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July 24th, 2006, 19:22 Posted By: shadowprophet
Lets Face it, The japanese import Of Dirge of Cerberus Didn't quite do as well as expected, It was plagued with problems that prevented it from living up the the name of which its predecessors enjoyed such untouchable fame. With both gamers and critics left disappointed, This Didn't exactly help the franchise any.
But Square Enix is hell bent on restoring its good name with the north american release of Cerberus this august 15 th, Addressing many of the issues that so plagued the over seas edition,
In fact, The north american version is already completed and has been tested by many critics. The game has definitely been improved over its original foreign-language counterpart too, but does that mean it's enough To make it a quality game? Honestly, Only time and popular opinion will determine that.
But first things first, what's new? The fixes are many fold this round, most notably with the camera. In the Japanese version, it was a slow, hard-to-control mess and it wasn't uncommon to desperately struggle with the analog sticks in order to shoot something. In the English build, a lot of those shooting issues have been remedied thanks to a reworked control scheme and faster response times. Players don't have to worry about tapping R1 to go into the first-person mode anymore either (which is a view much more conducive to game play), and they can now access the "eyes-through" perspective with a push of R3. Throw in a smarter lock-on feature (semi-automatic is the default setting now), a friendlier slider menu, and faster firing speeds, and things move along at a much better pace.
But the camera isn't the only technical fix. Square Enix has also gone back and done a lot of balancing/ reworking to make Dirge of Cerberus a more competent game. Noticeably, a good portion of these adjustments relate to the Limit Breakers. Whereas before it was a smarter idea to sell them than to use them, there's more of a reason to pay attention to them now. Why? To start, you can no longer sell Limit Breaks for 3000 Gil per use: its resell value has been lowered to a mere 850. Furthermore, the number of Limit stocks you can keep has been downgraded from 5 to 3 and the powers and abilities of your transformations have been increased. The Galian Beast, in particular, is a tougher force to reckon with as not only has his transformation time been increased and his attack radius widened, but his fireball can now penetrate shields as well. Moreover, those fireballs count as "magic" instead of "bullets" as it was before -- altering the end-level stat rankings in your favor if you aren't very accurate.
Other minor improvements include faster running and walking speeds, lightened weapon weights across the board, and an increased range for melee attacks. In addition, Vincent's roll maneuver has been replaced by a quicker-to-recover dash move, there's a double-jump for avoiding heavy fire, and the lowest difficulty setting has been removed in favor of "normal" and "hard."
The single biggest content addition to Dirge of Cerberus, though, would have to be the inclusion of an "extra hard" challenge setting that's unlocked by beating the game. Once this mode has been accessed, players can then blast through 40 different sub-missions that contain new items, weapons, and more. As an added bonus, Square Enix has included even more bonus content than what the Japanese version had. Joining the existing Event Viewer and alternate ending, there are artwork and character model galleries and a jukebox music feature. Given the fact that the U.S. iteration won't include the online multiplayer modes that the import edition had, these extra goodies are certainly a nice gesture.
With all these changes, one has to wonder how much of a difference it makes on the final product. Thus far, it makes a noticeable one -- but as I mentioned earlier, I'm still not sure how much of an impact it will have on the overall game quality when all is said and done. At its core, Dirge of Cerberus is still rather methodical compared to the PlayStation 2's other available shooters and in the first few levels thus far, the enemy count is still on the low end and targeting speedier foes still proves problematic (even with the response improvements). The AI doesn't offer much variety either and there are so many cut scenes between stages and sections of stages that the pacing is definitely off.
Here is a decent video I found of some in game footage.
You can expect updates as soon as they unfold right here on RPG-NEWS!
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