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.

I played the Japanese version of this one when knew absolutely nothing about Final Fantasy and barely anything about Japanese language. Despite that, the game was highly addicting. A mix of RPG and fighting game, two genres I couldn't even imagine working together, served with cutting-edge (by PSP standards) graphics and stellar soundtrack.
Eventually Dissidia was replaced by Duodecim, which is a better game all-around, so there is no real reason to bother with this one anymore. Unless you really miss the old Bartz.

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.

Dissidia is a slam-dunk in concept, a tyre fire in execution. Being that Final Fantasy is one of my favourite series, the thought of having an all-star fighting game with all the series' heroes and villains turned me on more than those SFMs of Tifa Lockhart in the Italian senate (you know the one, don't lie).

If this were actually the crossover fighting game it looks like, it would be a blast to play in local multiplayer with a friend who's also a Final Fantasy fan. However, Dissidia's biggest problem is that it's an RPG - and not a very good one - disguised as a fighting game.

It took me almost a month before I was done with this game, not just because my rate of playing games slowed, but because I just wasn't interested enough to spend time on it even when I had it. The story mode is overlong and grows utterly wearisome. The battles end up depending far more on stats and - horror of horrors - repetitive grinding (constantly having to replay chapters because more mooks won't show up) - than actual skill. You have to buy equipment and unlock moves and allocate them based on points in such a restrictive way - holy shit, just make Super Smash Bros. with Final Fantasy characters, it's not hard.

Even outside of stats, just on the fighting side of things, this game is hilariously imbalanced, with some characters being overpowered and others being completely useless, mostly depending on how they work in the largely claustrophobic stages.

And the game simply doesn't do a lot with its already limited cast - just the main heroes and villains of the first ten games - beyond some shallow characterization. At some point in the story, I realized, "What the fuck am I doing?" and started skipping dialogue, which I rarely do. There is no real story, just the same vague Nomura-isms repeated ad nauseum.

The graphics are decent, though inferior to Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII despite it being an older game on the same console. Some characters like Sephiroth and Tidus just look 'off.' The stages are very limited and get old fast with how often they're reused. I also didn't like the manikins, who are the common mooks you fight in the story mode and are monochrome reskins of 'real' characters. They look so ugly you can't tell who you're fighting 90% of the time; you're more likely to recognize them from their warbled dialogue and their attacks than the crystallite mess they are visually. With a larger cast and more 'real' fights like in its sequel (from what I recall playing 012 as a kid), this problem would have been alleviated.

Another point of criticism is the almost Games-As-A-Service playstyle the game wants you to adopt, despite being an offline singleplayer game for the PSP. More rewards for 'days consecutively played?' What is this shit, Animal Crossing? I'll play it whenever the fuck I want. If I don't want to log in every day, that's my right as a human being, dammit. My life has value!

Overall, Dissidia is best as a novelty for quick battles to make your favourite characters from different games clash. I wish I had someone to play it versus with irl, because it feels like that's where it would really shine. But as a single-player experience, and especially for the story mode, it's underwhelming as fuck. Its strengths - the character designs and music - owe more to the series' legacy than to its merit as a standalone game.