Dissidia Duodecim: Final Fantasy is the harder to pronounce sequel to Dissidia: Final Fantasy, a fighting game that puts all of your favorite Final Fantasy characters together in one slugfest. Duodecim doesn’t deviate much from the formula that the original created, and that’s probably for the best. It introduces a couple new gameplay elements and several new characters, but in the end it’s still Final Fantasy characters beating the shit out of each other and that sells the game by itself.

The story is pretty bad, as crossover fanfiction tends to be. The forces of Cosmos and Chaos are having their little lover’s spat again but this time the land is being invaded by pallet swaps at the same time! These mannequins, which are basically copies of your characters without souls or something, are generally screwing everything up, so it’s up to all the characters in the Final Fantasy universe to set things right by fighting each other. Yeah, I don’t get it either.

They really turned up the camp this time. Everyone goes on these long tirades about the power of friendship and trust and blah blah blah. It’s like you are watching a cheesy eighties fighting anime. The worst part about the story is the length. Characters go on huge monologues in cutscenes and still manage to say nothing in particular. It’s one stereotyped line after another and it gets tiresome after a while. You will be dying to get back to the action after just a few cutscenes.

The action itself is pretty much the same thing we got in the original. You can either attack an opponent’s HP or his bravery. Attacking bravery raises your damage and lowers your opponent’s and attacking HP goes in for the kill. There are a couple new features though. You can slow down time by entering your super powered EX mode as you are being attacked. You call in assist characters to help you fight, and even break your opponent out of EX mode by using your assists against them. Some characters can be used as assists but not as normal fighters. Aeris, for example, is one assist that can only be used if you pay for a play through the prologue available from the PSN.

The new characters are pretty interesting. Laguna, for example, fights entirely with guns and grenades, while Lightning can switch between her FFXIII paradigms in the middle of a match. You also will be able to control Kain, Gilgamesh, Tifa, Yuna, Prishe, and Vaan and all of them have unique and fun fighting styles. If the new characters aren’t your style though, you can always control one of the many characters from the original game. If you have save data from the first, you can transfer it over to Duodecim. You keep your levels, abilities, everything except for equipment. Nothing like rushing into a new game with max level characters. The story mode, however, specifically forces you to use the new characters, so you won’t be blowing through it with your old save data.

Everything else is pretty much the same. You go from battle to battle on a grid. Finding new equipment and items as you level up your characters is the name of the game. Level matters a lot in Duodecim and mismatched level fights are either foregone conclusions, or painful un-fun battles of attrition. This, of course, means grinding, which is unfortunate because levels seem to rise a lot slower in Duodecim.

To take a bit of the focus off the grind, Duodecim gives you an overworld to wander around between chapters. Here, you can purchase items from moogles and break orbs that create chain skills that chain battles together in order to up the difficulty and the XP reward. It’s kind of weird that this takes place on an open overworld map, but I think the developers just said “screw it, this is Final Fantasy. We need an overworld” and this was the only place they could fit it.

Then there is the mode selection, which is where a lot of the awesomeness comes from in this game. There is still no online mode, but ad hoc gamers can now party up and form tournaments together. Labyrinth mode forces you to rely on a randomly generated deck of cards to determine who you fight and how your character is equipped. Then there is creation mode, which allows you to make your own quests for you and friends to participate in. The interface is kind of clunky but you get used to it soon enough and soon you will be making quests with your own cutscenes, dialogue, music, and more. Always wanted to see Lighting go all emo after talk about friendship for fifteen minutes? Now’s your chance.

There’s lots to this game, and that’s the best part about it. All the old modes return, as do all the old characters, but there’s just so much new in this game, you won’t get bored easily. Hell, even if you ignore the new modes altogether, simply leveling the new characters up will take up plenty of your time. Overall, Duodecim is a great expansion to Dissidia: Final Fantasy, and a worthy sequel. They didn’t reinvent the wheel, they just gave you way more wheels. If Final Fantasy has taught us anything in these past years, it’s taught us that’s exactly what Final Fantasy fans want: more of the same.

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