Review: Dissidia Duodecim (PSP)
Fans of Square’s Final Fantasy franchise were granted their wish with the release of Dissidia Final Fantasy; a fighting game combined with RPG elements that show cased the main characters of Final Fantasy 1 through 12. Since then fans have continued to see more of their favorite Final Fantasy characters appear on the battlefield. With that came the sequel for Dissidia, Duodecim.
Duodecim can be viewed through the eyes of two different types of players. For veterans of the first Dissidia, Duodecim is more of an expansion pack with not too much new content. You have new characters, stages, and battle modes, but don’t expect a new story of any kind. Players that have missed out on the first one can safely pick up Doudecim without fear of missing any story from the first game.
The story is broken up into two parts. The first part show cases the new characters and their fighting styles. Their story, unfortunately, is separate to the main characters of the first game (Although they do run into a few main characters once in awhile). These characters discover the true nature of the battle between Cosmos and Chaos, the two warring gods of harmony and discord. The team of heroes and villains have been locked into eternal conflict that starts anew one cycle after another. This cycle of conflict has been on-going for twelve cycles, giving to the name of the game. With this knowledge, the team of new characters work to find a way to break the cycle once and for all.
With the notion of the repeated cycle of conflict from the first story leads the second part of the story. This is where the story of the first game is recycled piece by piece, with very small dialog changes. These changes are hardly noticeable and don’t serve much purpose. Here is where veteran players may be frustrated having to play over the same story as before, which leads to a few boring hours. New players are not missing anything from the first game, but chances are the majority of players are veterans from the previous game.
There are several special features that will make veteran players happy. First off, you are able to retrieve information from the first Dissidia game into Duodecim. This means you get to keep all your high-level characters, their learned abilities, and so on. You do not get to keep the summons or items you have worked for, and chances are these have been eliminated and tweaked for balancing reasons. If you have downloaded and played Prologus, you can retrieve the items you have collected as well as obtain Aerith as an assist character. With the good comes the bad. In the repeated story, veterans will have access to their high-level characters, though you must adjust their level to a proper level cap for this story mode, which means you can’t breeze through like you may have hoped. If you don’t adjust, you will be penalized harshly.
Some positives of the game are the new and polished modes. Players can construct a team of five characters and battle the CPU or others. Team battles can be fought in either a tournament or in a round robin style. In the tournament style, one character fights until he’s down, then the next character will step into the fight. In a round robin style characters fight each other one on one. The team with the most victories wins.
With team battles, players can play up to ten persons, five per team. The only disappointment is that you must wait for your turn to fight. With several of large arenas one would hope to share the battlefield with team members, unfortunately there is no such mode. In team battles, players may assign Jobs to their characters, giving them a bonus in battle. Monks will receive an attack boost and White Mages receive bravery recovery speed.
The once known Dual Coliseum has changed to Labyrinth Mode. This mode is much the same as before, except your character is stripped of all equipment, leaving you to fight bare bones. Players can pick up equipment and party members along their travels through the Labyrinth. As the player continues to move through the labyrinth, he may stop and save at exit checkpoints. Each section of the labyrinth comes with its own challenges, such as only finding equipment, or only finding summons to aid you in battle.
The biggest change to the battle system is the ability to call upon assist characters. Each player has an assist bar broken up into two sections. Players fill up that bar by executing bravery attacks (whether it lands or not doesn’t matter). If one bar is full, the player can call their assist character for a bravery attack; a second bar has the assist character do an HP attack. If players find themselves caught in a string of attacks and want to escape, they can call their assist character to pull them out of a bind. This does lock up their assist bar for a few seconds. The one downside for players who are being overwhelmed is that they must have their bar up to call for help. If the assist bar were to fill up while the player was being overwhelmed, it may help balance out the battlefield. Unfortunately, the way the assists are set up you must be on top of your game to receive the rewards.
All in all Doudecim is one big expansion pack with new characters, game modes, items, and several hours of new story. While there is plenty of End Game content to collect and play through, it really feels empty in some areas, most importantly the main story mode. While most fighting games don’t need a solid story, Dissida does make you play through one to collect special items for your characters. One must fight and collect these special items if you want to get the best of your opponent. Doudecim is not anything new or fresh, and barely brings anything new from its predecessor. Most of the content could have been published as an expansion pack to download online. With that your best purchase would be to download off the PSN, as the game hardly warrants a full UMD.
PROS: New characters join the fray and old characters are balanced out. Good deal of post-main story content. Added fighting modes and features, including assist characters.
CONS: Repeats the story from the previous game. Lack of new villain characters. Feels more like an expansion than a new game.
Bottom Line: Duodecim is still the same fighting game before with some new characters and a few new features. As a game alone it doesn’t sit well as a squeal. Some parts felt like Square was cutting corners during development. Once again, it’s more of an expansion pack to the first Dissidia. If you are a fan of the game, chances are you will like the second installment despite it’s short comings.
Verdict: C+
