Dissidia Final Fantasy Arcade to have 14 characters at launch

Dissidia Final Fantasy for arcades will have 14 playable characters at launch, Square Enix clarified during a live stream this morning.



On Friday, Japanese outlets reported the publisher as saying at its Closed Conference event that the game would launch with 50 characters.  But this was misreported, the company said.  Rather, Square Enix is planning to have 50 playable characters in the long run, added to the game via post-launch updates.

To date, the following seven characters have been confirmed:

• Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy I)
• Onion Knight (Final Fantasy III)
• Terra Branford (Final Fantasy VI)
• Cloud Strife (Final Fantasy VII)
• Lightning (Final Fantasy XIII)
• Y’Shtola (Final Fantasy XIV)
• Ramza Beoulve (Final Fantasy Tactics)

View some footage from the broadcast below.

 

  

While the battle set up menu (the picture with Y'Shtola up top) might look familiar to players of the handheld Dissidia titles on PSP the battle hud still looks just a tad bit cluttered to me.  Also of important note is the lack of villains in the starting line up.  Now I'm sure with 50+ playable characters we'll get some villains eventually but one my favorite things in the handheld titles was maining Garland.

 

However I do wonder if Kenji Utsumi's death in June 2013 is a reason we haven't seen the character added to the roster; Square Enix might be pretty busy both casting voice actors for any roles that have never before had speaking parts AND having to recast Garland.  If Garland does appear we at least still have his English voice actor, Chris Sabat of FUNimation, here to be his VA...unless we get a different director for this game than the previous two games had.  That director Bob Buchholz is a different voice director than the one for the main Final Fantasy series (Jack Fletcher) and while many may have criticized the direction he gave most of the actors he is at least kind enough to try and keep voice actors as consistent as possible.