Well Final Fantasy nerds rejoice. The game that all you pasty faced fanboys wanted is finally here. This game is, of course, Dissidia: Final Fantasy. In this game you can pit your favorite FF heroes against their respective villains and vice versa. (But we all know there is going to be an assload of Cloud vs Squall and Cloud vs Sephiroth videos on YouTube). Yes, this is ‘Fanboy Fantasy’.
Graphics – Damn. Square Enix just love to push the bar.This game is freaking sexy. The over the top visuals and attacks…everything is just beautiful. Its amazing seeing the re-created characters from the eight and 16bit transformed into such lush smooth 3-D character models. The opening cut-scene is PlayStation 2-ish. While there are some rough edges here and there, there is certainly a lot to look at and appreciate. Certain weapons look ‘blocky’ at times and some textures are muddy but the characters look great! Arena’s are a little bland.
Playability – This is a awkward fighting game indeed. Its a fighting game with a tough of RPG elements. Between fights you can go into a menu and equip armor and spells to make your characters stats higher so the character is stronger. To progress the player must progress through a series of chessboard like arenas and move using destiny points across the board while progressing toward the boss of the board and defeating them.
You’ll notice that fights are given their own unique twist as well as instead of just life bars you get “bravepoints”. When your character sustains damage with a light attack that directly lowers the bravepoints. While being hit with a strong attack bypasses the brave points and attacks the characters life bar itself. This can be called a tug of war of sorts. The lower the characters brave points the easier it is to just finish them off. So its a rush to drain each others brave points. And when combined with certain magic spells and summons, this can either add or subtract a characters brave points to make the flow of the fight ever shifting.
When one character has filled up their EX bar they will go into EX mode. In characters this will cause a transformation making their attacks stronger and their movements faster. They also get a finisher move that is acted out a-la God of War reaction command style. And damn it looks freaking awesome with lightning and wormholes that appear out of nowhere. And then there’s the point that this game takes place on the FREAKING MOON. I say this because you jump and attack and float and jump in mid-air and jump around like cypress hill and the house of pain in this game. It takes getting used to because it’s kind of floaty because you are weightless and kind of float there and if you don’t move you just fall right back down.
Story – Well it’s classic Final Fantasy. In this world there are two Gods, one of the Chaos and the one of Harmony, and they have been at war for thousands of years. One day the God of Chaos went to the bowl of darkness and summoned eleven warriors of darkness to aid him take over.When the Goddess of Harmony learned of this she also sought out and found eleven warriors of light to battle the darkness. Each story for each character intertwines and shows off the character growing and all of their motives and what they are there for. Each story has all the characters keep their respective personalities so expect a lot of soul searching questions and an assload of self doubt and nonchalant catchphrases.
Bottom line–
Pros – It’s great to see Final Fantasy characters old and new duke it out! The game looks great and plays just as good and comes with a ton of unlockable nostalgic pictures for die-hard fans! Fan boys can finally see who is a better crybaby… i mean character! lengthy single player campaign too.
– The chessboard thing gets repetitive because you will find yourself fighting the same glass mimic of the same character a ton of times. No infrastructure mode, no online… come on, WTF!! Easily performed spammable moves leads to un-balanced gameplay at times, many favorite characters left out to just single out lead characters.
Overall Grade-
A-
