Well I am the thread creator. I made this for a mature discussion rather than a bunch of negative one-liners.
I'd like to offer a bit of advice as someone who has been going to video game forum for a long-ass time: Unless someone is attacking your character, try to take their comments that seem impolite or negative to you as if it's your best friend saying it to you. You and your friends talk shit to each other, right? And it's okay because you already know you're friends. Try to look at people here that way and you won't find some comments nearly as offensive. Remember that all we really have on here is text; We can't see one another's facial expressions, body language, hear their tone of voice, etc. ...so it's always best to just take it lightheartedly.
As for DoC: I thought the idea was awesome. To me, as a big fan of VII, playing as Vincent, one of the coolest characters, in a third-person shooter sounded godlike. The customization options, especially the gun modifications were really neat, making it all feel somewhat like an RPG shooter. But in my opinion, a shooter's top priority should be to feel satisfying when you're shooting, which is something that's just not present in Dirge, and the RPG elements that were implemented, such as magic, just weren't useful. Ultimately, all the good ideas were not executed properly. The gameplay mechanics were pretty limited, even for their time. The AI was awful and made the game much too easy at many points. You had all these RPG elements implemented but you could easily just shoot and melee your way through. The cut-scenes were nice at the time but
man did the in-game NPC interactions suck... they were actually painful for me to listen to. The camera was bad, especially in small rooms and tight corridors, and the gameplay overall just felt too loose and clunky to me. It was kinda cool to visit some key locations from VII from a different aspect but the limited exploration and depth kinda killed that.
I don't even care about DoC''s story. I make a rule to basically never put any faith into a spin-off's story because it's almost never worthwhile. Crisis Core was an extremely pleasant surprise in that department, however. Even with Advent Children I just never went into it caring about the story. The whole thing is fan service and I knew that from the moment it was announced and I was cool with it. I accepted it. And I won't lie to you guys, I find a lot of enjoyment in the movie. Could it have been better with a decent story a lot less usage of the word "Mother"? Sure, but I do enjoy it quite a bit nonetheless, if for nothing more than the great CG, badass motorcycles, top tier fight scenes and just seeing more of all those characters I love sporting some newly tweaked designs that fitted them perfectly. That said, though, it's much easier to watch a bad movie than it is to play a bad game. And I wouldn't personally call AC bad... I guess it's a little above mediocre since it has its good and bad.
DoC is a one of those game where you have to just bite the bullet and take off your fanboy shades to see it at its core. If you strip away all the FFVII related stuff you have a really generic, boring and unsatisfying shooter. Add it back in and, to the diehard VII fan, you have a mediocre game I guess. Truth be told I had more fun with the post-story bonus missions than I did the actual game, which is unfortunate. Overall I don't despise the game, there were some things from it that I found enjoyment in. I still think it was a cool idea and it could be a pretty decent game with some work put into it for an HD bundled release, but I have to be honest with myself: I highly doubt that will ever happen. I wanna say I wish they had put all the spin-off money and labor into simply remaking VII, but I can't say that because then we wouldn't have gotten Crisis Core, which, to me, is damn near as good a VII itself.
