Okay fine, I un-ironically love Dirge. The plot is fucking bonkers and makes me laugh (Vincent seriously does the "*teleports behind you* nothin' personnel, kid." during the final battle with Weiss!) The art direction is much better than the rest of the compilation, I really like the neon thing deep ground has going on, Vincent's more stylized design is much better than how he looked in advent children, Yuffie's new outfit suits her a lot better than her AC one does. The game also has a SENSE OF HUMOR! Reeve gets fuckin shot to death but it was actually a robot Reeve! That's stupid and amazing! When Vincent asks Cloud if he can handle things outside, cloud's like "What do you think?" That's great!
The gameplay is a little bland at times but I have fun with it, and Shademp's epic length thread about it has made me appreciate that the game has more nuance than I appreciated originally. Getting combos is satisfying, taking out a bunch of enemies at once with explosive barrels or magic is a lot of fun. The bosses are maybe a little hit and miss, but I really like the Tsviet fights, Rosso and Azul especially. Also, Getting to see areas from the original game is really cool (though with the remake coming this novelty will be lost a bit.) I once sat down and ran through the Shinra Mansion stage with the original game playing on my laptop just to compare the layout (it's actually incredibly close!) and then did the same with the Shinra Building lobby. Exploring Edge in a video game was also pretty novel.
Reeve probably has my favorite actor in the compilation, and his voice actor is the only one I was actively sad to see go for the remake with this new trailer. He manages to sound incredibly earnest and genuine about the stupid bull shit that's happening during Dirge's plot. Rosso's Bizzare Russian accent is also really funny. Why does she sound like that? She was raised in the same environment as the other Tsviets. None of THEM are Russian. Whatever, I love it. Speaking of audio, Dirge has a lot of great ambient tracks, "Silent Edge" being my favorite.
So yes, I fucking love Dirge of Cerberus, and I think it deserves more credit.
Okay, I have now thoroughly derailed my own thread. Nice. If anybody is curious, I started drawing the first page of the comic that the thread question was relevant to. Here's the pencil sketch:
I'm working on coloring it now.