Dissecting Dissidia: Final Fantasy; characters, crystals, gods, and the manly Valkyrie
Square Enix‘s Dissidia: Final Fantasy is catching the attention of a lot of gamers. Being a tribute to 20 years of FF games, this cross-over title for the PSP looks like it’s got a lot to offer. Join us as we delve deep into the confirmed (and not-so-confirmed) details of the game: story, characters, and whatnot. Heck, we might as well take a walk down the memory lane of yester-decade’s Final Fantasy games while we’re at it! Keep your eyes peeled, you just might find Valkyrie Profile‘s Lenneth doing a cameo!
For the past couple of days, Square Enix seems to have been rolling out quite a lot of details for Dissidia: FInal Fantasy. Unfortunately for some people – myself included – these details aren’t enough. This has led to a lot of online discussions, most of which seem to revolve around speculations (and of course, wish lists) of the final character roster – just like what happened to Brawl.
Well, both Brawl and Dissidia are cross-over games, anyways, and fan-wankery over who makes it into the game is a common trend. While Super Smash Bros. Brawl had characters from pretty much any Nintendo franchise (and a few other third-party characters), Dissidia: Final Fantasy will be celebrating 20 years’ worth of Final Fantasy characters and putting them all into what’s looking like one kickass game for the PSP.
Now, details about the game are quite few and far between, and it’s only recently that we got our hands on quite a batch of them. So, before all hell breaks loose, and details start spamming us all over again (during E3, perhaps?), let’s take pause for a moment and have a little recap.
What do we know so far? What don’t we know so far? What are we sure of will happen in the game, and what are we sure of most definitely will not happen in the game? Confirmed details, rumors, mindless online blather? These are just some of the questions to be answered today.
I’ll be taking you on a special trip down Final Fantasy alley and basically dump on you all the little cool stuff I’ve found out over the Internets – including some rare tidbits of info that never made it to the humble reaches of our very own QJ.NET blogs.
Officially official. So will we really get Cloud Strife in Dissidia? What about the characters from FF3 through 6? Well now, just to give you a recap of sorts, after all of the trailers, interviews, and scans, here are the characters officially confirmed to be in Dissidia:
- FF: Warrior of Light – Garland
- FFII: Frioniel – Emperor Palamecia
- FFVII: Sephiroth (not in picture)
- FFVIII: Squall Leonheart – Ultimecia
- FFIX: Zidane Tribal – Kuja
- FFX: Tidus – Jecht
Strange how there’s no hero listed for FF7 yet, yes? Some say it might not actually be Cloud, when it could also equally be Zack Fair instead. But before you start throwing out your own assumptions and speculations, I do have to point out a couple of things:
- The character roster wasn’t decided upon based on pure whim. The developers have chosen a set of characters from the Final Fantasy series with a story in mind.
- The heroes and anti-heroes in the game should have a strong connection (this is why they chose a Tidus-Jecht tandem over a Tidus-Seymour), which, though only partly covered in their specific game, will be expounded on and given more depth in Dissidia.
- Tetsuya Nomura has also confirmed 20 characters. Unfortunately, this number doesn’t distinguish whether or not it’s the default total of playable characters or the final roster of playable characters after maybe unlocking some of them. Much to say, Nomura hasn’t even clarfied if the 20 characters are playable to begin with.
What’s the story, morning glory? Some of you may now start to ask… “Wait! What is the story in Dissidia anyway?” The entire plot, of course, hasn’t been revealed yet – and dammit, I will not go so far as to spoil myself of an ending. But the main arc for the game has already been dropped by the recent Japanese trailer and the latest update of Dissidia‘s official website.
I’ve included an embed of the the Dissidia trailer below, just to refresh your memory. If you follow the video back to its YouTube page, you can actually watch it with English subs, care of Forever Fantasy:
Searching for translations of the trailer and other press material online, here’s what I could gather of certain story elements in the game:
- There are two gods in the world of Dissidia: The God of Cosmos (good god – no, really – good god, like, literally) and the God of Chaos (bad god – also featured in FF1 as Garland’s final form, and later as a recurring being as Vincent’s fourth limit break in FF7 and an Esper in FF12). I strongly believe they’re also the ones shown at the end of the trailer.
- If you haven’t guessed yet, Cosmos and Chaos are the respective blue and red figures on Yoshitaka Amano‘s official logo for Dissidia (way back when, I thought they were Shiva and Ifrit).
- The heroes (Warrior of Light, Frioniel, Squall, Zidane, Tidus) fight for Cosmos
- The villains anti-heroes* (Garland, Emperor Palamecia, Sephiroth, Ultimecia, Kuja, Jecht) fight for Chaos
- The Crystals are a key plot element that the characters must seek out
With Crystals in the mix, it sounds like Dissidia is going back to its Final Fantasy roots – y’know, go to this continent, get/find/protect/restore the [insert element of nature here] Crystal, go to that other continent, and get/find/protect/restore the [insert other element of nature here] Crystal… lather, rinse, repeat.
Not that I think the game would feel repetitive; in an interview, the devs say it’s pretty non-linear, with you choosing which person to fight at whatever point in the game. And throwing in the Crystals is something I’d daresay was a good call. Dissidia is, after all, celebrating the Final Fantasy franchise’s 20th anniversary, so going back to the traditional set-up of Crystals and the fight between good and evil is quite apt.
* I make a distinction between villains and anti-heroes here because, personally, I don’t think that some of the confirmed villains are purely evil enough to be cast into the depths of hell. Case in point: Jecht. He was an opposing force, yes. And in that sense an anti-hero to Tidus. But really, he wasn’t all that evil.
On this corner… weighing in with ninety-eight Gil…! With all that over and done with (story elements, check! dev interviews, check! half of the cast, check!), maybe we can finally draw up a list of who the remaining characters are.
Immediately we can already scratch out Lenneth from Valkyrie Profile – just to clarify, guys, Dissidia is a cross-over game, not a cross-dressing one. That screenshot at the very top of the article is of the Warrior of Light from FF1 – and as you may have discovered in the previous QuickJump QuickPeek 54’s Comment of the Week, some speculate that he was given a purple palette change to boost his …manliness. Now, before we digress even further, on with the characters!
Some of you may or may not remember a certain Dissidia poster (illustrated by the great Yoshitaka Amano himself) that circulated around the Internet early this year. The promotional poster supposedly confirms the existence of all the villains to appear in Dissidia. Let’s bring that up now, shall we?
The list below is the commonly held truth of who the characters in the poster are (click here for a labelled picture taken from NeoGAF):
- FF: Garland (and Chaos)
- FFII: Emperor Palamecia
- FFIII: Cloud of Darkness
- FFIV: Golbez
- FFV:Ex-Death
- FFVI: Kefka
- FFVII: Sephiroth
- FFVIII: Ultimecia
- FFIX: Kuja
- FFX: Jecht
From this, you can now see that the villains for FF3–6 filled out. Some of them are pretty obvious enough to decipher, but some of them (for example, I can’t make head nor tail of Kefka) take a little bit more imagination to see. How legit is the list, you ask? Well, they got Jecht right, even before he was confirmed by Square Enix to be the official “villain” to represent FFX.
If we base our speculation on this poster and its list of characters, then finding their anti-thesis (i.e. hero counterpart) is pretty obvious. (Actually, with or without the poster, it’s still pretty obvious – I mean duh, they’re the major characters in their specific game after all! LOL!)
Given that, I’ll just toss in a little back grounder of the main characters who might end up as the hero counterparts for FF3–6.
FFIII: Luneth. Originally, your party in FF3 was composed of some no-name orphans who go on their Crystal-hunting journey throughout the game. The DS version – the 3D remake of the classic – finally painted some character into the heroes and gave them some back story.
The main character then was called, by default, Luneth (no, not Lenneth – stop it with the Valkyrie Profile references already, we get it!). His name plays on the whole “light-luna-lune” reference, a clear opposing force to the vile Cloud of Darkness.
FFIV: Cecil Harvey. Well, it’s actually a toss up between Kain (picture on right) and Cecil. Kain’s just too cool to pass up for Dissidia, but Cecil’s still our bet. Besides, Kain pulled an Auron on Cecil very early in the game and left the party – boo!
So what’s keen about having Cecil go against a villain like Golbez in Dissidia is that their FF4-relationship is quite an interesting one. I wish I could reveal more, but doing so will end up in a spoiler – those who’ve finished FFIV (or FFII as first released in the US) will know what I’m talking about. *wink*
FFV: Bartz Klauser. Or Butz, if you wanna go with the original translation. Now there’s not much to work with in FF5, since all four characters in your party were equally cool; the only thing that sets Bartz apart is the fact that he’s the one you control. His relationship with Exdeath (a cosmic tree that eventually formed sentience and transformed himself into some druid-sage – weird, I know, but he was cool in FFXII as an esper) is pretty interesting. The Bartz-Exdeath rivalry speaks of the typical “man versus nature” conflict, but maybe that’s because we’re taking Exdeath’s being a tree too literal.
FFVI: Terra Branford. Yes, I know… FF6 had a ton of main characters – each of them equally developed within the plot of the game. It could be Locke, or Sabin, or maybe even opera-singing Celes. But if we’re given a villain like Kefka, the best choice really would be the first main character you’re introduced to: Terra.
Kefka, after all, has been overly obsessed over anything and everything Magitek throughout the game, and esper-subjugation just one of his many evil plots to control magic. And since Terra was a half-esper, she’d fit perfectly as Kefka’s counterpart in Dissidia.
Besides, do you notice the certain lack of female main characters in Dissidia? Yeah, Terra would be a good addition to the male-dominated block here.
Where does this leave us? So there we have it. Imagine how a Dissidia article managed to dredge through some of the details from way back in the earlier years of the Final Fantasy franchise.
After going through the officially confirmed details and making a bit of a detour down rumor-landia care of that promotional poster, I think it’s time we cap this article with something of a wishlist. After all, online speculation isn’t online speculation without making stretches.
Lemme gather my own bizarre wishlist of which characters I would like to see end up in Dissidia – whether as a playable character or just a cameo. Yes, I admit that some of the characters in my list have been rendered invalid care of some of my theories, but we all can cling on to the fact that Tetsuya Nomura said “there might be surprises.”
And surprise you I shall with the most out-of-this-world wishlist. Mostly, it’s just RPG fangasming. But what the hey, I never said I wasn’t a geek, right? Might as well stretch it for all it’s worth, and take the path less travelled. I’ll avoid including the more obvious choices for characters like Seifer, Locke, or Zack Fair; instead, I’ll be throwing in wild cards (which I’m sure will eventually be 100% bunk btw) – just like how Sonic and Snake were brought to Brawl:
Gino D.’s 100% bunk wishlist:
- FFVI: Ultros
- FFVII: Don Corneo
- FFIX: Blank
- Secret of Mana: Flammie
- Chrono Trigger: Slash, Flea, and Oz
- Parasite Eve: Aya Brea, Eve
- Xenogears: Chu-chu
- Kingdom Hearts: Minnie Mouse
- (Enix) ActRaiser: The Master, Tanzra
- (Enix) Star Ocean 2: Opera Vectra
- (Enix) Bust-a-Groove: Shorty
- and yes, (Enix) Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth
I now leave you with what most consider as an FF fan’s theme song: Chocobo Robo Voice by one Joe Redifer, and in turn Flash vid’ed by LegendaryFrog! If you know the lyrics, time to sing along now… “Fie-nal Fan-tah-see is an ARRR PEEE GEE…”
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