Delving Into Dissidia, Part 2
As promised, this time around we’ll be taking a look at the mobile counterpart to Final Fantasy Dissidia NT, Final Fantasy Dissidia Opera Omnia…damn these titles.
Like any other Dissidia game, Opera Om…OO brings in characters from all other Final Fantasy titles, so you’ll have the usual suspects like Cloud and Zidane show up as you play through the story mode. Which brings up one of the things I actually love about this game. With a game like Exvius or Fate, you need to summon characters, usually with a paid currency. In OO, however, they will pretty much just give you the characters! No more dropping $500 trying to summon 2B in a limited even-…Ahem. There is still a paid currency system of course, no phone game is complete without that in the end. But it goes towards summoning weapons and armor rather than the characters. I think this is a much less punishing system, so kudos to them for this. You can also earn a ton of their paid currency just playing the game, so even that isn’t so bad.
Like I said they pretty much hand you different characters. You start off with the Warrior of Light, Rem (from Type 0, not Re:ZERO) and Vivi and will quickly amass an army as you progress through story mode. They do also have events that run every week or so, and new characters are often available through these. Since they are limited it is possible to miss certain people, but the events are super easy. Recruiting an event character so far has involved beating a super easy stage and watching two cutscenes. Boom, done. Harder levels exist to acquire better armor for them and to earn rewards of course, but if you only care about recruiting it takes all of 10 minutes.
So how does this gameplay? Well, take Dissidia NT, slow it down to a turn-based system and nail everyone to the floor. Voila, OO. If you didn’t read the NT article, it uses a system Brave and HP attacks. Characters build Brave by inflicting Brave attacks and Breaking an opponent. Then they can use HP attacks to inflict damage equal to their current Brave. Every character has their own unique abilities too. So Y’shtola, for example, has Stone, which inflicts a large amount of Brave damage and pushes back an enemy turn. Later, once you’ve leveled hr abilities, she also gains the ability to restore Brave to the rest of your party.
Characters level up in a few different ways. There’s the regular kill stuff level up factor of course, but there is a separate system in place for leveling up their abilities. This is done with crystals, which you pick up by doing quests and farming certain daily events. There are a variety of colors and each character has a specific one they’ll require to power them up. So don’t do what I did and level everyone at the same time. Recipe for madness that. Weapons and armor also require leveling, but this is done by feeding them other equipment you don’t need or using special stones.
The story itself is pretty simple thus far, and I can sum it up with one sentence without spoiling anything since they tell you right off the bat. Travel around the world and close portals so the world doesn’t end. Simple as it gets. For now anyway.
That’s pretty much it. All in all, it’s a fun little game that requires minimum financial investment and it pretty much plays like any Dissidia game, only much slower paced. I recommend giving it a shot if you like Final Fantasy, it’s a fun way to kill some time. Let me know what you think down below if you’ve played OO, or if you think you might give it a shot. Next week I’ll talk about Dynasty Warriors 9, Tecmo Koei’s open-world take on one of their main franchises and whether or not it worked out for them. Until then, happy gaming everyone, have a great week!