Dissidia: Final Fantasy [PSP]

Posted September 1, 2009 by Michael Curley.

Reviewed on the Sony PlayStation Portable.

I can only imagine what sort of conversation led to the creation of this game, but I imagine both Advent Children and Super Smash Bros. featured prominently – with maybe a dash of Power Stone put in for good measure. This could easily have ended up a gimmick of a game, an attempt to cash in on Square-Enix’s biggest property, but the good news is they went all out on this, and the fact is I had to pry myself away from it in order to write this review.

Dissidia, as you no doubt know by this point, pits the heroes and villains from the whole series (including cameos of characters from XI and XII) in a series of absurd, high-flying battles in what might be the best possible attempt to make the last 30 minutes of Advent Children playable. The game plays very smoothly, and the controls are streamlined to help you get around and fight. Unlike most fighting games, most of the time you won’t be taking off your enemy’s hitpoints, but rather engaging in a tug of war over the Bravery stat, which determines how much HP you take off when you finally do get around to outright attacking.

The Bravery mechanic helps keep the battles even, and as long as you can avoid the HP attacks, you can keep fighting. It makes for a good twist on the normal fighting game formula, and gives a good deal of strategy to the game. Each character also plays in its own style, but at the same time, the controls are very much pick-up-and-play, with a very shallow initial learning curve.

The game, like most top-of-the-line PSP games, looks as good as it would if it had been put on the PlayStation 2, which says a lot for the power of the little handheld, though the loading times can feel a bit long at times. The EX Bursts are where the graphics pull out all the stops, and if you’re a fan of the main series’ limit breaks or summons, you’ll enjoy both the animations, and the controls for the Bursts, which are often borrowed from the characters’ original games. The only issue is that the camera occasionally gets stuck behind the scenery during the more frenetic fights.

The game is fully voice acted, and everyone who already had a voice actor (Cloud, Sephiroth, Tidus, Jecht, Cecil and Golbez) has theirs returning, while everyone else gets an appropriate voice (though I still wish they’d gotten Mark Hammill to use his Joker voice for Kefka). Except for the occasional awkward pause, where, no doubt, they had to match the Japanese lipsynching, the characters deliver their lines convincingly, with some, like Kefka and Kuja, hamming it up as they should. And the battle themes from all the games have returned, with some rearrangements, but for the most part kept faithful to the originals.

The game’s got three main modes: Story, Arcade, and Quick Battle. Arcade and Quick Battle are exactly as you’d expect, a run-through of battles and a single-match set up, respectively. The story mode takes each character through their own arc, and has a mild strategy aspect to it as well, as you have to decide which enemies to engage to progress effectively.

There’s also an ad-hoc multiplayer mode, and a system for playing “ghosts” of your friends, but I wasn’t able to try those out in time for the review.

So, should you buy Dissidia? Short answer: Yes. Long answer: if you recognized even half of the names I mentioned during this review, then Hell Yes.

Tagged as Dissidia: Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy, Square Enix