As a child this was the coolest thing known to man even as a Non FF player at the time. Though, in reality, it's a JRPG disguised as an arena fighter. A lot of the RPG elements fight against the Fighter part of the game. I'll discuss more on BOTR, but my biggest gripe with this game is that characters feel concrete. They give you slots to add HP attacks and different bravery attacks, but...you don't get that many attacks to really customize your favorite characters. So a lot of the time you spent spamming the same two moves to actually do damage even in the postgame sections.

Having played Dissidia very sparingly in the past, Most of my time playing Dissidia in the past being NT, I was excited to go back and play this first entry and for the most part I was pleasantly surprised. For a fighting game that released on a portable handheld console in 2009 in NA, This game is really good. Tons of fun, a unique concept for a competitive fighting game that I still don't know if I completely have wrapped my head around, with a relatively simple story featuring the Heroes and Villains of the respective first 10 Final Fantasy games. Coming back to this first entry in the Dissidia series I have a slightly altered perspective to the voice cast for this game. Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Rebirth exist and are out at the point of writing this review. The majority of this voice cast I actually surprisingly liked a lot. Genuinely fun performances from most of the cast with some funny interactions in the story mode. Cloud however.. I don't know man. This is the same actor who had portrayed him from Kingdom Hearts onward in every subsequent project Cloud Strife was featured in, most of which I played and have fond memories of. This just felt bad. Normally I would chalk it up to bad VO Direction or something like that but I genuinely like every other performance in the game. That being said it doesn't really take any of my enjoyment out of playing this game or any future titles in the Dissidia series.

Every character I've touched has felt relatively easy to pick up figure out, which I think was intentional with the goal of this game being something different from your average fighting game. This one feels less competitive in nature and more so focused on just getting this collection of "Action Figures" together in one setting and trying to tell a story with all of them together and interacting and I think it succeeds in that aspect. That's not to say you can't play this like a competitive game, Dissidia Final Fantasy also features Competitive Multiplayer Versus matches through the PSP's ad-hoc. A really cool decision that I don't really remember about this game coming out back in the day but I super appreciate in retrospect.

All in all I enjoyed my time coming back to Dissidia Final Fantasy and all the ground work it layed for the eventual sequels it set up. I genuinely really hope that they can maybe bring it back at some point although how likely that is at this point with how well NT did remains to be seen. Definitely a high point of the PSP library in my opinion.