Article by Levi Rubeck. Illustration by Ben Bury.

I really want to love Dissidia: Final Fantasy, a fighter/RPG for the PSP that you’ve probably heard of. Maybe that’s the problem: I’m too close. Not in the sense that I will let the game get away with anything because it has Terra in it, but rather, because I want to truly enjoy this game as I did the games that spawned it, I am perhaps much too critical. Dissidia boils down ten games, most of which were integral to every major chapter in my life, into a stew that can’t begin to compete with the flavor of its sources.

Dissidia inflates my biggest yawns about the Final Fantasy series (I-X, to be precise) as the focus of the RPG half of the game. Stat-building and consumerism, two major tenets of the Japanese Role-Playing Game modus operandi, serve as the backend of Dissidia. There are billions of items that you can buy or create for your character that marginally boost their stats while your inch way up the gil chain until you can pick up the next powder/shard/whatever comes after that. Thankfully, there’s the now-common “optimize” option when outfitting your character’s equipment, so I don’t really have to think about it anymore. Though I still have to do the buying. And you can’t optimize your accessories, because those are strategic! Like a 5% boost in EX Core absorption is really gonna put Sephiroth on his knees.



There’s also a “battlegen” system, where meeting certain conditions in a battle grants you a prize, and you can read through the conditions which make those prizes more easily attainable. But even if you’re the right character, at the right level, fighting the right opponent, at the right time of day and after eating enough fiber, you still only have a 10% chance of getting said item, so you need luck! And wouldn’t you know it, there happens to be an item that will boost your luck which I have for sale right over here...

These bores are compounded by the availability of playable characters, two from each FF game I-X, meaning that, like many of the original games wherefrom these heroes/villains of excessive muscular and magical might have emerged, you are struggling to keep up-to-date equipment on a couple of juiced-up soccer teams. There was no such closet-management in the Smash Bros. games, with which the action/fighting part of Dissidia is closely aligned. In Smash Bros., it was good enough to choose the character with the biggest sword (or Lucas, in an act of solitary protest) and mash away. You pick up elements of style in between and learn what works and what doesn’t from battle to battle until the controller disappears and what you want to happen just happens. With Dissidia, you have to make sure you’re on top of your ensemble, because no matter how badass your finger skills are, a wrong outfit makes all the difference when the game throws up a boss that has twice as many levels as your current avatar. Which it does often.



Really, the fighting itself isn’t bad—Dissidia is almost the video game version of Advent Children, the FF VII cgi cartoon loaded with all the zips, slashes, running and flashes that I do not really recall taking place in the actual game of FF VII. But in order to dodge, block and dash, you have to press R and one of the face buttons, as these are some of the most used skills. I don’t know about your PSP, but mine must be angry with me or something, because whenever I really need to dash towards an EX core (which makes you go ultraoverdriveomegatransformation) my character inconveniently blocks, thereby letting my opponent, who has no such button restrictions, get the lead on said ultimodestructive core.

The brave-damage system is interesting and as a bonus it works rather well—essentially you and your opponent vie for bravery points by hitting the crap out of each other, though it doesn’t affect your hit points until you use an HP attack, whereby, if successful, all the bravery points you syphoned from your opponent turn into damage dealt. For the non-action enthusiasts, there is a command input option which turns the battle into more of a rhythm game, somewhat sapping the action of the battle. Of course, the ton of accessories all affect the way these numbers play out in ways large and small, though you probably won’t see the large ones until you’re 20 hours deep.

A lot of people really enjoy going through a thousand menus, creating custom “sets” of equipment and accessories and summons to flip through for their characters, maximizing their play potential from match to match, and if that’s your flavor then I salute you. Really, I don’t have that big of a problem with grinding, or leveling, or even equipment optimization in an RPG context. What makes those elements bearable (and even entertaining) in the original FF games is the ongoing story. Battling drones for an extra hour is fine, and obsessing about purchasing some Dragoon Greaves for every member of my party before stepping into the Cave of Self-Immolation is all well in the service of the story and exploiting the weaknesses of my enemies and those who command them. But in Dissidia, these major story elements just aren’t there, and it sucks if you aren’t beating down Kuja because you need a new sword or because you have the reflexes of an arthritic sloth.



Which leads to my major issue with this game: I want to love it so badly, but god damn the story makes it hard. I’m a fanboy. The help menus feature the sprites of all my favorite secondary and non-playable characters throughout the history of these games. There’s a joke about “Vicks” and “Biggs” that only people who played Final Fantasy III, as VI was known on the Super Nintendo here in good ol’ ‘Merica, would get, and I actually opened my mouth to laugh when I read it. The designs of Tetsuya Nomura and Yoshitaka Amano feel more closely fused with Japan’s anime instincts (and America’s obsession with them) than in any other FF game, and the music wrenched way more emotion out of me than I expected (Cloud’s overworld/board theme in particular). As I mentioned, the battles work alright and are even fun sometimes, though if you are clearly outmatched in levels in stats, no amount of finger dexterity will matter, just like in most of the other Final Fantasy games. The real crime of this game is the way it turns our favorite characters into two-dimensional community college actors.

It’s arguable that no story could possibly contain twenty characters like these. They aren’t all equally nuanced if any are nuanced at all. Chekov obviously didn’t write any of their original scenarios nor did he have a hand in this game. But where the Warrior of Light is transformed from the player’s avatar to an heroic archetype, every other character has become a stereotype of themselves. The heroes have to find the light within themselves in order to obtain their crystal to restore the world blah blah blah. Cloud’s depressed, Squall’s a dick, Terra’s a weak little female, Zindane’s a childish monkey, Cecil is a Hamlet-lite baby, etc... And in the end they all learn a quick little lesson about the meaning of friendship. It’s insulting, and since this game takes place in some unexplained extradimensional vortex where some-but-not-all of each character’s storyline has occurred, there are fewer references to each game within the story than in the help menus. The story is rendered down into vague epiphanies on cooperation and a misleading pseudo-philosophical mashup of character dramas and action flicks.



A game like this exists for the fan service, and in terms of visual/sonic aesthetics it serves, but I loved the Final Fantasy series for the epic quests, character growth, and emotional manipulation. I do feel manipulated by Dissidia, but only because the game is an adequately built money trap. And that’s really the best summation of this game: it is an adequate fighting game. It is not the game it could have been, either good or bad, and maybe this is my own problem. Dissidia can’t possibly meet the expectations of someone like me, who has so completely enjoyed the source material for nearly twenty years. At the very least, Square-Enix has succeeded in encouraging me to revisit Final Fantasy I-X (well, I-IX) and successfully evaporating thousands more hours in the service of direct nostalgia.

See more of Levi's writing at his blog. To see more of Ben Bury's work, please visit his website.

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