Dissidia: Final Fantasy Review

Final Fantasy is arguably one of the longest and largest gaming franchises in existence, it’s been across four generations of consoles and is about to emerge into a third. It’s been ported across consoles over time and been shrunk down into handheld chunks of fun on the DS and PSP, it’s spawned new series of games that range from pseudo hack ‘n’ slash (crystal chronicles) to Real Time Strategies (FF Tactics) and even been through 2 incarnations on film. It even survived the merger of the two Japanese RPG giants Squaresoft and Einx in 2003.

Dissidia: Final Fantasy is the latest in Square-Einxs epic and takes a different approach into the series as a swish and sleek fighting game. Spanning across all of the Final Fantasy universe, from I to X, and containing the lead protagonists and antagonists from each of these games who have joined together onto two opposing sides; the side of Cosmos made up of the protagonists and the side of Chaos which consist of the antagonists from the series. The story is the standard affair for a Final Fantasy series; without wanting to reveal all, the side of Chaos (who is the God of Discord) attacks and tries to kill Cosmos (who is the God of Hope), this means that both sides then call on help from the warriors of light and dark to aid them in their battle. As the side of light you play through the story  ’Destiny Odysseys’ and then as the side of dark you play through the story of ‘Shade Impulse’ and this alone will last you hours in gameplay, let alone its complete replay value with extras to unlock and and achievements to win.

So many other fighting games have come and gone, and so very few of them can survive in the market against the titans of Tekken, Soul Calibur and Dead or Alive; Dissidia however comes in full force and will easily be a fighting series that people will anticipate any sequels too. Where Dissidia differs is in how it plays, battles were intended to be amazing to watch, like in the 2005 Square-Einx CGI film Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, and still not be unplayable and complex. This is something that they easily achieved and fights are blisteringly nail biting, amazing spectacles and never mind bogglingly impossible; what makes it so easy and free flowing to play is how automatically it locks onto your opponent within the 3D environment, meaning you will rarely be fumbling around wondering how to reach your target. Secondly the controls are so intuitive and simple that depending if you are in the air or on the ground you will perform a different move, which all look amazing when performed; you then have moves to dodge and block attacks, that again are easily executed, and this creates such amazing back and forth fights of attrition, which have always been a staple of any Final Fantasy game and of those amazing Advent Children fight scenes. The actual matches however play out differently again to a normal fighting game as each character has two gauges, a standard HP gauge and a Bravery (or BRV) gauge, the BRV gauge is what makes Dissidia such an interesting game. Your character can perform two types of attack, a HP one and a BRV one, BRV attacks mean that your opponents health isn’t damaged but instead their bravery which dictates the amount of HP damage they can give out, the amount of EX they absorb during the battle and, when you reduce their bravery to below zero, their vulnerability to critical attacks. This means that you now have to balance attacking on two fronts and defending too thus deepening the combat in the game far beyond the standard affair of fighting titles on many consoles, let alone the PSP.

What is immediately noticeable about Dissidia: Final Fantasy is just how polished it looks and runs on the PSP hardware, as with many of the PSP games you can still install data to the memory stick to make it run faster, however other than in loading times it runs super smooth from the UMD itself, on rare occasions it may lag for a split second but that problem completely disappears even with the smallest installation of 256mb. Visually its got to be one of the much better looking games on the PSP hardware, and if they even thought about making a home console version would just make the visuals mind blowing with all the action happening onscreen. Its evident that Dissidia is just such a highly polished game, it really is Square-Einx’s celebration of 20 years of Final Fantasy and it completely lives up to the legacy of such a powerful franchise. If there is only one game you ever buy for your PSP make sure its this one.

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Posted by Vaughn.H on Jan 20 2010. Filed under Other, Reviews, VITA/PSP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry