My horribly sarcastic Dirge recap, part 1
I love Final Fantasy. I really love Final Fantasy VII and it's world. I've got tens of thousands of words dedicated to this world. Dirge of Cerberus did more to kill the characters than anything else SquareE could have done. So, to spare my friend the pain of playing this horribly written, lousy excuse for a FPS, I wrote the following review for her.
Game start out with Vincent doing the broody Vincent thing in a room in Kalm, where Reeve's asked to meet him. There's a celebration going on outside, because it's been 1 year since Advent Children. Vincent is semi-listening to a TV news report about a group of WRO people who vanished in Midgar a couple of weeks ago after opening a big door under the old Shinra building when there's an explosion and a bunch of helicopter-like things swoop in, dropping tons of troops, some mutated dogs, and big containers. The troops run around with goggles over their eyes, separating the "pure" (into the containers) from the "contaminated" (killed). Vincent decides this is going to make it hard to meet up with Reeve, and so does what he can while acting cool and flapping his cape around.
After a while, he meets Shelke (young looking girl with double light-saber looking things) and Azul (big troll-looking guy), but nothing happens yet except some talking about protomateria. After shooting down one of the helicopter things, the World Regenesis Organization (WRO) shows up, including Reeve. Reeve guilts Vincent into coming along with him, since Vincent would normally be too cool for it or something, and while they're motoring along towards Edge (where people like Cloud, Tifa, Marlene and Denzel live), Reeve talk about Deepground, which Rufus Shinra supposedly doesn't know about because his dad was killed and couldn't tell him (*coughwhatevercough*) Basically, a bunch of people were experimented on and locked deep underground, then "forgotten" (emphasis mine) since Meteorfall, and now they're getting out and getting revenge.
The convoy gets ambushed right after a scene where a guy named Weiss sends out a television signal saying he's going to kill a lot of people in a lot of different ways, and Reeve sends Vincent ahead on to Edge while they repair the trucks. Vincent finally gets there, but it's eerily quiet, because Deepground is already there. While walking along he road, he meets up with Shalua, the one-eyed, one-armed, hooker dressing scientist chick. She mentions something about looking for her reason to live and wanders off. Vincent wanders around Edge, gets sniped at a bunch, rescues a kid who mentions that they took everyone to a warehouse and slaughtered them, and finally makes his way there. He meets Rosso the Crimson, and chick with a bad Italian accent also asking about protomateria, and in the ensuing cut scenes loses control of his Level 4 Limit Break form, then passes out.
He wakes up in a tank, and has some flash backs about the last time he woke up in a tank, which was right after Hojo shot him. We get a little background about him being a Turk assigned to guard Lucrecia, and how he fell for her, and how she was nice to him for a while then spurned him. He comes to fully and Shalua, who had rescued him (don't ask me how she dragged him to the WRO lab), lets him out. Vincent sees that she's looking up stuff on Lucrecia and gets all wide-eyed, and Shalua makes some cryptic statements about Lucrecia's doctoral thesis on Omega when Reeve comes in and mentions that Deepground is about to attack the building.
Vincent helps get rid of the Deepground regulars. While Shalua's in the lab, she sees Shelke walk past a camera and freaks out. Vincent finds Shelke in the basement and before a fight can ensue, Shalua runs in, turns out Shelke is her sister who vanished 10 years ago. Shelke goes on about the hell she went through in Deepground, Shalua collapses sobbing, and Reeve give Vincent some tranquilizer darts to use once Shelke's slowed down enough. Once that happens, Azul shows up and Vincent has to take him out as well.
After all this, Vincent decides that he needs to go to Nibelheim and see what's going on there, and Reeve decides he needs to use Cait Sith to infiltrate Deepground. Cait does manage to avoid detection and watches one of the containers from Kalm get dumped into a (apparently) still functioning mako reactor. Another Deepground elite, Nero, shows up and says this is all so that his beloved brother Weiss can become Omega, then kills him.
Meanwhile, Vincent works his way up from the sewers to the Shinra Mansion library, and meets up with what I guess is a hologrpahic recording of Lucrecia, who says she's sorry a lot and that there's bits of her Omega report scattered throughout the building. He dutifully collects them (the Shinra mansion is as scary in modern graphics as it was before), then runs into Rosso again, who talks about how much she likes killing and how Vincent is a lot like her. They natter about who's human or not, then Rosso runs off, Vincent chases her, and has to deal with a big mechanical robot. After the fight, Rosso jumps him, sticks her hand deep into his chest and rips out a sphere which turns out to be the protomateria. As Vincent lays there dying, he also transforms a bit, and she laughs because he can't control Chaos without the protomateria. Before she can finish him off he's saved by Yuffie.
Yuffie, who acts a hell of a lot more like X-2 Rikku than 7 Yuffie here, twirls around and flirts with Vincent, who is understandable sore as hell, although he doesn't have a gaping hole in his chest anymore. They've apparently hopped continents while Vincent was out, because they're heading back to the WRO headquarters again. The convoy gets ambushed AGAIN, and Vincent has to fight his way to the building, where Azul suddenly comes to life, transforms into something that looks like a Behemoth, and wrecks some serious havoc. Meanwhile, Shelke and Shalua have been having some sisterly arguments, mainly because Shelke can't understand why anyone would care, since it's a weakness. Azul catches up to them and says that Shelke's usefulness is at an end now that they have the protomateria, and Shalua sacrifices herself so that Shelke and Vincent can get away.
(to be continued, since I don't know IJ's character limit)