cucked by a mad scientist.
 * 2) It actually supports using the PS2 keyboard and mouse, and controls somewhat better like that.
 * 3) The pre-rendered cutscenes are visually stunning.
 * 4) The soundtrack is pretty neat.

Reception
Though Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII was indeed a commercial success, selling 1.5 million copies worldwide, it was not well-received by many gamers and critics alike upon its release in 2006 as it was criticized for its bizarre, futuristic incomprehensible storyline, monotonous gameplay, lackluster visuals, and terrible camera. Many considered not only one of the worst Final Fantasy games ever produced, but the weakest entry in the Complication of Final Fantasy VII.

In July 2022, in an interview with Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu, FF7 Remake director Tetsuya Nomura and producer Yoshinori Kitase confirmed that there are currently no plans to either remake or remaster Dirge of Cerberus.

Trivia

 * This is the first shooter in the Final Fantasy franchise and even Square Enix admitted to finding the gameplay to be challenging.