Dissidia: Final Fantasy
I figured it out. The whole Dissidia idea is secretly a valid one, despite the first game's apparent effort to undermine its own validity.
It just means that a random cross-section of multiverse gets erased or abstracted in a conflict between Chaos and Cosmos, and the only things that can retain shape or concept are those with the strongest will to exist, and the artifacts and settings they're most likely to dream about.
In Kingdom Hearts, it's how people's Nobodies retain a personalized shape; in The World Ends With You, it's how Minamimoto reemerges through the Taboo Noise Sigil after his own abstraction. In The Matrix, it's how Smith achieves autonomous self-replication. And so on.
Dissidia: Final Fantasy is just the story of several Final Fantasy dualities (Tina vs. Cefca, Cecil vs. Golubaeser, et cetera) and their relationship within the struggle between Cosmos and Chaos. The stories of Dissidia: Star Wars, Dissidia: Dragon Quest, Dissidia: Soul Calibur, and any number of others, all run concurrent to one another, but are mutually exclusive because their respective players have no context to mutually imagine one another. In other words, Tina, Squall, Cloud, Cecil, Firioniel, et cetera can all interact and team up because they're easy to imagine for each other--they all come from worlds with Chocobos and airships and Moogles and someone named Cid and gil and powerful spells denoted by an -aga suffix. Another way to think of it is in terms of frequency and Imagination as hinted at in The World Ends With You's Secret Reports.
(Squenix, please feel free to take this idea and make good on it--just creating a pattern of Dissidia games might make this debacle of a release SEEM to be justifiable.)
PS: Chaos vs. Cosmos is a good excuse for porting characters over from obsolete D&D campaigns--I doubt Brennan's ever going to run Macarno Shuffle again, but I'll be damned if Rocky Swivel wasn't a playable character in Dissidia: Dungeons & Dragons. (Ohh, muhh, the world kinda ended and there's a random cross-section of motivated badasses, and we can't remember anything, and if everything gets fixed we won't remember or mention each other, and we can't say the word "kill"...)
It just means that a random cross-section of multiverse gets erased or abstracted in a conflict between Chaos and Cosmos, and the only things that can retain shape or concept are those with the strongest will to exist, and the artifacts and settings they're most likely to dream about.
In Kingdom Hearts, it's how people's Nobodies retain a personalized shape; in The World Ends With You, it's how Minamimoto reemerges through the Taboo Noise Sigil after his own abstraction. In The Matrix, it's how Smith achieves autonomous self-replication. And so on.
Dissidia: Final Fantasy is just the story of several Final Fantasy dualities (Tina vs. Cefca, Cecil vs. Golubaeser, et cetera) and their relationship within the struggle between Cosmos and Chaos. The stories of Dissidia: Star Wars, Dissidia: Dragon Quest, Dissidia: Soul Calibur, and any number of others, all run concurrent to one another, but are mutually exclusive because their respective players have no context to mutually imagine one another. In other words, Tina, Squall, Cloud, Cecil, Firioniel, et cetera can all interact and team up because they're easy to imagine for each other--they all come from worlds with Chocobos and airships and Moogles and someone named Cid and gil and powerful spells denoted by an -aga suffix. Another way to think of it is in terms of frequency and Imagination as hinted at in The World Ends With You's Secret Reports.
(Squenix, please feel free to take this idea and make good on it--just creating a pattern of Dissidia games might make this debacle of a release SEEM to be justifiable.)
PS: Chaos vs. Cosmos is a good excuse for porting characters over from obsolete D&D campaigns--I doubt Brennan's ever going to run Macarno Shuffle again, but I'll be damned if Rocky Swivel wasn't a playable character in Dissidia: Dungeons & Dragons. (Ohh, muhh, the world kinda ended and there's a random cross-section of motivated badasses, and we can't remember anything, and if everything gets fixed we won't remember or mention each other, and we can't say the word "kill"...)