Dissidia, Dissidia, where do I start? I really didn’t know what to make of it when Square Enix announced a PSP fighting game, starring a bunch of Final Fantasy characters. Dissidia is certainly a strange concoction; a cup of Final Fantasy here, a pinch of Kingdom Hearts there and a dash of Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi. Is it for everyone? Probably not, but it is such a game that those who do enjoy it, will love it to bits.

Before you even get to the main menu, you immediately start playing as the Warrior of Light. The problem with this is that while easy at first, he’s one of the hardest characters in the game to use, sporting a five-star difficulty rating. I kept playing past the prologue but eventually switched to ‘one-star’ Cloud and managed to breeze through quite easily. The Story Mode is where you’ll spend most of your time. It starts with a cheesy voiceover introduction and the rest of the story and dialogue continues to be pretty forgettable. Each character has their own storyline which is mostly made up of cutscene conversations between characters. Unfortunately it doesn’t quite work, I appreciate the effort though. You would’ve thought the creators behind such intense story-driven games might’ve fared better, but after all it is only a fighting game. Dissidia has a basic good versus evil type story and something about collecting crystals. Chaos is the evil side’s God, while Cosmos is the good side’s goddess. The story only allows you to play as the good guys which is a shame. It would’ve made it interesting to see the story from both points of view. Cloud asks himself, “Why am I fighting?”, he wanted to know why he kept on fighting pointless battle after battle. While I’m guessing it was meant to be profound I couldn’t help but see the irony in it.

You can choose the main Final Fantasy hero from Final Fantasy’s 1-10. I’m not a hardcore Final Fantasy fan but I have played Final Fantasy’s VII, VIII and X, and you guessed it my favourite character’s to play as are Cloud, Squall and Tidus. So familiar characters do have a certain draw factor. Each character has a unique power, some easier to use than others. Warrior of Light is incredibly hard to use with his slow one hit attack. You can play any character’s story at any time, saving progress, suspending play and starting as another if you desire. This is incredibly handy if you get stuck and want a go at trying someone else. Made even easier is the fact you can share items, equipment and all that other good stuff between all the characters.

There are three main screens that you will get mighty familiar with as you play through Dissidia. The level screen, battle screen and customisation screen. For you Final Fantasy fans, you’ll have some idea of how the customization menu will work; equipment, abilities, items, accessories and summons. Besides the story mode there’s a few other things you can get up to which also allows you to choose your side. Arcade Mode for instance is a series of varying fight challenges. Duel Colosseum (only unlocked once you finish the game) is a series of difficult enemies chosen by  a bizarre card game. Quick battle thrusts you into a simple battle where you can choose your opponent.

The combat is third person with full 3D movement, duking it out in an enclosed arena. The graphics are pretty incredible, even the cutscenes are done in-engine with detailed characters like in Crisis Core. Once you get into the combat it’s all gung ho attacking, blocking, running up walls, fighting in the air and other crazy acrobatics. Not the usual turn-based action you find in the actual Final Fantasy games. Most stages have sections where you can fall down but you’ll respawn to solid ground without losing too much. Some levels in particular have more open air than floor which causes great frustration, not enough to toss my PSP to the floor, but still aggravating nonetheless. The camera is incredibly annoying sometimes, there is a lock on button, but this doesn’t fix it completely. What makes Dissidia different from other fighters in the combat realm, is the unique damage system where you need to build up bravery by performing bravery attacks. The more you attack them with bravery attacks, the more you drain their bravery and increase your own. Your opponent is in turn easier to kill with normal ‘HP’ attacks. So if you drain their bravery enough you can actually kill them in one hit. Or you can just do a number of HP attacks, the choice is yours. The combat is pretty exciting and requires you to keep thinking as you zoom all over the place but it does tend to get a bit repetitive after a while.

There’s so much packed into Dissidia that there’s no way I can cover everything but I will mention a few further things that stood out to me. The game features a data install feature to make loading times shorter, but Dissidia ran perfectly fine, I didn’t feel the need to do it at all. It has Wifi multiplayer for online battles and Ad-hoc for card sharing. There’s a Chocobo week calendar that uses a feature DS games like Animal Crossing tend to use. You are told to set up which day your bonus day is and if you play on that day you’ll receive more experience and other goodies. The music is an assortment from past Final Fantasy games bringing back a few memories from the time I spent with them. Absolutely nothing compares to an epic Sephiroth battle in tune to the Sephiroth theme! There’s also a considerable effort gone into the help menus with a bit of wry humour, which is great since you might be referring to them from time to time. Now we can’t forget the little Achievement system under the cleverly disguised name ‘Accomplishments’, and of course the PP Catalog used to unlock rewards such as playable characters and costumes.

Closing Comments

The game does take  a while to settle into, to find out what on earth you’re supposed to be doing. It’s far from a pick up and play button masher, especially with all the lingo you have to learn; AP, DP, EXP, and PP to name a few! Despite that, Dissidia is better than any other fighting game I’ve played. Mind you it’s not the traditional beat-em-up. For those that enjoyed Final Fantasy games or just JRPG’s in general, this should be right up your alley. Dissidia is more than just fighting and offers a longer playtime with levelling up and it’s other RPG elements. There’s truck loads to unlock and it’s sure to keep you entertained for quite a while.

Released 11/09/09 for PSP.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 27th, 2009 at 11:58 pm and is filed under Games, PSP, Reviews, sidefeature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.