If it ain't broke, don't fix it... or so they say

User Rating: 9 | Dissidia 012: Duodecim Final Fantasy PSP
Somewhere in the back of my drawers, my old PSP had been gathering dust. Since the completion of GOW: chains of olympus and FF VII: Crisis Core (and sadly no remake of FF VII) there hadn't been much reason to pick it back up.
Then in 2009, along came FF Dissidia, swallowing up 150 hours of time, in a single game package.
Needless to say, upon the announcement of the sequel, I was pretty excited and after breaking my own "no pre-orders" rule, picked it up on the Australian launch date - which surprisingly was not that far behind the American and Japanese dates. Since then, 30 hours playtime, seven days... you do the math.

First of all, you may have heard that this game is very very much like the first. If this is what you heard, then you heard right. Now, this wouldn't mean anything unless you understood what the first game was like, so to put it simply; the first game was awesome, but not quite perfect. Like many Final Fantasy games, the gameplay system sounds very odd on paper, but strangely ends up working very well.
Outside of battle, characters gain exp, gil, items, etc and can customize more or less everything including stats, summons, moves, speed buffs, health regen, etc. Inside of battle, players deal HP damage based on a Bravery meter. matches are determined by HP, which is in turn determined by Bravery.
For the Dissidia vets, the major additions to the gameplay are the assists, which are very fun to use and EX revenge which spends your entire EX gauge in exchange for breaking out of an enemy combo and several seconds of slo-mo action. Furthermore, EX and Assists can be used to counter each other for "added depths of strategy". Honesty, these additions don't really add much to the original action, but they are still great fun to use.
For newcomers, essentially the action boils down to something more like Super Smash Bros. style reflexes, mental fake out of your opponent and understanding of the battle system, rather than Blazblue or Tekken style combos.
Importantly, the issues that plagued the first one are still here.
- firstly, the camera; there are two main problems with the camera: one, in closed spaces, it has a nasty tendency of showing you naught but a wall; and two, since it is permanently set to an over-the-shoulder view, it is often impossible to see opponents when they are at an elevation of over 40 degrees (relative to your position).
- secondly, jumps travel a pathetically small distance, so that on stages such as Reactor Core with little stable footing, you'll find yourself using dodges over and over again to get from one platform to another. This is quite tedious and if you are locked onto your opponent (which you usually will be) it's very hard to survey the environment which is not immediately in between yourself and the opponent.
All of these problems where clearly in the first game, why they weren't addressed upon the making of the second game is beyond me.
One awesome improvement is that in story mode, you can retry as much as you like. When you get to the final story chapter, there will be lots of enemies over level 120 (your own maximum level is 100) and the final boss is level 130 with 200000 health. (note that the maximum possible amount of bravery damage in a single hit is 9999), if it weren't for this, my PSP may have long since been smashed into smithereens.

Another change from the original is the story. Put plainly, the story in the original may as well have not existed and that's what most people seem to be saying about the second. I personally think it may not be that bad. yes, the characters are still constrained to single dimensional stereotypes and THERE IS STILL NO JAPANESE VOICE ACTING, but try to give yourself the chance to enjoy it and not be held back by it's reputation. At the very least, SQUARE ENIX did manage to come through with their promise - that the story will be improved - so even if that's not much, try not to be too hard on them.
It is important that you enjoy the story, because when you start off, there is little else offline content you can choose from. The only other major offline modes are free battle and Labyrinth mode.
I haven't actually spent that much time on Labyrinth mode, because what i found is, you can't actually take the equipment and accessories you earn in there outside into other modes. This makes it fundamentally different to the Duel Coliseum mode in the original... i went there to try and power up my characters with better equipment and i almost felt as if my time was wasted.
Somewhere, it was said that there are a plethora of modes that you can eventually unlock... I'm 30 hours in, and these are still the only main offline modes that i can choose from.

An interesting thing to note, is that with 31 characters in total, every single one of them plays considerably differently. Characters are different to a level similar to Blazblue, you won't find any clones here. Furthermore, each character can be customized, giving them different movesets and passive buffs (such as jump boost) so that even if two players used the same character against each other there characters could still be considerably different.
whether or not the characters are perfectly well-ballanced, remains to be seen. As i haven't yet tried playing with another human player, my only observation is that the npc is not as good at some characters as it is at others.

I guess the fact that i have spent almost 4 hours a day since i've got this does speak for itself, but in the end, Final Fantasy Dissidia Duodecim (or whatever it's called) isn't completely perfect.
The graphics do still look awesome (albeit exactly the same as the original).