lestatdark

User Score
10

Presentation - 10
Gameplay - 10
Value - 9.5

It was labeled first as an Ergheiz succesor, for those who don't remember, it was a Playstation original game released by Squaresoft, which featured unique characters with the addition of a few Final Fantasy VII characters, like Cloud, Tifa, Sephiroth and a RED XIII lookalike, Django.
Dissidia does share some similarities with that game, especially when it comes to the battle mechanics, but all comparisons end there.

While the first was just a mediocre game with some known characters thrown in the mix to lure fans; Final Fantasy Dissidia is in a whole another galaxy.

What started first as a massive fan gathering of known Final Fantasy heroes and villains, ended up as one of the most solid Beat 'm up's in gaming history.

For starters, the game offers a wide variety of content to keep you playing for hours and hours. Not only is the actual story mode of the game long enough to gather you at least some 40+ hours of gameplay, to actually complete it 100% you'll need more than 70+ hours at least.
Needless to say that in the whole story mode, you get to play as the heroes side (Cosmos side) which accounts for a total of 10 characters, each one with full customization capacities, their own abilities and strategies and also with a whole array of RPG elements such as level ups, accesories, weapons, armor, summons and many more.

If that wasn't enough to keep you playing this game, you've got additional modes that are as long or even longer than the whole story mode, like the Arcade mode, which is broken down into three different modes; normal, hard and time attack. This mode offers you the possibility to play with a pre-set character from both sides (Cosmos and Chaos), and it works just like a normal arcade mode from other beat 'm up's, in which you fight against a set number of enemies, each one more difficult than the last, gaining items and PP if you finish all the fights in each mode.

Next comes the Quick Battle mode, which is the equivalent of a Training mode, which allows you to test you character setups against the CPU. In this mode you can customize everything from the stage you want to fight, to the AI behaviour and the AI difficulty; and it can also be used to level up your characters even further, since they also gain Exp in these fights.

And at last, but not least, comes the coup de grace of Dissidia, the Duel Colosseum. Broken down into five stages, each with a different range of enemy levels and it works using a system of cards, which can vary from enemy cards, treasure cards and job cards.
Each enemy card is set to a different AI difficulty, which will gain you, should you win the fights, a different amount of medals, which then you can trade for the treasure cards, or gather them till you max the amount of medals, 999, and then trade those medals for PP points at the end of each session of Duel Colosseum, each stage of the duel colosseum offers a different amount of medal to PP tradeoff.
The job cards, are, like they sound, a set of cards which will offer you different advantages or disadvantages for the next fights, and you can only have to a maximum of three job cards at any given time.
The whole spectrum of the Duel Colosseum is to build your characters even further, and to gather those hard-to-get items so you can make the ultimate build for your characters. This will bring you dozens and dozens hours of fun, since you can always come back for more fights, and more prizes.

Of course, most of these things won't be available at first, and they will be unlocked as you progress in the story mode, either by winning them, or by buying them at the PP shop.
Things like the characters from the Chaos side, alternate costumes, alternate BGM, player icons and more can be bought from the PP shop, giving the game more and more replaying power.

Next we have the online mode. It works via Ad-Hoc (so no world multiplayer yet, unless you use other programs to force that capability), and it uses player cards as the information method between people, giving them your most used character, your type of play, your items build, Bio and player icon.
The best part of this system is that, once you get a player's card into your list (and you can have a maximum of 40 cards) you can then fight their ghost data in the offline lobby, which can allow you to build up your own items or just simply to learn your friends patterns and strategy even better.

As you can see, Dissidia is one of the most complete Beat 'm up's of all time, granting you hundreds of hours of gameplay. But that's not all.

Dissidia is also a PSP graphical powerhouse. Everything from the character models, stage modelling, magic effects, global lighting and many more puts this game as one of the best usages of the PSP hardware. It's also one of the few games to actually rival the quality of PS2 games.
Even the sound quality of this game is astounding. It has one of the best compilation of Final Fantasy music through the entire saga, worthy of any collector's edition, and even more songs can be unlocked in the PP shop as i've mentioned. Classics like "Dancing mad"; "One winged angel"; "Battle of the four fiends"; "Otherworld" and many, many more are just a tiny sample of how great the music selection of this game really is. Even the voice over of the characters is really good, but it would be best if we had the option to use the original japanese Voice over with english subtitles.

And at last, we come to the gameplay part, per se. Each character, as I said, is broken down into their own fighting pattern, with characters like Cloud, Tidus, Sephiroth and Squall being the most melee heavy hitters; and characters like Terra, Kefka, Kuja and Ultimecia being the primordial magic users of the game. Each of them has their own strategies and to gather the sufficient know-how for each of them, will have you wandering in the game for dozens of hours at least.
The battle gameplay is broken down into two different attack modes:

Bravery attacks - These are the attacks that will fill up the big numbers at the right of your character avatar. They won't cause any direct damage to the opponent's health, but they will be used to empower the HP attacks. Also, when a characters Bravery reaches 0, the next attack that he suffers, will put him in Break Status, and the opponent will gain the same amount of Bravery that's in the number between both character's HP bar - this is called stage bravery, and is affected by various factors like both the characters levels, or special conditions in each stage.
HP attacks - These is the bread and butter of each character attack pool. These attacks are the only ones that can actually damage the opponent's HP bar, and their power comes from the amount of bravery you've accumulated over the course of the battle. Once you've used an HP attack on an enemy, and if he's still standing, you will be left on a double-edge scenario, because your bravery will drop to 0 for a few moments until it recovers to the normal amount, in those moments any attack you suffer could easily break you, but you also gain 100% critical strike against the opponent. It's up to you to decide which is the best approach to use.

There is also another mode during the battles. On the left of your character avatar, there is a small purple bar, the EX bar, that is filled by either collecting the small blue orbs each character releases when he suffers damage, blocks and attack or dodges the enemy during chase mode, or by collecting the EX core's that appear randomly on the stage.
Once you've completed the EX bar, you can activate EX mode (R+Square) which will add several effects to your characters (these depend on the character you're using) and during this mode, after each succesful HP attack, you'll gain the possibility to do an EX burst attack (hitting Square when prompted to); this attack is the ultimate damaging move of each character, and to pull it off succesfully, you'll have to do a series of on-screen commands that differ from character to character.

So, that's it from me, hopefully you'll find this review useful, and let yourself dwelve in the magnificent world that is Final Fantasy Dissidia.