With Square Enix, I've found lately that their games are either high-budget, quality titles that earn the company its reputation in spades, or high-budget crap that coasts off of the success of their established franchises and are somehow still blindly praised by their fans. When the opportunity arose for Squeenix to make a fighting game incorporating characters from all of their Final Fantasy games to date, they could have easily thrown together a halfassed fighting game with the depth of a Flash game whose only merit was that it had characters from games that sold well in the past. And they did just that.

Now these days, typical fighting games use a four-to six-button layout - varying degrees of punches and kicks - each attack changing further depending on the direction pressed while executing the attacks, plus a variety of special moves. Squeenix dared to think out of the box, and gave each Dissidia character a whopping THREE moves. I'm not even kidding, and I'm actually being nice here, since one of those three is actually a "super" move. Now in theory, which of your two "regular" attacks your character deploys depends on whether you're moving the analog nub towards or away from the opponent, but in practice the computer just seems to decide randomly which one it wants you to use; and since each move is drastically different in terms of form and distance, this pretty much takes away a big chunk of strategy from the game.

Now there is a "fourth" type of attack, but the reason I didn't mention it before is because it's not actually an attack. This "regular" attack just saps your opponent's "brevity" points, but doesn't actually harm them physically, even though your own character is smacking them around with a sword. The idea of the brevity point system is that, the more points you have, the more powerful your attacks, and this is where the bulk of the game's strategy is supposed to come in, apparently. Of course, these "brevity" attacks are all short-range, and the levels are all too damn huge for this to be anything of a convenient strategy.

And the levels. Did I mention they're huge? And multi-tiered. You maneuver around the levels by pressing triangle around walls and pillars so that Squall can automatically run up a wall like he apparently can do, chasing your opponent in a giant castle that's just too damned huge for a two-character brawl, meaning fights can sometimes turn into irritating chases that fluff the match out for far longer than it needs to be. One level even features floating castles separated by huge gaps, which means your characters are going to be falling off quite a few times on account of the fact that none of them can actually, you know, fly.

Now to be fair, I'm judging the game only by the demo, but from the reviews I've read about the final product it's not any different. But hey, it's on PSN for free, so snag yourself a demo and see for yourself what you think.

you know what i'll do... is snag the whole game for free on pspiso and give it my judgement. but you're not giving me much to look forward to.

I wish I was brave enough to do that -___- I wouldn't want to brick my PSP.

lol. i actually had someone else hack mine. I'm not brave enough to do it. Which is one reason why I'm still using a 1000 series PSP (the fat one) instead of upgrading to a better one.

I just downloaded the demo, cant wait for dissapointment.

And I'm still using my one because I'm a jobless student who is completely dependant on their parents. At least you get free games and have a fat one rather than pay for games and have a fat one. Swap?

And now because I'm scared of being kicked out for talking about piracy I'll shut up.

seems fine, but I'll have to wait until I get it to give you a real opinion.

http://www.1up.com/do/reviewPage?cId=3175648

Yeah, I noticed a lot of gaming sites, save the one by GameInformer, giving it positive reviews, which is absurd because anything contradicting what I say is clearly wrong.

ANYWAY.

Personally, I've stopped trusting reviews from big sites after the whole Kane & Lynch fiasco. And you have to admit a lot of the enthusiasm on those sites seem a bit forced, and even after they claim that it's not about pandering to its fans, a bit more than half of the review is about how wonderful it is for all of its little Final Fantasy references. But hey, on a more personal level, if you enjoy the game then what the hell do I know.

I hate to say anything to defend the Squeenix Androgynous Angst Factory, but it seems like Dissidia's generally getting good reviews. I know Isukun will tell you all of those review scores have been paid for under the table (especially if they're for a Nintendo game) but I'm not so paranoid. I'll bet the amount of enjoyment you get from Dissidia is reliant on your willingness to understand the systems they have in place, and your fondness for spiky-haired emo stereotypes wearing leather and zippers.

Nothing about it entices me though, I'll admit.

I'm not much of the RPG or fighting game player, but when I tried it it was fun. I mean, I've only played a little, but my sister keeps demanding that I play it. Doesn't she know that I DON'T know Japanese? I have no idea what I'm doing! Heck, I was playing as a level 58 Squall against a level 1 Golbez and I still lost.

Plus, I'd totally play it if the English voice acting didn't suck balls and I didn't have to play through the good guys first. Because I'd totally be Gabranth and eat Tidus' heart for breakfast.

But wow, there's a lot of ill feelings here. I'm guessing somebody didn't like Kingdom Hearts, haha.

I've found that probably the best approach is to first see what the big sites have to say about the game and then what yahtzee has to say about the game. The forced enthusiasm and the force hate cancel each other out to give you a more balanced view if the game is worthy.