The best game on the PSP. There is so much to do in this game, it is definitely worth your money!
The story begins between Choas, the god of discord and Cosmos, the god of harmony. The balance of the two forces have been distrubted in Choas's favor. Cosmos calls on the ten warriors from the first ten Final Fantasy games to fight off the ten villians from the same Final Fantasy games. The story is fairly simple and it is the one thing that really didn't excite me about the game. I'm sure this was hard for the creators to work with. It's hard to create a story between all the characters that would be something new plus stick to each character's original Final Fantasy story. So overall the story was acceptable, but nothing special. Everything else in the game was beyond satisfactory that this never became a real issue in my mind.
The graphics are amazing, plain and simple. I will say that PSP has a lot of beautiful games. The graphics, colors, and design of the levels and characters is very impressive. This is a section of every Final Fantasy game that never dissapoints. Square Enix always creates great stages/levels, character design, and the cutscenes and overall graphics are spectacular.
The music/audio was also top notch. Some people may not like that there were hardly any new tracks for this game, but this game was made for the intention of celebrating the first ten games in the series and I really loved how it brought the best songs from all ten games into one. From "One Winged Angel" to "Dancing Mad" they are all here. They chose three songs from each game and trust me they are the best ones. The new songs are great as well. None of them really stand out in my mind, but then again they aren't played much throughout the game.
Then to the best part of the game which is the actual gameplay. Having Final Fantasy characters in a fighting game may have seemed like a very different idea, but it really came together nicely. This doesn't play like a typical fighter though and that's why I think it works out so well. Square Enix put something completely different together and I really like this new idea. Each character starts out with a number of bravery points. As you fight each other your bravery points go up or down depending on who is getting hit and who is doing the damage. For example lets say both characters have 250 bravery points. One character hits the other character for 50 damage. So now the character that got hit has 200 bravery points and the person that did the damage has 300. Then there are other attacks called HP attacks. These attack actually do damage to your opponents HP. How much damage these attacks do is based on your bravery. So in the previous example, if the character did an HP attack it would do 300 damage. So you can either be really cheap and continually do HP attack, or you can build up your bravery and do a massive HP attack. It seems complicated at first, but the longer you play the game it becomes more natural, obviously.
The game has many modes to play. There is the story part of the game where you can choose one of the ten Final Fantasy characters. There is an acrade mode which explains itself. You play against a certain amount of characters until you win and recieve a prize at the end. Then there is another mode called the duel colliseum that is opened up later. This is similar to the arcade mode but with a few changes. These modes can be played for hours. Especially the story mode. Playing through each character's story plus other more challenging options open up in story mode as well.
I almost put in 100 hours into this game, and I didn't even finish it all. There are to many other games out there that I still need to beat, and I feel like I got what I wanted to do accomplished. After each battle you get PP and you use the PP to unlock a multitude of things. I bought 93% of the items. Buying all the secrets and items will take you many many hours. There are also accomplishments in the game that will take you probably 200 hours! I am not kidding. I played for 100 hours and only got 63% of them completed. Some of the accomplishments are easy, but most of them are very time consuming.
After playing this game for even just 5 hours you will get addicted to it. There is just so much to do and accomplish that it will definitely be worth your money. If you just want to finish the main story and beat all of the story modes you can put in at least 30 hours. If you really want to beat everything possible in this game it will take at least 100 hours if not more. Plus this is a Final Fantasy game. If you even just liked a few of the game in the series it will make this game so much more enjoyable to you. I've played all the games in the series and it really made the game that much more enjoyable for me. Overall, you need to buy this game! There may be different reasons, but whatever it may be, whether it is because of it being a Final Fantasy game, because its the best PSP game (in my opinion), or simply for the amazing gameplay...you need to get it!