Dissidia 012 [duodecim]: Final Fantasy: The Revenge of Oppenheimer: Episode V: Part 2-A New Hope (PSP)

“Who’s the bigger badass; Sephiroth or Kefka?” This question that has plagued many fans of Final Fantasy for decades, and now, we Finally have an answer. Of course, we’ve had the answer for some time now; neither. Kuja destroyed a planet, and then destroyed everything that could possibly exist, but even for the homophobic, the answer came last year, in the form of Dissidia: Final Fantasy. This is the sequel. 

Except it’s a prequel.

And a sequel. A bit.

And the exact same game.

With a long title.

Or possibly the 12^th in the series. I don’t know.

Confused? You will be! 

The premise for the Dissidia games (and I’ll mostly be talking as though this were the only one, since it’s essentially a replacement) is deceptively simple. The goddess of Harmony is engaged in unending war with the God of Discord (Cosmos and Chaos respectively). To facilitate this, they summon up warriors from the world’s past. Or worlds’ pasts. Or possibly the future. And they may not actually be the same people, but copies. Deceptive. From a more meta viewpoint, it’s a fighter/RPG with Final Fantasy characters. The original Dissidia had one hero and one villain from each game, and Duodecim adds about eight new fighters; Lightning, Vaan, Prishe, Yuna, Laguna, Tifa, Gilgamesh and Kain. The first half of the game focuses on the “12^th cycle of Battle” (bare with me), which takes place before the events in Dissidia. It focuses almost entirely on six of the new characters, with most of the returning characters getting cameos at best. After that, the game starts to be a rewrite of the original, allowing for the new story points and features.

And now, about those features. In Dissidia, outside of battle, the gameplay was that you’d move your character around on a sort of chessboard, interacting with “battle pieces” to start fights. Now, you move around a world map (similar to Final Fantasy I’s), and enter into dungeons, where it starts to look a lot like the original game-board thing, but with a little bit more interactivity. 

Now for the fights themselves. Your characters need to be equipped, level up, learn and set abilities like in an RPG, although there is an arcade mode with preset characters. In battle, you have two sets of numbers to keep your eye on; brave and HP. Your Brave can be boosted by attacking with the circle button, which in turn reduces your opponents brave. When you think you’re brave is high enough, use the square button to attack there HP. As you might expect, the goal is to reduce their HP to zero as fast as possible. By collecting EX cores (wingéd bells), you can enter EX mode, and by performing an HP attack, trigger an EX burst, this game’s limit breaks. New to 012 are Assist characters; by filling up a separate Assist gauge, one can summon another character to perform an attack and depart.

The Graphics are pretty nice, although unlike the recent Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, you cannot increase the colour depth from 16-bit to 32 (this means that there’s a weird cross-hatching thing going on with the graphics, and characters with bright coloured models (e.g. Cloud’s hair) have weird halos in some scenes. You’ll also want to do a data install before you start playing, since the load times are long and frequent otherwise.

If you’ve already played the original Dissidia, you can import your save data. A nifty feature of this is that you can opt to not import character levels and abilities; you can start with everything you’ve already unlocked (in my case, this was 42% of 012’s  PP catalog), without having characters ridiculously over levelled, particularly since some of them have been given lot’s of new shiny moves.

Speaking of the unlockables, in the original, most of the unlockable outfits were disappointing palette swaps. Now, the majority of characters have at least one drastically different outfit, often designed to resemble the ingame appearance, since the default outfits are mostly based on concept art. We have a Warrior of Light with Red spiky hair, Exdeath out of his armour, Kefka in a Turban, President Laguna, and Marriage of Convenience Yuna (beard not included) to name but a few. There’s also DLC costumes and music. A few of these can only be obtained by buying certain square-enix products (the legacy edition of duodecim for instance), however they’ve been really smart here; there is a helmetless Warrior of Light costume for free on PSN right now (at least, I ASSUME it’s still there), which looks pretty badass, but it’s located right next to the other DLC for the game. If a new player goes to get there free DLC, they’ll notice the fairly cheap other items, and end up buying them as well. It’s the same reason why newsagents keep the mints and stuff at the counter.

The soundtrack is just awesome. It’s a mix of new arrangements of familiar battle themes, and a few unaltered tracks thrown in for good measure. I love it, but then I love them anyway. More will be available as DLC packs. Or not. It’s hard to tell right now. For all we know, the PSN was downed by Skynet, and all our days are numbered. I hear tell judgement day just passed again recently.

In summation (which sounds damned professional), if you’ve not played the original Dissidia, but this instead; there won’t be massive gaps in your understanding of the plot because of it. If you have played the original Dissidia, this one’s just better. If you have already bought it, but didn’t know there was DLC, then make a PSN account and check them out posthaste. If by some fluke you cannot get on PSN, then there’s something wrong with you, and you are right to feel ashamed. 

You are right to feel ashamed.