TMR – Accept no Substitutes

9/14/09 September 14, 2009

Posted by themoodyronin in Ramble, Rant, Rave.
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Yes, it’s been quite a while…>.> I’d apologize, but I’m kinda over that sort of thing as far as this is concerned.

But anyway…

I got Final Fantasy: Dissidia about 2 weeks back and I’ve been playing it just about non-stop since then, so I think I’m fairly qualified to give an opinion about it. I guess since I’ve been playing it for 2 weeks straight, it’s pretty obvious that I think it’s a good enough game, but then again, when have I ever said anything about anything without complaining about it?

Let’s start with the basics. It’s obviously a FF fighting game (though, not quite the first FF fighter…>.>) and as such, you get to see FF heroes and villians beat the crap out of each other 1 on 1. 22 different characters from 12 different FF games. And let me take a moment to give Squeenix some props
for actually making it 22 different characters. I haven’t played them all (15 played, 3 maxed out), but the characters I’ve played actually play like different characters. No palatte swaps, or slightly altered stats. Each character has their own moves and playstyle (to an extent…), which is something
you (well… I guess “I”) don’t really see all that often. But anyway, there’s about 4 different modes to play in, but they all boil down to a simple premise; you pick a character, someone else (an AI or PC) picks a character, and then the two of you try to beat the crap out of each other.

What sets Dissidia apart is how you go about that. Basically, here, there are 2 types of attacks Brave attacks and HP attacks. HP attacks act as normal attacks in any other game. You try to use one, if it hits, you get that much closer to killing the other guy and winning the fight. But HP attacks are
directly linked to your Brave. No matter which one you do, all HP attacks do damage equal to your Brave. Your initial Brave is determined by a bunch of factors, and usually isn’t high enough to do enough damage to win a fight. You can raise it, however, by using Brave attacks to sap your opponents Brave, thus making his HP attacks weaker and yours stronger. If you get his down to 0, then you get a bonus to your Brave based on the stage you’re in, and he enters Break status, making him unable to deal any damage until he either survives for a set amount of time without being hit by a Brave attack, or hits
with you with an HP attack. This isn’t the end, however, because once you get out of Break status, and additionally, everytime you connect with an HP attack, your Brave resets to it’s initial value. There’s also another wild card in the EX gauge. Everytime an attack lands, or is blocked, EX mini-cores
are generated and EX cores are also “randomly” (not quite) generated at various points in the stage. Collect enough cores and you can go into EX mode. In EX mode, you regenerate life, get stronger attacks (for most characters) and some characters even get extra moves. You also get the opportunity to pull off an EX burst, a special HP attack chained to the end of another HP attack. A move that is quite deadly under normal circumstances.

But this is all kinda boring to just read about…

A replay of a fight I played when I was trying to see if I wanted to use Cloud or not. Pause at 0:02 to take a look at the screen. The life bars and the small number under them (bottom-right for P1, bottom-left for P2) are the HP gauge. Big number on top is Brave. The blue gauges on the outer edge is the
EX gauge. 0:04 is an example of a Brave attack. 0:13, HP attack. And note how the same attack at 0:16 only did 1/2 the damage. I didn’t let my Brave regen fully after the 1st one so it only did damage for the brave I had at the time. 1:31 is the first Break of the match. Note the fact that I ended up
with 6x the Brave that I started out with…>.> 1:51 is the first EX mode of the game, and 1:53 shows why you can’t just continually attack in this game (well… HP attacks anyway…). I didn’t let my Brave regen enough and even though it was only 20 secs after I first broke his Brave, my Brave was low
enough to be broken. The sequence from 1:59 to 2:21 is something I’ll get back to. 2:31 is something I didn’t get to before. In most modes, you’re also allowed to bring in a summon to a fight. They have various effects, such as subtracting 1000 Brave from your opponent whenever you want to (even in
the middle of a combo) 2:33-2:39 is a chase sequence. Fairly simple & self-explanatory when you play the game, completely irrelevant if you don’t. 2:45 is the first EX break of the match. 1200 damage on the first HP attack and the EX Burst generated 700 more to smack me with on top of that (the EX Burst itself is pretty cool too when you think about who this guy is and what game he came from). And 3:33 is when I land the last EX Burst and attack of the match to win it.

And that’s how a low level Dissidia match plays out. You do that over and over, collecting items, money, xp, and other various points from the matches themselves so that you can buy better gear, level up to get stronger and more abilities, and unlock more stages, characters, modes of play, and various
cosmetic touches.

There are 5 modes of play. Arcade, where you take baseline characters and play them through a couple of matches against other baseline CPU opponents. Arcade’s also the only mode that doesn’t take into account the money & equipment that you’ve accumulated (for better or for worse). Story Mode is where the main plot of the game takes place. You get 10 interlinking stories to start with, one for each FF hero, then play said character through them. Good strategy and exceptional play (the ability to meet goals like Brave breaking your opponent in 10 secs, for example) nets you rare items. Quick Battle
allows you to use your characters to play 1-on-1 matches against any opponent of your choice. Communications Mode allows you to play either against a human opponent (only locally unless you have a PS3, I believe), or to exchange info with a human player and then play against a AI-controlled character of their choosing (again, only locally, but there are codes to unlock special fights here). And finally, once unlocked, Duel Colliseum is a sort of survival match against AI-controlled opponents of random strengths in order to earn more points and rare items.

And that’s basically Dissidia. And now for the problems…>.>

First off, like I said, which the exception of Arcade mode, all of the modes are pretty much the exact same thing. You just have to play by different rules to get different items. It’s not really all that much of a problem, but it is a bit misleading…>.>

Speaking of items, there are a LOT of them here. Getting all of them is getting to be a full time job, and even after all the time I’ve put in, I’ve only unlocked about 1/2 of the unlockable content (‘course, the 1/2 that I don’t have is the majority of the cosmetic stuff) It helps with the longevity of the
game, but it’s a bit annoying when you have to replay the same match for HOURS because its the only way to reliably get a 6% chance to get 1 simple item.

The plot (and by extension the characterization) is pretty dumb too. At first it seems pretty in depth, but once you play through it a bit, you see its only about as deep as the plot to the first FF. Bad guys want to destroy the world, good guys want to save it. Period. SUPPOSEDLY, the bad guys want
different things (to rule the world as opposed to destroying it, for example), but since you never see any evidence of this (I mean overt action as opposed to simply talking about it), I’m not really sure it even happened. There’s also a bit of added “drama” with the various rivalries between the heroes and
their respective villain (Cloud and Sephiroth, for example), but 1/2 the time it’s weakly portrayed and the other 1/2 it’s too STRONGLY portrayed based off the original games. I mean, was Squall even aware of Ultemicia’s existence for 95% of FFVIII? Then there’s the fact that there’s no real evidence that aside from his job, there’s no evidence that Onion Knight is even one of FFIII’s characters (and I think they too didn’t know about the CoD for most the game).

And then there’s the battles… The whole Brave system seems innovative enough, but in practice it’s ridiculous. I’ve played many matches where my opponent was able to generate 1000s of Brave in one combo and many others where the CPU was able to achieve 9999 Brave within 10 seconds of the open of the match, sometimes even when both I and the CPU were at the same level. HP attacks being directly linked to Brave is ridiculous too when it means that Cloud’s simple, easily telegraphed and therefore DODGED, Braver has the same potential as an attack that pulls rocks from the ground (damaging you if you’re under it), spins them around you (damaging you if you’re nearby, stuck in a corner, in the middle of an attack that won’t clash with it, or God-forbid, shooting projectiles which usually bounce off the rocks and go back to hit YOU), then throws said rocks in various directions across the stage. Also, certain game mechanics make certain moves at LEAST 50% more powerful and allows you to chip off HP with insane efficiency.

And then there’s that 1:59-2:21 bit that I said I’d get back to. As you can see, the CPU dodges everything I throw at it. EVERYTHING. You can do that with projectiles and even that crazy rock move I mentioned as long as the attack and stage gives you the time and room to. Once you’ve played enough to know how each character attacks, it becomes frighteningly easy to dodge every attack in the game. In fact, in high level play(the higher CPU behaviors and probably any and every human you’ll play against), the only way you’ll ever get an attack off is to dodge in a way that gets you close enough to your opponent to get an attack in before they finish their attack animation. The end result, a match that is either over in mere seconds due to one or 2 attacks, or a match that is drawn out for FAR longer than need be, because of dozens of dodges and blocks. Here’s an example of the latter http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nk8fq-5hsSc , but to be fair, I was pretty inexperienced at the time (I could go through the vid and point out all the mistakes I made if I wanted to) and an example of the former http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHgnIcACYlM (again, to be fair, it was a pretty lucky match)

BUT…

It’s still a pretty good game. Lots of customization and again, 22 unique characters. And at the end of the day, for all it’s faults, it’s still an FF fighting game. But it’s just that in the realm of fighting games, you have your Soul Calibur (the original DC game xP) on one end of the spectrum, you have your Zatch Bell: Mamodo Battles on the other and somewhere in the middle, there’s Dissidia.

…*sigh*… and now… without me even doing anything to it for weeks… I can see that my journal’s broken…  It’s too late for me to bang stuff around anymore…-_-

edit:  …hmph… Reduce the posts per page and it goes back to normal…whatever…