So my friends and I mean the 5 whom I usually hang out with bought downloaded Dissidia: Final Fantasy on to their PSPs'

After they finished selfishly playing their illegal copies, I strong-armed asked them if I could play. And I did... for about 20 minutes before they decided to do random battles.

Here's my take on it:

It's a a button mash-fest as I originally expected after seeing the demo from the last TGS. but what I didn't expect was the fact that it is a timed button mash fest. The game is both balanced enough where spam characters are definitely a no-no, (here's looking at you Ultimecia and Kefka) but unbalanced enough where a character at full health can still lose to a character at 1 hp (I hate you cloud of Darkness)

My FF6 obsessed friend, after only playing the game for 2 days, managed to level up his Terra to lvl 52, and unlocked most of the story characters (No Exdeath and no hidden characters)

The Good:
The bottom line is that this game is fun. The flashy aesthetic of the game as well as mostly different battle styles between each character makes this game a hell of a lot better than Itadaki Street. The extreme customization can make any nit picky microtasker happy, and considering that only fans of the series would only buy this game, there's a character for everyone. If you liked Brawl then you'll probably like this game. If you liked Mortal Kombat... you may like this game. If you like Street Fighters/KoF... give it a try. The voices are irritating, but mostly good. Regardless of how much I will tear this game apart, it's an enjoyable game and most of it's bad points are forgivable.

The Bad:
I'll give it a chance say that and I can get over the androgynous characters, but the voice acting and the story mode irks me to a point. Kefka's been whittled down to the annoying joker character instead of the homicidal one i,e, his sole purpose in being dissidia is to piss off everyone; friend or foe. His laugh has been watered down and not as reality shattering. Some of the situations and villain choices do not make sense like Jecht for FF10 or Golbez from FF4 (Most would have figured from the original previews). Gameplay-wise there tends to be a bit of a lag during battle when both characters are pulling off spectacular moves, but that may be due to the fact that I was playing a dled copy. The stages interestingly enough are probably the Achilles heel of this game. Some stages have bottomless pits which are not only a completely retarded idea, it breaks the flow of battle... badly. Granted they are easily avoidable, but during quicktime battle sequences, the battle may actually lead to these dark hols of nothingness and you have to respawn after a second or 2. This may seem very short, but considering that characters respawn in random locations, you have to take the time to find your opponent. This leads me to the second problem: the stages are very large and very spacious. You have an arrow which leads to your opponent and your camera is free range, but the stages are just too damn wide. I wouldn't want to play this game in a claustrophobic arena, but jesus shit, these stages are unnecessarily huge

The Ugly:
The absolute worst flaw of this game has got to be leveling system. The irony is the fact that the leveling system is what sets Dissidia apart from most if not all fighting games, but there's a reason why most fighters do not have this: there is no point. What the leveling system does is make the game from partially unbalanced to completely unbalanced. It would make sense for a multiplayer final fantasy fighter to have a leveling system, but if you've ever played Soul Caliber 4 online you'll know how irritating this system is.


You can take my review with a grain of salt, but I'm actually going to shell out the 70 USD for the import, so from that you can tell I enjoyed the game.

Sorry keep forgetting to do this.
So I actually got the game and I'd like to make some revisions now that I've immersed about a 100 hours into this thing.

The Good:
copypaste the above. To add on, there's a lot of replay value. The last boss to prevent spoilers was challenging and you can obtain him in the game. A lot of the characters are made for a specific niche just as I stated before. The end result however isn't as bittersweet as most fighters. The characters aren't all completely balanced out and rather having one overpowered character, you have a split between characters that are fun to use, characters that are statistically strong like say Zidane, who aren't overpowered but easy to handle easy ride.

I'm going to errata the ugly from this point. The leveling system to me is still meaningless, but if you've ever play competitive pokemon battling, you'll understand that the bigger numbers will make the game last longer, or subsequently shorter depending on your equips and such.

Leveling isn't hard for most characters (considering you would only max out your favorite ones anyway). The level designs are intricate, seeing as there's the nice normal versions of all the stages, and horrible obstacle inducing claustrophobic ones as well which brings a lot of the challenge into this fighter. If your a brawl tourney fag, you might find this game a bit easy in the same way that a FPS gamer who spent most of their life on the valve engine finding halo easy.

The game is all about timing, which is interesting considering that the people at square have a stiffy for the damn timing puzzles.


The bad: There's a lot of superfluous crap put into the game. Gabranth, ExDeath, Ultimecia, and Cecil are all characters whom I find completely useless. ExDeath in particular seemed to have been put in there for the sake of the designers and fans of V. (Going off a tangent) Okay I get he's supposed to be a tree, but still having a character who is that slow and that irritatingly stupid doesn't do anything for you other than training fodder. If you play as him almost guarantee you will die.

The voice acting is again bad, but the storyline is just meh. It's not that interesting, not by FF standards anyway. The characters seemed to all been beaten by the angsty stick, just as I had expected. The irritation of having Jecht and Golbez is sort of underminded now that you find out *spoilers spoilers* they aren't actually evil.

The end dialog of the final storyline, is copypasted directly from your favorite FF villain death scenes, and I mean that completely. Once you finally kill the baddie, a white screen will pop up and have the text. If your finishing the chapter, it'll instead give you the actual cutscene I believe... Considering I used Firion/Frioneil for my adventure, I think if you fight the individual villain with the respected hero you'll get the scene...

Sorry, went off another tangent.

The Ugly: Forget the leveling system, what made this game completely horrible at some moments were the cutscenes. Ironically the dialog, the storyline, all of it is just horrendously bad. It wasn't just the fact that a lot of the characters were beaten with the angsty stick. The dialog was made in a way, where a person could identify "oh I remember that line from FF#" What really kills this for the story mode which was surprising well thought out is the cutscene at the end of each level. If you don't understand japanese and got the import, consider yourself lucky. The writing is also very plastic and shallow. I never expected any deepness considering who the cast was. The lack of substance characters, and subsequently Ramza, create situations of "super serious emo badass action phrase" followed up by "horrendously insulting 12 year old self esteem crushing quibble"

The dialog almost consist entirely of making the main character your playing as more emo, which ironically makes great characterization.

The only man in this game is really Jecht, who gets some of the most straightforward non-epic lines in the game.

So that's my revision. If you have your own opinions please PM and or rant on this page... not that anyone really reads it.