December 22, 2007 - The phrase "they've done it again" seems to apply perfectly to this situation. I go the Jump Festa event today at the Makuhari Messe convention hall just outside of Tokyo, I line up to play a PSP game that everyone pretty much assumed would suck from the start, and I'm totally blown away.

Last time this happened, I got to share with everyone the sheer awesomeness of Final Fantasy VII Crisis Core. This time, the game at hand is Final Fantasy Dissidia. It goes against what everyone was expecting, but the Final Fantasy fighting game is way up on my most wanted list after I sampled it for 20 minutes today.

Calling Dissidia a fighting game may have people picturing a one-on-one fighter viewed from the side. Dissidia is actually more of a fusion of one-on-one fighting and 3D combat. The camera doesn't stay fixed to the side of your character, nor does it remain behind your character's back. Your opponent may not always be in view.

The game has all the control options required for both free-roaming 3D combat and fixed one-on-one fighting style combat. You can lock on to your enemy with a press of the L trigger, jump and double jump with X, and guard and evade with the R trigger. Camera controls are up on the D-pad, making it a bit unrealistic for use during a fight, but I didn't have too many problems with camera angles once I was locked into my opponent

There's a major twist in how you go about actually damaging your opponent. You have two attack buttons. Pressing circle in combination with the analogue stick unleashes one form of attack. But rather than draining your opponent's HP, it drains your opponent's "Brave," which is just Squenix-speak for attack power. To deal actual damage to your opponent's HP, you use the square button, again in combination with analogue stick motions. The resulting physical attacks eat up the Brave that you've just stolen.

The tug of war between Brave appears to be central to combat. The game rewards you with massive amounts of Brave when you manage to make your opponent's Brave meter drain down to zero, an event called a "Brave Break." The more Brave you have, the more damage your attacks do.



Classic Final Fantasy characters in this display from Jump
You also have an EX gauge which fills up as you battle. When this reaches max, you can perform a wild special move that fills the screen with colors and lights and deals massive damage to your opponent.

In addition to dealing blows to your opponent, you also have to figure out how to best use the stages to your advantage. The battle fields aren't like those of your typical fighting game. Instead, they feel more like the stages of a 3D platformer, with multiple surfaces over which to fight, all at different heights. Some stages have bottomless pits between fighting planes; fall into these, and you incur damage.

The environments are semi-destructible. Do a particularly strong move, and you'll end up knocking down columns and platforms. They regenerate after a brief period of time, building up gradually into their original form.

Navigating such varied and variable terrain may seem tough, and it will be if your triangle button happens to be broken. When you traverse key areas of the battle field, usually near walls, the triangle button icon will flash on the screen. This flashing is called a "map hint." The game is telling you that by pressing the triangle button, your character will perform some acrobatic maneuver that's straight out of Final Fantasy VII Advent Children.

If you're in the vicinity of a wall, pressing triangle will make your character run up the wall. He'll keep on running up the wall as long as you hold the triangle button down. I also got my character to perform a brief air glide in some situations.

You can use these special map maneuvers in various ways. If you fall off a ledge and into a bottomless pit of death, you can recover by doing a midair jump towards the wall then climbing up with triangle. You can also climb up seemingly impossibly high cliffs to reach new fighting platforms.

The similarities to Advent Children's acrobatic, gravity-defying combat are unmistakable. A trailer shown separately from the demo had a pre-rendered CG sequence in which FFX's Tidus and FF7's Sephiroth raced up a cliff, exchanging blows, just like in the film. I couldn't confirm if the characters in Dissidia can exchange blows while climbing up walls, as I was unable to get my character into a parallel wall climb with an opponent.

With all these formula twists, I was left questioning if there was ever an actual pre-existing formula for Dissidia's gameplay. Rather than trying to adapt the Final Fantasy characters into some existing fighting game formula, the designers of Dissidia seem to have attempted to create an original fighting engine around the Final Fantasy characters -- at least the characters as they'd probably combat one-another in a Tetsuya Nomura movie.

Does it work, or is it a confusing mess? That's a bit hard to determine after just 20 minutes of play. However, I did feel myself getting the hang of things the more I played.

Square Enix had the game's demonstration set up exclusively for single player play, with access to four fighters: FF1's Warrior of Light, FF8's Squall, FF9's Zidane, and a character from FF2. Artwork outside the booth hinted that the Judge character from the Ivalice series of titles (FFXII, Tactics, etc ) will appear in the game. And, as mentioned above, the CG footage shown in the trailer had Tidus and Sephiroth doing combat. This isn't official confirmation, but it seems to be a strong hint.

The demo had a few elements that I couldn't properly try out due to my limited play time. When first starting off, you're able to select between "normal" and "hard" combat modes. Hard seems to add completely new moves depending on the character. Strangely, in multiplayer mode, these combat modes are referred to as "standard" and "technical," even though the move sheet handed out by Square Enix suggests that they're the same move sets as in single player play.

While the demo consisted of four isolated one-on-one fights, there are some hints of a more progressive experience. After a battle, as the classic Final Fantasy fanfare rolls, you're rewarded with gill and "AP" points. When selecting your character from the select screen, the character description lists the required experience for your character reaching a next level. Obviously a hint at character customization.

On top of what appears to be a complex combat experience for single and multiple players, Dissidia also manages to push the PSP to new visual heights. The game is a visual feast, with detailed combatant models, and plenty of lighting effects. Definitely a step above Crisis Core, which already had some thinking that the PSP really was a portable PS2.

If you, like me, were expecting a quick cash-in with Dissidia to take advantage of the popularity of the Final Fantasy characters and all that work Square Enix clearly put into developing its Crisis Core engine, you, like me, were wrong. Dissidia has the potential to be a rare breath of fresh air in the fighting genre, Final Fantasy characters or not. I've only played it for 20 minutes, but I can't wait to sample the full Final Fantasy fighting experience.