Heaven's My Destination

Dream. Goal. Crystal. Wild rose. Puppet. Persevere. Friends.

After playing Dissidia: Final Fantasy, I never want to hear any of these words again. Story in games is a constant struggle. The quality is pretty consistently bad, even for the action-movie milieu most games judge themselves by. If you were hungry, would you rather have a teaspoon of gruel or a bucketful? A line of misspelled conglaturations or hours of voice actors droning out tech-fantasy Mad Libs? Post-Dissidia, I'm leaning toward the Mad Libs.

Luckily, there's a game underneath all that plot. A 3D fighting game made from disparate ingredients. A bit of Power Stone's chases through large arenas (and mad dashes for super move granting baubles.) A taste of Squaresoft's own Bushido Blade (the same attack can do no damage or be an instant kill, depending on the timing.) Maybe a dash of Smash Brothers (an intramural fight where strikes send foes flying.) I spent most of any given fight in the air, dashing around the arena. It's very Dragon Ball Z. The game's broken up into chapters, any order you want, blah blah blah. Fanservice is the game's chief bullet point, so it's prudent to let the player determine which chapters to skip.


It's all fun enough. But. After I started skipping every cutscene, I realized the game was pretty thin. The fighting isn't complex enough that I'm driven to master it, and I have no one to play with via wi-fi (there is, of course, no online multiplayer.) I ended up deleting the game from my PSP when I was 2/3s of the way through. That's unusual for completionist me, but coming away I feel satisfied.

Whenever I read a game review, the primary question I need answered is: Is it worth my money? Not sure if I have an answer for this one. I think it'll be a good game to pick up every other month, play hard for a few days, and put down. It's a cop-out, but your love of the source material is really going to determine how much slack you give Dissidia. Final Fantasy and I fell out around 1996, but I still enjoyed all the parts where nobody was talking.

My Judgement: Temporarily Smashing