Weekly Try A Thing: Dissidia Opera Omnia mobage'd

I almost feel like this is cheating, but the spirit of the rules is trying new things, and this is a new thing that I am trying and is likely going to devour my time like a nerd elemental. See, I'd heard murmurs since about halfway through last year that there was a New FF Gacha Game In Town, and it was Good, and it was coming out soon.

And Tuesday evening it did in fact come out.

This might take a little bit of explanation, so bear with me.

Final Fantasy is an RPG series, which is more or less common knowledge at this point to most gamers.
Dissidia: Final Fantasy is a fighting game series with elements (and characters) adapted from the Final Fantasy series.
Dissidia: Final Fantasy Opera Omnia is a mobage RPG, complete with gacha mechanics. It is an RPG based on a fighting game based on an RPG. Because that's the level of self-recursive circlejerk we do around here in mobage land. Bitch just you wait and we'll have a crossover with Farmville and nobody will give two fucks.

And, honestly? I have to say, from my first.... five or ten hours of it... *cough* Needless to say, it's got its hooks in me already. Yes, there's a gacha, and yes, that by its very nature is manipulative and exploitative and there is no ethical consumption under lootboxes.

The gacha is the only form of cashgrabbing the game has, though, which is unheard of in modern day mobage. There's no stamina system to make note of (though your daily grinding dungeons are limited to X Amount Of Runs A Day), meaning if you want to just sit and plow through the story mode or an event in a single sitting, you can. And, unlike most gacha games, the gacha is for character equipment and for the most part seems largely not essential. Like, characters live and die on their own merits and are unlocked through the story mode (or, assumedly, events), your gacha is just jpegs of swords again. Yes, you want to do pulls, but there's nothing here that requires you absolutely have the Grand High Sword of Murderfucking to progress.

(Yet. I fully expect there will be a day where the Power Creep button gets pushed. It's only natural in the life cycle of gachas.)

Gameplay is their best attempt at adapting the weird Bravery/HP mechanic of Dissidia into a turn-based setting, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. Largely, though, it means that the concept of "using healers" is largely foresaken (which admittedly sucks for the few healers in the game) and the game instead becomes a juggling/balancing act of knowing when to strike without risking being struck back. It's awkward and a little unwieldy if you've never played a Dissidia game, so I wouldn't blame people for being pushed away by that. (Or by being a gacha game - I know not everyone has sold their soul to the RNG like me.)

That said, this is actually Square's development team on this. There are writers here, and they're good. The game has a lot more than just The Immediate Protags And Villains that the original Dissidia series has, which means there's a lot more subtle character interaction going on. Little things, like Sazh from FF13 getting grumpy that Cloud acts just like Lightning, or Vaan and Yuffie bonding over thievery"cultural reclamation". It's honestly a better sort of nostalgia trip than FFRK ever was, which is saying a lot since FFRK kind of completely held me hostage for several years straight.

As for the aesthetics, it's solid but takes some getting used to. Graphically, everything is in a stilted halfway point between Dissidia's graphical style and the more cartoonish WoFF ultrachibis, looking slightly cartoony but not ENTIRELY. It works well in the character art (except that nobody has noses again, they caught the FFT disease) but the models could use a little tweaking. Likewise, the music is solid if more or less directly cribbed from the mainline Dissidia games, and everyone's voice clips are in Japanese... which would be fine for a mobage based on a series like Tales or similar, but considering everything Square-Enix has put out in the past decade has been English Track ONLY, it's a bit weird for these American ears. It's a minor enough gripe, though.

You all know me well enough to know that I can't outright recommend gacha games with a good conscience. The monetization scheme is predatory and exploitative. That said, I feel like DFFOO is one of those games least hurt if they were to remove the gacha completely. Like, I fully expect their endgame for this title to be like what happened with FF Dimensions 2, where they run it as a gacha for a little while, but then pull the plug on that and just release it as a stand-alone game with an Actual Price Tag, complete in box.

If it ever gets to the point that they do that, then I can recommend without hesitation. For now, though, well. If you're okay with gacha games, this is one of the better ones. But it's still a gacha.