Dissidia

The two Gods Cosmos, the goddess of harmony. Chaos, the god of discord have been at war for eons and Chaos seems to have gained the upper hand with Cosmos’ forces slowly withering away and Chaos is about to reign supreme, a few warriors remain and that is where Dissidia begins.

This game takes the normal beat ‘em up concept and sticks its nose up at it, giving you a familiar design with a completely new way of doing things and this is a game that really needs to be played to understand it and appreciate the amount of originality and thought that has gone into its design, but I will try to describe it to the best of my ability.

The battle field is not just ground based, and it is a lot bigger playing field than what you have come to expect from games like Tekken and Soul Calibur. The environment throws in an element of RPG gaming and gives you a truly three-dimensional area in which to fight, you grind on arcs through the air flying at opponents, locking on to them from a distance and pounding them with special attacks collecting what are called EX cores and EX force that can be connected with HP attacks and when executed take you into the EX mode giving you a different screen with close up action graphics and effects and some of the levels even allow Characters to wall run.

There are two different single player modes, the Arcade mode that is just quick fights with the various available characters from all the different Final Fantasy games and then there is the rather lengthy Story mode with a different story line for each of the characters (each of them has their own unique weapon, special powers and fighting style) intertwining into the main story arc.

Each chapter is set out like a chess/game board with various fights available by moving on the squares to reach each one, each time you move a square it costs 1 destiny point, you pick up items in Story mode that increase your Destiny Points and if you finish the chapter with surplus Destiny Points you get bonus’ that allow you to buy characters from a catalogue.

The multiplayer between multiple PSPs is excellent trading friend cards and even being able to fight your friends’ character complete with their playing style while they are offline.

There are replays to relive your battles and you are able to pause the action and move/zoom the camera around the battlefield to get a closer look. Although it is hard to explain the concept what I can say about this game is if you are a Final Fantasy or general beat ‘em up fan buy it, but be prepared to throw the playing style you have become accustomed to in other fighting games out the window and start afresh with this new beat ‘em up engine that will no doubt be repeated or tried to be replicated by the genre in the future. I would also like to thank Tommy D for his help, contributions and opinions with this review and also allowing me to experience the multiplayer mode, as this is something that is hard to do by yourself.

For Final Fantasy fans here are some of the characters you will be using - Firion (Final Fantasy II), Onion Knight (Final Fantasy III), Cecil Harvey (Final Fantasy IV), Bartz Klauser (Final Fantasy V), Terra Branford (Final Fantasy VI), Cloud Strife (Final Fantasy VII), Squall Leonheart (Final Fantasy VIII), Zidane Tribal (Final Fantasy IX) and Tidus from Final Fantasy X.

– Maceman

Dissidia
Platform – PSP
Distributor – Ubisoft
Genre – Beat ‘em up
Rated – PG