But Square Enix is determined to fix or address most of the game's problems before its North American release on August 15. In fact, we had the opportunity to try it out for ourselves and spent more than two hours with the finished English version. The game has definitely been improved over its original foreign-language counterpart too, but does that mean it's enough to move Vincent Valentine into another quality bracket? Honestly, the jury is still out on that one.
But first things first, what's new? There are a number of fixes, actually, 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 gameplay), 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 In addition, Vincent's roll maneuver has been replaced by a quicker-to-recover dash move, there's a double-jump for avoiding heavy fire, and the lowest difficulty setting has been removed in favor of "normal" and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 cutscenes between stages and sections of stages that the pacing is definitely off.
But who knows? We still have a good 80% of the "new and improved" game to blast through before its review time so we'll leave our optimism buttons in the green. Bizarre as the pacing might be, you still can't deny how strong the production values are and we're genuinely interested in seeing where the story goes (it's one year after the events of Advent Children, by the way, so you may be spoiled to some things if you play this first). Expect the full review sometime in mid-August.