Much Ado About Everything

It’s very rare for me to give up on a game. Even if it’s bad or hard, I feel strangely compelled to finish them all. It may be some kind of obsessive-compulsive behaviour, but no matter how much I scream at the monitor or TV or how many controllers or keyboards I break, or how much bored I am, I just don’t give up. Usually, that is.

So, I rarely give up playing a bad, hard or boring game. But it’s even rarer for me to give up playing a game because of it’s storyline. I can’t even remember the last time it happened – oh wait, I can. It was Baten Kaitos, the RPG for GameCube. At some point the game appeared complete… but it just kept going on for some reason. Then I kept running into some never-before seen bosses that were just too tough to take on (plus the gameplay was getting way too intense, as much as it sounds strange given that it’s a battle card game!). A quick look at a walkthrough showed me that there’s still almost a third of the game left! At that point I gave up for the day, though I had intention of continuing later, after some leveling up. I never did.

The story is different with this Dirge of Cerberus – supposedly a Final Fantasy VII spin-off. The game itself is bad – plain graphics, annoying camera, uneven difficulty, repetitive levels, awful graphics. But then there’s the storyline. It’s predictable, it’s lame, it’s infuriating (in a bad way), it’s naive, it’s stupid. I played until I completed level 6 (about half of the game), but every time there was a cutscene I kept yelling at the screen “come on already, enough of this, give me the game back to play”. After this chapter, however, I had enough. I have never seen a more stupid cutscene in my life, and I’ve seen plenty. Utterly incomprehensive, lame, and stupid. Keep reviving dead bosses, will you? Right in the headquarters which they overrun prior to you dispatching them. And have the enemy storm the headquarters again (uhm, hello, we’ve seen this already?!). And that on top of previous chapter’s ending, where another boss which was supposed to be dead came back… and managed to get some sort of revenge, despite of our hero being able to dodge that same particular attack just a few chapters earlier.

Wow. Now, Final Fantasy VII had the worst story of all Final Fantasy games I’ve played, and this kind of fits right in. But the degree of badness is just so high, the game’s story stinks so badly, that I decided to give up. Too bad I paid full price for this… piece of crap. Shame on Square Enix. I don’t think I have any desire left to watch or play anything related to Final Fantasy VII in the future. I’ll give back the unwatched Advent Children DVD that a friend lent me – I’ve seen 20 minutes into it and other than headache at flashy motorcycle sequences that are impossible to make out without slow motion, I don’t think it’s going to fare any better. I guess Square Enix is capable of screwing up. And when they screw up, the stink eclipses the lamest of the lame games any seedy studio can come up with. What a shame.