- "I know. I'm not alone... not anymore."Cloud Strife, at the end of Final Fantasy VII Advent Children
Episode 34
Timecode: 2:26: Footage from EGirl, a hardcore porn game for the PC, from EGirl Interactive. It's never a good sign when an up-and-coming developer names themselves after one of their first games.
EGirl is like other porn "games" where you pick form one of a few Uncanny Valley-riffic sex dolls, and command them to... do stuff. The dolls in question look and move incredibly creepily. There's a reason why Hentai games have more cartoonish anime styles. The invoked Soundtrack Dissonance (creepy, cold opera singing and sinister strings) just amplifies the creepiness, perhaps giving the show's opinion of the game.
3:15: Love Aerobics, another member of D3's budget line for the PS 2. Compared to something like EGirl, it's refreshingly cute and chaste, albeit with generic character designs, a la Catfight. It looks to be a simple rhythm game where you have to switch between three different tracks of commands, but it doesn't seem to keep track of your score onscreen, so who knows if whoever was playing the game was doing well or not.
8:54: A PC... "game" called Porrastruvat: Stair Dismount by Jetro Lauh. It shows how you can push a simple 3D model down some stairs, and affected limbs flash red. Okaaay...
16:17: The intro to Dirge Of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII. After Cloud had his sad cured at the end of Advent Children, Square Enix turned their attentions to the dark and brooding Vincent Valentine for a solo, third-person action game.
It shows Vincent, advised by wayward kunoichi Yuffie, investigating an abandoned facility of the Shinra Electric Power Company, the company responsible for many calamities, including...
- Sucking the energy, or "mako", right out of the earth to power their reactors.
- Experimenting on the corpse of Jenova, "the calamity that fell to Earth" - actually an alien that wanted to destroy the planet. They used her DNA to engineer powerful beings for their own force of SOLDIERs. One of these SOLDIERs, Sephiroth, was born from the womb of Vincent's ex. The experiment was conducted by her husband, Shinra scientist Hojo.
- Gave Vincent the ability to turn into various monsters, and sealed him inside a coffin in an old Shinra mansion.
On his investigation, Yuffie uses a machine to scan the facility for life signs, and finds one on the upper level. On that level, Vincent sees the body of someone resembling Hojo draped over a console. He readies his gun, only for lightning to strike the building and cause a part of the building to explode. Yuffie pushes past her motion sickness and picks Vincent up on an airbike.
The console says, "Start - fragment program", then a title card says "Three years later". Vincent is still sad, holed up in his room in a village that is celebrating some sort of festival... until a mysterious, militaristic force starts attacking the citizenry.
A helicopter tries to blow up Vincent's house, but he escapes and retaliates, wrecking the chopper with shots from his firearm. Seeing the devastation wrought by the attackers, Vincent decides to take the fight to them.
Dirge Of Cerberus was heavily criticized, but the intro, as per usual Square style, was awesome and concise.
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