Dissidia Impressions
Because people asked, my thoughts on Dissidia:
- Presentation is absolutely top-notch. It's graphically amazing; I'd say it's easily the best-looking PSP title out there, from the character models and their animations to the slick menus.
- Most characters are represented quite well and match how I imagined they'd be in a 3D, voice-acted world. The Warrior of Light and Firion struck me as especially cool, considering that they had little to no personality in their original games. I also love the way that Terra was rendered.
- The story (at least in the first, character-specific half) is basically embellished fanservice, but I'll be damned if I'm not eating up every friggin' bit of it. Sure, some of the dialogue is cheesy, but it's a whole lot of fun.
- The fighting is fluid, fast, and engaging. Every fight is a pleasure, and it's a blast to experiment with new tactics against different foes.
- I was pleasantly surprised to see that not only do characters level up as they are played, but they learn new attacks that you can set as you please (in addition to there being a huge pool of equippable weapons and armor). I was under the impression that this would be a Smash Bros.-esque game where every character had a fixed moveset, and so the ability to customize your fighters is a boon to me.
- In the tutorials, there are cameos of characters from older FF games who explain the game mechanics to you. It's a really neat way for the developers to give a nod to long-time FF fans and to players who explore every inch of content within the game.
- It seems to have incredible lasting appeal. Not only are there story, versus, and quick battle modes, but there's also an arcade mode and a card coliseum mode for even more variety in gameplay.
To say it as plainly as possible, I absolutely love the hell out of this game. If I were to score it, however, I would have to issue two different ratings-- one for Final Fantasy fans, and one for series newbies. Because the game relies so heavily on nostalgia and fanservice to succeed in some areas, I can understand why newcomers would be less thrilled with it than I am.
My rating: 9/10
FF newcomer rating: 7/10
Depending on how the game pans out by the time I've finished the story and gone through all of the modes, I could easily add a point to each of those scores.
For me, it really is that good.