Dissidia 012 [duodecim] Final Fantasy (PSP)
aka: Dissidia 012 ~my pure heart for a you~
aka: Dissidia 2: The Reckoning
aka: Doki Doki Panic
2011 Squeenix

The Short Version: The other, other Final Fantasy fighting game.

The Long Version: A long, long time ago, in the days of static HTML and tables being acceptable web design elements (god I miss those days), I referred to Soul Edge and the Soul Calibur series as the classy/pretentious member of the fighting game genre due to its pseudo-historical monologuing and epic narrator. A few years have passed, and Soul Calibur is officially more about jiggling, barely contained dominatrix tits and crossover cash-ins than CLASHING UPON THE STAGE… OF HISTORY. But fear not, even though the Frasier Crane of fighting has gone jiggle-physical on us, Square Enix, the two headed chimeric juggernaut of JRPGdom has stepped in with a follow-up to Dissidia that runneth over with dubious Latin chants, pretty men in skimpy armor, and philosophical musing while wandering in Nowhere Land. Hurrah pretension and fanservice!

I had a love-hate relationship with the original Dissidia, so much so that I owned the game for over a year before finally deciding to review it here. I’m not the biggest Final Fantasy fan, but I do love to geek out to the in-jokes I get, and damn it, I like a game that tries something new. Dissidia’s fighting system is basically the ideal way to simulate overdramatized anime fighting. “Normal” attacks can’t really kill anything, but break your opponent’s morale down while yours rises, attempting to tip the balance enough to put you in a position to deal one big finishing blow. I covered a lot of this already. So, let’s have a look at what’s changed.

The first thing you look at when going into a fighting…ish game is the roster. And thankfully, DD opens the floor to people other than ‘main’ characters, giving us Tifa and Kain Highwind, as well as Yuna, Laguna, and Sam the Tuna. So, while everyone from the first makes a return, at least there’s a little less of the sting that some of your favorites were left by the wayside in favor of people whose name is their goddamned class. Lightning from FFXIII also puts in an appearance since she’s from the new one, and please, please PLEASE like her and by extension, buy her ultra-linear game. Story Mode begins with her before you can unlock anyone else, and she was heavily featured in the demo, or “Prologus” (which is Latin for “paid demo with unlockable content for the full version to pull in suckers.”)

The system has taken some tweaks to it, for one, you can now call on an Assist Character to help you out in addition to your usual powers and EX mode, which seems to charge a lot slower. They’re a bit like KOF Strikers and can perform Brave or HP strikes depending on which command you use, though it seemed like unless I’m already hitting someone or they’re cornered, the assist would pop up and miss by a mile, wasting a summon. Summons still exist like they did before, but they’re not as prominent by far. Thankfully. Chase sequences seem to have been tightened up a bit, so you’ll have to think a little faster to win the semi rock-paper-scissors.

Story Mode got a near total overhaul, adding an overworld to the overworld, because I guess you needed extra overworld to roam on in addition to the board-game style levels you now enter via dark gates. Also while on the over-overworld, you’ll see the doppelgangers of your enemies as semi-random encounters. This is… weird. Especially when you’re roaming about a copy of a PS1-era overworld and see a technicolor Kefka skipping about. 

But, gentle reader, I must caution you, while Dissidia 012 carries much awesome, it comes with a price. And no, not the $30 USD tag (give or take DLC.) And that price is the fact that it will fucking pull your pants down and kick your bare ass for importing data from the first game to begin the second half of the game. See (SPOILARS), 012 refers to the 12th iteration of the time looped war going on in the game, with the original game being number 13. So yes, this game is a prequel, and the absence of Kain and Tifa and all the other good characters added for this one are gone because they’re dead for real (or something to that extent) and the second half of the game is just the first game reworked in the new engine. Okay, that’s fine. Except for the fact that they implement a mechanic called the Bonus Line. You tweak your level down and fight tougher battles for bigger rewards, right? Wrong. If you enter a chapter with your level too high, you will immediately be penalized KP (points for the moogle shop) for each level above the line you are. So starting off with my Level 46 Cloud immediately set me to -44 KP. I understand that they’re trying to keep the game challenging for veteran players, but this is just plain bullshit. And furthermore, I’ve ALREADY SEEN THESE CHAPTERS ONCE. I didn’t suddenly develop any new affection for the Onion Knight since burying the original Dissidia in my “Will Totally Finish This” pile. I do not want, therefore, to play as him against my least favorite opponent (Cloud of Darkness), at several levels below it, nor do I want to relive Sephiroth’s creepy stalking of Cloud to taunt him with a rose he stole from another character I don’t give a shit about. It really seems like they got dramatically better at writing in between games, since the entirety of Dissidia’s plot is characters wandering around barren wastelands while musing about WHAT AM I FIGHTING FOOOOOR and waiting for the next villain to appear, whereas 012 tries to create a narrative, with events, and everything!

In all seriousness, if you’re a fan of Final Fantasy, and want a change of pace, you could probably do worse than Dissidia 012. Skip the first entirely if you missed out on it, since the game sure isn’t doing you any favors for coming back to the franchise (Fast Fact! The next Dissidia will be a rhythm game! On an entirely different console!) There’s no shortage of fanservice on display, from the Golbez’s four Fiends giving you tutorials to rearranged soundtracks. And if you don’t like fighting games, there’s still a turn-based mode available too. Just be forewarned, for a ‘fluff’ game, it gets dickish when it wants to be dickish.

So on my usual three point scale of Fail/Meh/Sweet, I say it’s a “Sweet” to FF fans, and a somewhat warm “Meh” to the non fans. It does have an interesting play style, and Square is kind of missing out on a chance to whore the engine out for licensed anime games since the flashy, cinematic combat just screams for it.

As an extra concession, this game will export saved replays as .avi files making screencapping and video capture easy as cake. Why the hell don’t more games do that?