Staying classy? In THIS economy?

On the subject of Dissidia

So apparently, Squenix is going to put out another mobile title in the Dissidia Final Fantasy lineage called Dissidia Duellum, with a trailer released this week:

I've been a fan of the Dissidia games since their PSP days, but... man, this series has had a tumultuous history that I'm honestly a little sad about.

The original Dissidia was... well. It was a fighting game, kinda, but it would be a little silly to think of it in those terms. I feel like in some ways its closest analog would be Power Stone, or even Square's own lesser known and oft-overlooked weapons duel arena fighter Bushido Blade.

You played as a hero or villain from the then-mainline Final Fantasy games (the original was 2008) in a 1-v-1 battle. Each character had two types of attacks and two resource pools:

Only "HP attacks" (usually harder to connect with, sort of) will reduce HP, and they do so by your current Bravery score. So the loop was to use "Bravery attacks" to build up your Brave, then spend it hitting your opponent with an HP attack.

Of course this is FF, and there were a huge number of systems under the hood -- equipment that boosted stats and provided passives, abilities that also provided passives or even enabled new actions (you could turn off your own ability to jump or dash!). Your attacks leveled up over time and would either unlock new attacks, or even provide "linked" attacks that let you connect HP attacks directly from some Bravery ones.

Each 3D arena was taken from an FF location and each had its own distinctive, almost Smash Bros-y weird gimmick. The Interdimensional Rift from FF5 would reconfigure itself mid-fight; Ultimecia's clock tower (FF8) would suddenly shuffle both fighters' Bravery scores as time slowed down or sped up.

I obsessively played the PSP Dissidia games, to the tune of at least a hundred hours with one of them, and my memory of them spun between "fun and flashy easy game" and "absurd bullshit" depending on how hard fight conditions were stacked against you. I don't really think the combat is 'good,' and I definitely don't think it's up to the rigorous balancing standards of a modern fighting game.

Additionally, many of the ideas that Nomura and co. would bring into later Kingdom Hearts games, like the "Flowmotion" move-anywhere actions in Dream Drop Distance, found their earliest iterations in the Dissidia games, where players could one-tap a movement button to grind on 'light rails,' climb walls, and do other maneuvers.

Dissidia Duodecim combat screengrab

The story is what I was playing for, but really, even that wasn't that good. Going into the various curlicues of it here would be a waste of time; the extremely abbreviated executive summary is that various FF characters are pulled to an alternate shadow world version of the FF1 landscape and pitted against each other, Good vs. Evil-style, in a set of repeating cycles until eventually the cycles are brought to an end with the 13th (the events of the first Dissidia) and everyone goes home. The second game, Dissidia Duodecim, adds a prequel chapter on the 12th cycle that adds new characters and provides additional background for why the 13th cycle ends up the way it does.

Plot-wise, it's C-tier anime crossover storytelling stuff, extremely forgettable. What was fun was the interactions between characters, particularly in Duodecim when some of the dynamics had already been established and got new twists on (we discover that Terra and Tidus were on the Evil Side originally! Fun!). It was an experience made up of little moments; not all of them good, but some of them great.

After Duodecim, the Dissidia games disappeared for a long while. They finally returned in the form of an arcade game, followed by a PS4 home release, called Dissidia NT. It was built by Team Ninja -- the same people who've ruined licensed Musou games, in my personal and deeply biased opinion -- and had only the tiniest hint of story to it. DNT was a 3v3 arena fighter focused entirely on the fighting aspect; arenas became more enclosed, the idea of "balance" became more central to the design, and from all reports, Squenix planned to go Full E-Sports with it.

Problem: nobody really liked it (I was its target audience and even I was pretty lukewarm on it), and Dissidia as a fighting e-sports definitively did not happen. Never mind that playing it online on the PS4 was a nightmare of connection weirdness that often made the already visually chaotic game an absolute nightmare to play. It kind of... came and went.

The bridge between all of this and the upcoming Duellum was a mobile game called Dissidia Opera Omnia, a mobile gacha that was narratively a spin off from the PSP games, following the "story" (and I use the term loosely) of Dissidia NT and incorporating, sometimes with weird and out of nowhere specificity, narrative elements from the PSP games as well.

It was a gacha so I have very little to say about the mechanics, but I played Opera Omnia for a long time, and it had the same appeal to me as the PSP Dissidia games, just with an unfortunate and powerful gacha influence: the story was very Well Whatever, though it had its moments. What I enjoyed was the character interactions, the little moments where these characters from different titles would have a fun or meaningful or even dramatic connection.

Opera Omnia ended service last year sometime, I believe, and Squenix does not have a good history of maintaining its mobile titles, so I'm already wary of getting attached to Duellum. I also have Thoughts about putting an action game -- if that's what it is -- on a mobile platform, since I'm An Old and a game I have to control with virtual thumbsticks or whatever is about the last way I want to play an action game.

But I do wonder -- is this going to be more like the PSP Dissidias and Opera Omnia, full of enjoyable character moments (in an otherwise unremarkable mechanical and narrative wrapper)? Or is this going to skew more toward DNT? The trailer suggests the former, which would be nice, but... I don't know. As I slowly but determinedly shed gachas or gacha-adjacent titles (Honkai Star Rail is the only one I play now, and even then not terribly seriously), I find them less and less worthwhile as a venue for any sort of game I want to take seriously.

The pitch of "FF characters living in modern Tokyo as phantom versions of themselves that fight invading big FF monsters" is actually kinda cool, to me... but are they gonna be able to do that properly in a free-to-play mobile framework? Opera Omnia was a game I enjoyed for what it offered but eventually gave up on, because the game's mechanics were so relentlessly directed toward encouraging pulls (and getting you to spend money). I stopped playing Fate Grand Order after 7(!) years because I realized everything about it from a gameplay perspective was infuriating and I could watch the good bits on YouTube.

We'll see how Duellum plays out, but I feel like the deck is kinda stacked against Squenix on this one, based on their own past actions. Maybe they'll have learned something from all of this... but I doubt it.