Dissidia 012 Final Fantasy is a fighting JRPG crossover spin-off game for the PSP. It is the second game in the Dissidia series but the story is a prequel, and it also contains the first game’s story as a post-game bonus. Dissidia is designed as a fighting game, which serves as the combat system. Battles are one-on-one fights taking place in a large open area. It is fast paced and looks great in action. Winning is slightly different though because there are two types of attacks. Bravery attacks will not deal damage to your opponent’s HP, but will build up Bravery Points. HP attacks will damage your opponent’s HP to the value of your Bravery Points. Thus you must build up enough points and then land a HP attack in order to get somewhere. Furthermore, your character can jump, block and dodge. Blocking and dodging depends on your timing, which isn’t helped by the fact that it is a combination of two buttons pressed at the same time in order to execute. Complicating things further, you can call for Assist Attacks where a friendly character will come in to deal damage, and an Ex Mode that gives your character stat boosts, unique attacks and other passive abilities.
All the while you can jump around the place, dash towards or away from an enemy, and climb walls and other obstacles. This leads to verticality in the area designs. The game highly discourages button mashing since all attacks aren’t instant. They have a short starting animation that can be interrupted, which can be annoying and frustrating if you are not used to it. Dissidia is a difficult game with a high learning curve, even on the Normal difficulty. Despite being a fighting game, it has a meaty story mode complete with all RPG elements. Each character can gain experience to level up, unlocking new attacks and abilities to equip in the process. There is a wide variety of attacks and abilities that can drastically change a character’s play style. The story takes place in chapters and focuses on six characters: Lightning, Vaan, Laguna, Yuna, Kain and Tifa.
The game’s cycle is that your character is placed on a world map where you run around to go to Gates. You battle through these Gates, defeat a boss and then move on. There are frequent cutscenes, which are all fully voiced. The story mode can be difficult for newcomers due to the complexity of the combat system, and how you need to look out for the enemy’s moment in order you time your actions. Furthermore, you seem to be perpetually underleveled compared to the bosses and you do not have enough resources to consistently source the best equipment. Bosses can feel cheap when they are able to constantly dodge your attacks. You’ll fight against the camera since when you are locked onto an opponent, the camera likes to shift around and have a pillar or wall blocking your sight. This is a limitation of the PSP hardware since a right stick to control the camera would have alleviated this frustration.
The crossover aspect is very cool. As part of the eternal conflict between the gods Cosmos and Chaos, Cosmos summons the heroes from various worlds to fight for her. During the journey, our heroes will fight against Manikins which are effectively clones of the villains. It uses the same music from the various Final Fantasy games and when used as battle themes, it is awesome. The battle between Cosmos and Chaos are in cycles, and as the title suggests, this is the 12th cycle. The story ends up being quite simple and not that well told. It seems very drab with a lot of dialogue. It takes around ten to fifteen hours to complete so it isn’t a long story by JRPG standards. However, the final chapter requires a bit of grinding since it forces you to use a party of all the playable characters, but they will all be underleveled by the time they reach the final boss, even if you had never skipped a battle before this point.
Once you get the hang of the battle system, the game is very fun. The graphics are impressive for a PSP game. The gameplay loop within the story can be a bit repetitive, especially with the amount of battles that you have to do. It only feels like this because of the constant loading screens. It does try to stave off the repetitiveness by forcing you to control a different character each chapter, and each character plays differently, you have to change and adapt your tactics. Summon effects during the battle that usually puts the opponent at an advantage or you at a disadvantage and it feels really unfair when that happens. It happens way too frequently. Due to the seeming “lag” between pressing a button and the attack actually happening due to the attack animation, it feels as if the opponent dodges your attack way more often than you’ll like. This is probably due to the game encouraging you to dodge and then counterattack but it is still frustrating at times, especially when it drags out the end of a battle. These two combined makes it a terrible design choice and makes the game really unfun.
Once you’re finished with the prequel story, you can play through the first game’s story and the difficulty rise is ridiculous. All your characters start at level one and the enemy far outpaces your level. You are supposed to make up for it with equipment but it is still unfair when certain opponents spam moves and continues to make the game more and more unfun. This highlights the flaws of the control scheme where the AI has inhuman dodging reflexes while you’re stuck trying to press two buttons at the same time to dodge, and the movement being so clunky. Upgrading your equipment is not as easy as it sounds as you don’t gain much money from battles; it makes the game a stupid grindfest. The first game’s story is longer, and feels even more of a grind. It tries to shake things up a little bit by introducing stage effects but the story is of a lower quality and somehow manages to make an epic crossover quite bland. It takes around 15 to 20 hours to complete and after that comes the post-game content which is the first cycle of battle. In this, the enemies are very high leveled.
Sure, there is a lot of content but it is all very repetitive, and the world map ends up not adding anything to the game. That fact that you’re fighting in the same arenas against the same enemies multiple times (since they’re used as mooks), it’s not great and feels like it is dragging the game way too much. The story is nowhere near good enough to keep the grind going. The original’s story has the same concept, which is just the various characters fighting against each other, there’s a lot of dialogue but very little is meaningful. Overall, Dissidia 012 Final Fantasy is fun for the first ten hours or so but then it eats away at you with its repetitive nature. It is grind heavy, the AI difficulty is broken, being either too easy if you exploit it properly, or too hard as it spam moves and throws massive level differences. The world map is cool but once you get to the second cycle, it’s like, what’s the point since it is unnecessary fluff.
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