Developer/Publisher: Square Enix
Genre: RPG/Fighting
Price: $39.99
Acquired: Review Copy from Publisher
Verdict: A fun fighting game and RPG hybrid that dares to do things differently from standard fighting games.
Pros: Fighting system provides for a variety of brawls, great graphics, the ‘skip cutscene’ button
Cons: Said cutscenes are excessively long and melodramatic, there’s a lot going on that’s not easily understood
It’s an idea that’s long overdue; Final Fantasy characters in a fighting game? In a world where Pikachu’s fighting Solid Snake, it’s kind of a surprise that Dissidia Final Fantasy didn’t happen sooner. Square Enix could have just made a Super Smash Bros.-esque game and have been done with it, watching the money rake in. Thankfully, Square Enix have instead gone in a distinctly different direction, making Dissidia something more than just your standard inter-franchise brawler.
Dissidia’s basic fighting system plays closer to a 3D Smash Bros than to Street Fighter or Soul Calibur. You’re constantly jumping and flying around the arenas, and you have two basic types of attacks: the Bravery attack, and the HP attack. You essentially have two health meters, the bravery count, and then your actual HP (a good comparison would be the health system from the original Halo – the bravery being your shield, and your HP being your health) – your goal being to break an opponent’s bravery so you can then start taking out their HP before their bravery regenerates. You have a jump button that you can use to perform multiple jumps with, a block button, a lock-on button, and a context-sensitive button that allows you to run up surfaces or grind on things like strands of the lifestream when you see a yellow arrow. It all sounds pretty simple, but there is a LOT going on that can be hard to comprehend – the instruction manual and tutorials are a must for this game, even though you may just think it’s a fighting game, it’s a fighting game given the full Square-Enix treatment.
"And curse my bedhead! Just as long as the double-sided tape sticks..."
What I mean by this is that if you started playing Dissidia thinking “Oh hey, it’s the new Square-Enix RPG,” you wouldn’t be wrong. This game is chock-full of more cutscenes than every other fighting game ever created combined. It sounds like hyperbole, but I’m probably right – there’s enough story here through the overarching story and each character’s main quest to fill plenty of normal RPGs. The story is also very melodramatic – it involves a battle between the god of light, Cosmos, and the god of discord, Chaos, summoning up their best warriors (read: the heroes and villains from Final Fantasies I-X) to duke it out, and people apparently learn important lessons about themselves when they’re not fighting. If you’re a fan of the story in most Square-Enix games, this will be right up your alley, the game hits the melodrama nerve perfectly. If you’re not, but still want to play a fighting game featuring familiar characters, then you will be thankful for the Skip Cutscene option.
This Lion prefers not to stick around TOO long.
Other RPG elements include leveling your character up (although that’s becoming less of an RPG element and more of a ‘game’ element), getting money from fights to buy new armor and items, and for those of you RPG freaks who break down in tears when anything real-time occurs, there’s even a menu-based gameplay system where all you do is select commands and the computer will move around and execute all the actions for you. I don’t recommend this mode. One, it dulls the gameplay to an excessive degree, as all you’re doing is just selecting menu actions. Two, using it makes you a pansy. Play your fighting games in real-time like a real ultimate warriror. Well, that’s actually a point of contention – the more I played this, the more I realized this wasn’t much of a fighting game at all.
YO SQUALL, I'MA LET YOU FINISH, BUT FINAL FANTASY VII WAS THE BEST RPG OF ALL TIME.
Yes, the core gameplay is one on one arena fighting, and you can just go into the Arcade mode, pick a character, and throw down for a few rounds of fighting, but everything else just screams RPG – from character levelling being such a huge factor (fighting enemies much higher level than you is a fool’s errand), to the prevalent story elements, to even the strategy RPG-esque playing board that each level takes place on (and proper strategy on these boards is the key to getting the best bonuses). You may come into this thinking it’s Super Smash Bros. with Final Fantasy characters. At one level, it is, but Dissidia clearly aims for something far greater than just that.
That doesn't look good for the guy with the health bar on the right.
The fighting itself is fun – battles have you flying all over the place, running up walls, busting out flashy attacks – and these fights can be long, drawn-out affairs that represent the kind of epic affair you’d expect when the stars of the Final Fantasy series are duking it out. Of course, sometimes they can be over in seconds, when one opponent is clearly outclassing the other in not just power, but in superior strategization. In some ways, this game is a lot more like boxing than the Street Fighter fighting game model that has been the norm for the genre for almost two decades now. The strategy elements in the story mode make the game a lot more engaging than it would if it was just a straight run through of battles. The story, while I found myself ignoring it more often than not, is at least there for those who have a higher tolerance for melodrama than I do. But it just goes to show that this game is all about a different approach to the fighting genre – and it succeeds.
Dissidia is not a fighting game for the hardcore fighting game fan – this is meant to be a fun and unique approach to Final Fantasy characters fighting it out, all with the RPG touches you would expect from a Final Fantasy game, fighting game or not. Dissidia is engaging, unique, and fun to play, there’s not really much bad that I can say about it. If Final Fantasy characters having crazy battles sounds appealing to you, then Dissidia is well worth the purchase. If a fighting game that dares to do things outside of the box appeals to you, then get Dissidia. If you want the same old, tried-and-true approach to your fighting games, maybe just rent Dissidia, then buy it when you realize that I’m right and you’re a pansy.
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