Land of Discord

Day 370

The more I think about it, the more I realize that Confessions of the Creator must surely be considered optional content. I've just now completed it by taking out level 130 Feral Chaos (no small feat) but the reward for my efforts was little more than a simple message saying that I could continue to play and feel free to explore as I wished. I had already viewed the credits sequence countless gameplay hours before after completing the main story chapters. 

Was it a waste? No, I really enjoyed grinding my characters up to level 100 and tracking down the best gear I could get. A lot of the enemies near the end of the game became frustrating to square off against, however, with their staggeringly high HP totals and tendency to dodge every single attack. The majority of enemies in the final areas were level 125 or more, 25 full levels above the cap for human players. This gave the AI a pretty sigificant boost in damage and survivability, leading to countless resets. Just about every fight in the final areas required multiple attempts except of course for the ultimate encounter with Feral Chaos himself. It would have been a horrifying difficult fight that would have taken me weeks to conquer if not for the simple fact that the big bulky guy can't dodge Yuna's Mega Flare to save his life.

After devoting so many hours to feverishly playing the game over the past few days, I'm glad to be done with it. It's a fantastic game with a ton of content and plenty of enjoyable characters to develop. It makes me wish more than anything that Square-Enix would make a crossover Final Fantasy title that's more of a traditional RPG. I would totally dig into that level of fanservice, regardless of how well it would be handled. Dissidia is pretty awesome, but despite all of the statistics and equipment behind the scenes, it is at its core an action game. I like it a lot, but RPGs are always going to be my favorite.

Prishe is adorable

 I don't have a lot of insight into how popular the Dissidia games are, but I feel reasonably confident they're among the most popular for an admittedly overlooked handheld. The Final Fantasy theme of course makes them niche in other ways, but they're very polished and fun to play regardless of one's familiarity with that mythos. I've never played Final Fantasy XI for instance but Prishe is still one of my favorite characters. I also love Final Fantasy VI but can't stand Terra's playstyle--and that's unfortunate, because Terra's a really cool character.

I'm not sure what's next on the agenda, but I'm considering continuing to clear out my PSP backlog. I'm kind of glad I started with Dissidia 012 because it seems unlikely any other unfinished games would take me anywhere near as long to finish. It should be smooth sailing from now on. Of course, there's also Fire Emblem: New Mystery of the Emblem to be completed, but it doesn't really fit into my backlog marathon and I'm still mostly just playing it at work. My progress on that game has been stagnant for some time, but I've definitely not forgotten it.