Ok, so I decided since I'm staying in this weekend, I'll rent a few things... The first was Scary Movie 4, the second was this gem of a genre buster from Squenix.

Dirge of Cerberus takes place three years after the end of FF7, which is known as 'Meteorfall.' The by all means most awesome player character from 7, Vincenzo Valentino (as they say in the Sicily), finds himself chilling at the hotel at Kalm when his 24 hour news channel is interrupted by a explosive explosion at the celebration goin on in the streets of Kalm. He flips out the window, takes down a helicopter and proceeds to beat the living hell out of all these 'Deepground' folks.

The action is soon, and all over the place. As Vinnie, you get the opportunity to destroy the new found enemy with a variety of arms. First is literally your arms (as well as you feet). Valentine can do melee combos, and even crazy arial combos. Most enemies in the early part of the game are easily taken down by the three hit combo (while, of course their buddies are shooting the hell out of you). Next is his kick ass, triple barrell pistol of doom and gloom, the Cerberus. This little tank shotguns it and I find that I rarely, if ever, switch to the other guns. Its that good. Next is the gunnus ab machina, the Griffon. The obvious misuse of iff where there should be yph is offset the the machine gun's horrible rate of fire. It is only good if you've got cover and can strafe your locked on enemies. Finally is the standard shooter issue rifle, named the Hydra. This gun has marginal power unupgraded, but can do excellent damage with a zoomed sniper headshot (though good luck f inding time to zoom that damn sniper scope).

Besides the aforementioned weapons of death, Vincent can also use a pretty uncommon item (about 1 per level), to transform into a toughass beast. This is his Limit Break, and the Galian Beast is the 1st of his breaks from 7. He also has a few episodes of becoming the Chaos limit, which plays into the relevance of the story. Galian Beast can do both the slash attack similar to its Bezerk Dance attack, and if you do an air combo, he performs similar to Galian's Beast Flare attack. This form does a bunch more damage than normal Vinnie.

I really find the cross genre action to be cool. Take Devil May Cry, cross it with Resident Evil, and add in a welcome dearth of RPGesque components (items, levels, materia, ect.), and you've got Dirge. Combat is straight forward (once you get the sticks inverted so that right turns right and left turns left), with the R1 and L1 buttons controlling weapon and materia combat respectively. The left stick is used for movement, while the right stick aims and moves the camera. The system works out excellently, and I find it to be a superior 3rd person shooter system than both Devil and RE.

Perhaps the highlight, at least for me, is the impressive story behind Dirge. Nearly halfway into the game as I am (after only 6 hours of play @_@), the story draws me in past the monotony of a shooter. Vincent's background is expounded upon, much to my delight, and even good ol' Cait Sith is a very major plot line component (though mostly as Reeve instead of his cat self, though it is EXTREMELY unclear as to whether the cat is real or the man is. If you thought that was ambiguous in 7, seeing Reeve's body fall apart and the cat jump out makes it even more confusing.). Yuffie is there also, but after 5 missions, only seen in the Prologue.

Overall, the game is quite enjoyable, though a bit repetitive and somewhat monotonous. Blasting wave after wave of Deepground SOLDIER gets boring after a while, especially when your inventory is limited to 4 potions, and 2 hi-potions. So far, I've only died twice and received one game over. But I'm playing on the easiest of 2 initially available modes (normal or hard, with Extra Hard and Extra Hard+ unlockable). The mission based levels kind-of keep the story moving along, but they seem to be either help out the WRO (World Regenesis Organization) troops, or protecting civilians.

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