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Dissidia: Final Fantasy

Posted: 2009-09-17 01:02am
by Ford Prefect
Okay, so I picked this up, and between doing an important essay, I've been playing it. As far as I'm concerned, it's good, but I may be incapable of forming an objective opinion on this. Anyway, my thoughts.

Basically, Dissidia is a fanservice crossover beat 'em up game featuring a hero and a villain from all the Final Fantasy games from I to X, as well as one character from both FFXI and FFXII. The plot is essentially classic FF find the crystals nonsense, but this is pretty much incidental. Each hero character gets a chapter of the story to themselves, called a Destiny Odyssey, where they try to find their crystal. Generally each of these chapters is driven by their individual motives or what have you, rather than just 'find the crystal'. For example, DO4, about Cecil Harvey from FFIV is more about his relationship with Darth Vader Golbez. It's not stunningly amazing writing or anything, and because each DO is so short it can feel kind of compressed, but it still comes across as being pretty interesting (Emperor Palamacia's antagonism of Firion in DO2 is great, for example).

The meat of the game is obviously Final Fantasy characters beating the crap out of each other. At first I wasn't so pleased with the mechanics, and found them confusing and seemingly quite random, but now that I have a few hours under my belt I really like the combat. You have two attack buttons , one for HP attacks and one for Brave attacks. Pushing forward or back will also give you a different attack, plus attacks are diferentiated between ground and air, giving you a total of six Brave attacks and six HP attacks. The air/ground divide can actually give character really different styles, such as Firion who only has magical attacks in air, which are a variety of homing projectile attacks, compared oto his array of physical combos on the ground. This is quite restrictive, especially at the beginning of the game when you don't have enough attacks to fill slots, and I think learning new attacks is somewhat too slow, though I get the impression that the rate of attack learning will go up. In any case, the mechanics are pretty interesting. In addition to HP, characters have a pool of 'Brave points', which basically determines the power of your HP attacks and to a lesser extent your defense. Brave attacks actually sap the Brave points from your opponent, making your inevitable HP attack much stronger, but when you make an HP attack, your brave will drop to zero and must be built up again (it regenerates, but of course it's much faster to wail on your opponent). On top of this, if you reduce your enemy to zero Brave they go into 'Break', giving you all the points in the Brave pool and making all hits critical, meaning you can potentially wipe your opponent with a good combo (being in Break is pretty tense as a result, especially against chracters like Sephiroth or Garland who have huge range and excellent attack speed). Generally, combat is extremely fast, which contributes to how confusing it was initially. This is in addition to all the other combat mechanics like Guard Crush, Chases, traps, Wall Rush, battlegen, your chocobo, equipment, accessories, EX mode and so on.

On top of this, characters are wildly different in the way they play. Cecil, for example, has a transformation mechanic where ground HP attacks make him a Dark Knight and air HP attacks make him a Paladin, completely changing his Brave attacks; Jecht is a pretty simple character focussed around a huge number of combos - one of his Brave attacks has something like ten different combos come out of. Garland is a slow character that does huge damage, but he's more about timing and precision than any other character in the game. Darth Vader Golbez is primarily a spellcaster who has spells which change how they work based on distance, Exdeath is ridiculously slow but has the ability to teleport, and so on and so forth. I prefer some characters over others (Jecht, for example), but balance at this point seems excellent. While at first it felt like Sephiroth was completely broken, as he has huge range, is fast, does great damage, has easy Chases etc, he was surprisingly easy for characters to punish if they dodge. From what little I've played, no character seems 'broken', not even Golbez with his all-range attacks, teleport strikes or ludicrously useful tractor beam attacks. Once you get the handle on on a character it's possible to have some really cool looking battles due to unlimited mid-air dodging, clever grind rail usage and so on.

It's not all great though. Some of the maps are hard to play on, due to three dimensional battles and some confusing architecture. Ultimecia's Castle is probably the worst so far, but keeping track of the levels with lots of different floors can be difficult. Lock on means you'll never lose your opponent, but in some cases you are really fighting the stage. On the other hand they're reasonably dynamic, with limited destructible objects and plenty of ways to enhance the combat (grind rails are boss), and sometime it's just really cool when Garland just fucking bats someone through the roof. :) My main other complaint is that while combat is fun and dynamic, the stages of the DOs aren't terribly compelling. Essentially, you have to get from one side of a grid-like maze to the other, taking on 'battle pieces' and finding treasure and shit, while conserving as many of your movement points as possible. It's actually pretty well done, but it's very slow paced compared to the break-neck speed of the action otherwise, though it's a better single player mode than your usual arcade fair. Finally, keeping track of every mechanics the game has to offer can be kind of bewildering.

Pretty much, if your'e a fan of Final Fantasy as a series, then you should enjoy this. The meat of the game is fun, solid and when you're in the zone looks awesome (and you can save replays of all your most boss moves). I don't think there's an option for Japanese voice acting, but it's generally pretty good. Most of the heroes are Vaan level voice acting, excpet for some exceptions (Cloud is decent, Zidane is shit) but the villains are great to listen to. Also, some of the help menus in the game are lol. Penelo's commentary on some of the characters are priceless: 'Do you all really find Sephiroth that attractive?', 'Kuja ... yeah, a boy shouldn't be prettier than I am' or 'goddamn Jecht is fucking sexy guys'.

Re: Dissidia: Final Fantasy

Posted: 2009-09-17 12:18pm
by UCBooties
Overall impressions of the game have been very positive and there is a lot of depth buried in the game. My one real complaint is that at higher levels the computer cheats like a motherfucker. As in, nearly %100 dodge and block rate, we hope you like your neverending combo string, and we can equip whatever the fuck we want, so bite me. Still, the fighting engine runs very smooth and there's so much to do in the game. Like I said, overall impressions are very good and I don't have any problem recommending it to anyone interested in it.