Man, I woke up way too early today considering I have the day off. It turned out for the best though, as I had no food in the house and it seemed like a pretty good opportunity to go pick up some breakfast. After gorging myself on Hardees biscuits, drowsiness almost overwhelmed me--but I didn't let it happen and instead tried to make some more progress on Dissidia. I completed Terra and Cecil's chapters today. Terra is really not my playstyle, but Cecil is pretty fun. I'm not sure I'll be using him as much as I did in the original Dissidia, but I'm certain he'll find a place in my final party, if such a thing even exists.
Cecil is interesting because of his ability to transform from dark knight to paladin and vice versa through the usage of HP attacks. HP attacks on the ground transform him into a dark knight, where he possesses a variety of hard-hitting combo-oriented ground attacks and dark magic. HP attacks in the air will transform him into a paladin, an agile form focused primarily on aerial combat as well as some light magic. Dark Knight attacks in the air typically focus on bringing the enemy to the ground, whereas paladin attacks on the ground focus on knocking the enemy into the air. It is the balance between these two forms that make Cecil such an interesting character to me. It also helps that I like Final Fantasy IV a lot.
Square-Enix (or whatever internal dev team was responsible) took a lot of liberties with Cecil's combat capabilities. Although the spirit of his character is definitely preserved from Final Fantasy IV, a lot of that game was about his quest to overcome his dark knight side and in fact he is a paladin for a good three quarters of the game and can never go back to what he was. He also used pretty traditional Western swords instead of the stylish lance sword he wields in Dissidia. Truth be told, if they were to ever remake Final Fantasy IV (and let's be honest, they've done this too many times already) I wouldn't mind if Cecil's weapon had this unique design. It's apparently inherited from Yoshitaka Amano's original artwork. His art was often pretty bizarre and it's clear he had a thing for draping his pale, slender characters in as many colorful extraneous lengths of cloth as possible. It does make his style very unique and recognizable, though.
It's pretty interesting what Dissidia has done with these early Final Fantasy characters. In many cases, there was little to no personality to draw on and only the barest of gameplay elements to translate into a moveset. Firion from Final Fantasy II, for instance, is one of the first named characters in the Final Fantasy series, but I would be lying if I said he had any kind of defining personality traits. Characters from that game also had no defining gameplay traits, because it was all determined by how they were used in combat, how their stats were developed, and what spells they were taught. In this case, the developers decided to go with the "jack-of-all-trades" approach and again drew on Yoshitaka Amano's original artwork, resulting in what is essentially a new character, but an interesting one.
The same is true for Warrior of Light and Onion Knight, representatives from the first and third games in the series, both class-based Final Fantasy titles with no actual named characters (barring the Nintendo DS remake of Final Fantasy III, of course). These characters are both really fun and definitely draw inspiration from Amano artwork, but for the most part, their combat styles are designed from scratch. One notable exception is Onion Knight's EX Burst, which has him doing a Class Change into either a Ninja or Sage depending on the spell used to initiate the attack. To execute the attack properly, you'll have to cast Holy or throw a Shuriken through a traditional Final Fantasy menu. I thought this was a really nice touch.
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