Dissidia: Final Fantasy (PSP)
2009 Squeenix

The Short Version: The heroes of Final Fantasies 1-10 are summoned together to do battle against the villains of Final Fantasy 1-10, in an otherwordly realm for the fate of all universes. Somehow, they made this boring without it being turn based.

The Long Version: Ooh boy. Maybe I should start by mentioning that I started my first draft of this thing a couple weeks after the game’s initial release in August or September of last year. I hadn’t completed it due to many factors, though mostly after a while I just got plain tired of it, which isn’t really a point in favor of something that has about eight thousand different kinds of weapons, items, armor, unlockables, alternate costumes, buddy icons, and so on, and so on. I was pretty stoked when I first heard about the game and saw some of the trailers, which you’d think would be a reaction I’d grow out of after a while since Square CG trailers ALWAYS look good, and rarely feature any actual play footage, especially the early ones. I thought we were finally going to get the game Ehrgeiz should have been- Square’d had a long time to polish up their 3-D engine since then, and since they dumped the pretense of an ‘original’ game world that crossed the frustration of dungeon crawls with characters more or less lifted wholesale from Tekken, and were just making Final Fantasy: The Fighting Game. I had some friends who had even imported or downloaded the game, and seemed to love it, but I was gonna wait for the inevitable English release.

Of course, the roster online was the first thing to dampen my enthusiasm- They decided to limit themselves to the main character only from each game, which wouldn’t be so bad if not for the fact this means there are character slots taken up by people WITHOUT FUCKING NAMES. So, if you hoped for Tifa or Vivi, or Kain to put in an appearance, lower the bar a little and welcome Light Warrior and Onion Knight. The villain side fares a little better, both in selection and their plot being full of infighting, backstabbing and conflict whereas the good guys mostly wander around in a void having Benadryl’d up discussions about fate and shit. Seriously, most of the story mode consists of your hero of choice ambling around some kind of weird astral plane populated entirely by shitty off-colored dopplegangers of themselves and all their enemies. Because Shitty Texture Effect Doppleganger Land is one of the most iconic locations in Final Fantasy, don’tcha know.

In Dissidia’s defense, the fighting system’s pretty unique. Unique enough that if you go into it thinking it’s a fighting game you may not exactly latch onto it. Actually, hell, it’s basically an expanded edition of Evil Zone. With a splash of Super Smash Bros.  for good measure. You got two kinds of basic attacks, Brave Attacks and HP attacks. The Brave Attacks do no actual damage, but steal Bravery Points from your opponent and power up your attack, represented by a big-ass number above your life meter. When you have enough Bravery to kill your opponent, it changes to a shiny, glowing fancy font. Which leads us to the HP Attacks, or, well… ATTACKS. Because they do damage. They’re pretty much all way easily telegraphed, which more or less means the best time to land one is after your opponent screws up. That’s pretty much the basics. You use the swift, easily combo’d Brave attacks to power up for a decisive blow with your slow-ass HP attack. If you can push your opponent’s Brave to zero, they suffer a guard break of sorts and their defense drops even lower. Further along, there are ‘launching’ moves that stick you in a quicktime event style pursuit sequence that ends when you relent or hit a wall… or the floor.. or other surface. And of course, there’s a super gauge in place that allows you to enter EX mode, which powers up your character while at the same time opening up your Big Overkill Button Masher Attack for use if you can land an HP attack while it’s in effect. These would be your Omnislashes and other cutscene-worthy special moves that more often than not end up being your finishing move. Oh yeah, and while you wail on your opponent, sparklies hover about the ring, eventually gathering to form a crystal that will instantly power you up enough to enter EX form. That’s useful to know.

The thing that really gets me about Dissidia is that for all the things it does that sound interesting on paper, in practice it just feels like a jerky fighting game that adheres to parts of its source RPG’s that don’t mesh well with fighting action. Like for instance, you gain new techniques as you level up, and your summons only work so many times before needing to sit out for several battles. Not to mention the entire level grinding thing in the first place comes off feeling pretty pointless since even as you learn new skills to assign, the computer cheats. There’s really no way around it. The quest mode loves to toss impossible to duplicate combos and broken ability boosting equipment designed specifically to keep you from winning the bonus requirement for whatever fight you’re on.

Here’s something else that’s kind of screwed up in addition- this game actually offers turn-based battling. Sort of. You can change from directly controlling your character, if that’s too much for your console RPG degraded twitch reflexes to handle, to watching your character prance about while pressing a button at appropriate times to go offensive or defensive. It’s the weirdest thing I’ve seen in a fighting game, and I’ve gotten 100% completion in Evil Zone. It’s not exactly flawless, but it’s handy if you’re playing the story mode and get tired or bored.

Which I suppose is a good lead-in to the story mode itself. It’s pretty much the trendy thing in home/portable fighting games ever since Soul Calibur to have a ‘Make Your Way Across The Map Having Battles With Random Special Conditions’ mode. Sometimes it’s done interestingly, most of the time it’s more like a visual novel with groin punching. In Dissidia, the story mode, a.k.a. Destiny Odyssey with a Roman numeral appropriate to whichever hero’s game you picked, you’re basically playing a board game. You’re allotted a set of DESTINY POINTS to take your turns with, though it’s more like a challenge than a game-over-if-you-run-out thing. You move your character across the map, initiating battle with enemy pieces and collecting items until you reach and smash the ‘Sigil of Chaos’ at the end of the map, which is sometimes a drawn out slog, and sometimes just you walking over, avoiding any enemies, and hitting the symbol. Occasionally there’s a boss battle, but weirdly, most of the time it’s just a matter of breaking an inanimate object.

…FINAL FANTASY!!

So, pretty much, you play through Destiny Odysseys I-X, and they pretty much all consist of following the protagonist of whichever game wandering around in a Benedryl haze, in search of their Crystal. See, there’s a Goddess of Order, KOS-MOS- er, Cosmos, and a God of Chaos named… Chaos fighting for the balance of good and evil in the universe. To do this, they’ve gathered ten teenagers with attitude from different continuities and worlds to do their dirty work for them, and stage out what amounts to a really wanky version of FFI’s plot, since the overall story involves a time loop and Garland being related to Chaos. Go figure. In order to beat Chaos, they need to each gather a Crystal by going on some kind of inner journey and conquering their demons. Naturally, everyone’s story is ‘different,’ but united in their pointlessness since Cosmos ends up biting it midway through the game and all the disparate Destiny Odysseys converge and lead into a brand new GRIM N’ GRITTY final series of chapters that anyone can play through.

It really took me a long time to decide if I loved or hated Dissidia. See, here’s the bottom line. The actual gameplay is pretty fun, even if it really doesn’t mesh well with how I pictured a lot of Final Fantasy heroes doing battle. See, I’ll grant that say, Garland is an awesome uberwarlord, but battles in Dissidia routinely take on Dragon Ball Z levels of airborne clashes and exploding fucking MOUNTAINS. It’s kind of hard to buy when the native games for each hero usually show their awesome prowess at standing in a stiff line, taking turns taking uninterested swipes at each other. It also kinda irks me in an inexplicable way that Cecil Harvey’s fighting style is based on switching between light and dark when his becoming a Paladin was sort of the guy’s defining moment of rejecting his evil deeds. They may as well have dubbed him with Homer Simpson’s voice shouting “Good Cecil! Bad Cecil!” when he transitions in mid combo.

The fact is, Dissidia isn’t a horrible game. If you go into it expecting a fighting game a la Tekken or King of Fighters like I did, you might be a bit let down, since it’s drastically different than any other brawler I’ve played. The roster pretty well blows, and that by extension makes the story kind of blow, since it’s a journey of self discovery with shimmering personalities like Squall Leonheart, Cloud Strife, and uh, Light Warrior, who manages to be a bigger asshole than both of them. There’s a reason none of the heroes spoke in FF1 I suppose.  Wouldn’t it have been great watching Selphie skip and prance about Nowhere Land? There aren’t even any model-swapped characters, like Ehrgeiz used to pad out its roster by cloning its ninja to make Yuffie, and adding Zack as a palette swapped Cloud. Even a ‘cheating’ expansion to the roster would have been welcome considering the main foe you’ll be facing throughout the game are SHIT RECOLORS OF THE HEROES. Oh, yeah, and while the villains are buyable from the game’s shop for play, they don’t get their own story modes, which is really bull since the villains’ infighting is the only remotely interesting part of the game- Golbez discretely helping the heroes on the side, The Emperor’s scheming, Garland’s cryptic lines and behavior… It’s a lot more gripping than Firio’s plotline which mainly consists of

“WAAAH. SEPHIROTH STOLE MY FLOWER!”
“Your flower? What’s it look like?”
“This.” (materializes a white rose from thin fucking air) “Well, fuck me! I can make these things at will?”

I’m not quite sure if it’s worse that a flower is a plot point, or that Sephiroth takes time out of his busy schedule to steal them.

Oh yeah. This game also has that Chronic Unlockable Disorder that affects many games these days. I think it’s a hereditary ailment. More or less everything you do unlocks some Achievement or another, or awards you points to spend in the shop to unlock other things. I think it says something that for a while I would power on my PSP every morning, then turn it right back off as I was building towards some of the ‘consecutive days played’ badges for some reason I can’t explain. You also get Mognet emails on a daily basis, occasional trivia questions, and a whole load of other shit- and really, all that does to me is turn things into a chore. Trophies are neat and all, but after a while, when you’re giving out gold stars for successfully pushing square two thousand times, all it translates to is more things to mash X to cycle through when you quit back to menu.

So, if you must have an arbitrary score here, I think I’m going to resignedly give it two halves.

It’s a decent title. It gets kind of old fast, but if you like Final Fantasy, there’s statistically something in here that’s going to stroke your insert sexual euphemism here. Just try not to think of it as a fighting game going into it and approach it like its own monster.

Or get a real fighting game and play it to Eyes on Me.