What could Final Fantasy fans want more than a bunch of their favorite characters from past titles all kicking each other’s ass in one game? Nothing, that’s what. Its a Final Fantasy fanboy’s wet dream. That being said, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I loaded up the demo. Sure, I’ve read the articles and watched videos about the Japanese version of the game - it did pretty well, from what I hear.

As you probably know, lately the genre lines have somewhat blurred, with shooter/RPG lovechilds being fairly popular. Well, Dissidia does that, but it meshes together 3D fighters and RPGs. Battle feels a lot like the battle system in Crisis Core, except on a larger scale. You’ll see over-the-top attacks, huge, sweeping jumps, dashes and signature moves from characters we all know and love.

The demo includes playable characters such as the Onion Knight (FFIII), Terra (FFVI), Cloud (FFVII) and Sephiroth (FFVII). You can play through a short segment of the game (four battles) with each character. What I like about it is that the music of each stage is based on the character you’re fighting. When you fight Jecht, for example, you get his powerful theme from FFX playing in the background. While you don’t see this in the demo, it should be noted that the story arc each character goes through in the full version is based around the events surrounding that character in the game from which they’re taken. That will be interesting to see.

Speaking of story, take this with a grain of salt, but I heard you’ll get approximately 40 hours of gameplay out of just the story mode - all characters combined. That’s reaching RPG territory in the amount of game play available, but makes the purchase worth your buck.

I found the battles to be rather chaotic and it was hard to get a grasp on what is actually going on, even with the text-based tutorials on each loading screen. The demo introduced you to one new concept in each of the four battles you can fight with a single character. I found it more difficult to defeat some opponents as a melee character like Cloud and pretty easy to defeat everyone by playing a caster like Terra. After you play a dozen battles or so, things start to get smoother, but they are still rather chaotic at times.

While it wasn’t in the demo, I’m looking forward to seeing how experience gain and leveling up work in the full game, I’m sure there are some heavy RPG elements involved. We’ll be able to find out on August 25, when the game ships in North America. In the mean time, grab the demo, it’s a fun romp.