Trivia / Dissidia Final Fantasy

• Acting for Two: In Dissidia 012: Final Fantasy - Warriors of Cosmos, Maaya Sakamoto voices both Aerith and Lightning.
• All-Star Cast: This game pulls off the nearly-unique feat of being filled with anime actors from California, Texas, and New York. Beyond those, you've got big-name voice actors reprising their roles from Final Fantasy X, TV stars reprising their roles from Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, and to top it all off, Keith David as the Big Bad.
• Ascended Fanon: Vaan wasn't exactly the favorite in Final Fantasy XII, due to being a Supporting Protagonist who has very little plot impact. That said, the devs decided to say Take That, Scrappy!, and make a number of the cast take potshots at him.
• Creator's Favorite: Tetsuya Nomura stated that Terra Branford is his favorite character because he likes long-range attacks and Terra's Tornado move.
• Meme Acknowledgment: Christopher Sabat, in his Garland voice, said "I, Garland, will knock you all down!" on request at Another Anime Convention. Furthermore, at least one of his attacks involves turning his sword into a hammer, and striking the opponent vertically downward. Garland can, literally, knock you down.
• No Dub for You: Universal Tuning recycles the English dub, despite being exclusive to Japan.
• No Export for You: Dissidia Final Fantasy - Universal Tuning, yet another example of Square's tradition of Japan-only updated re-releases. However, in an interesting situation some people prefer the North American and European release over Universal Tuning, as numerous characters had their ability to cancel certain attacks removed, resulting in the combo potential of some characters being shattered.
  • Dissidia 012's Official Quests, as short as they may be, fill in a lot of holes in the plot—i.e. how Sephiroth killed himself in the 12th cycle, the original cast's travels in that cycle and the continuing exploits of Gilgamesh, Shantotto and Gabranth. In this case, though, they couldn't be localized or released overseas because every text screen is Capped at 25 characters.
• Role Reprise:
  • Not only do all of the voice actors from the original Dissidia (many of whom were already reprising roles from previous Final Fantasy titles) reprise their roles for Dissidia 012, but the new characters in 012 also reprise their roles, including Liam O'Brien as Kain Highwind.
  • Masakazu Morita reprising his Star-Making Role from Final Fantasy X, and also Takahiro Sakurai as Cloud Strife. This generally applies to any character who's been voiced in either English or Japanese before: In this case, the casts of VII and X through XIII with the addition of Squall thanks to Kingdom Hearts.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Kazuya Nakai voices Gilgamesh, in lieu of the late Daisuke Gōri.
  • Vaan is voiced by Kensho Ono rather than Kohei Takeda. Square-Enix said they couldn't finalize a deal with Takeda but didn't want to cut Vaan, but some fans suspect that Takeda was dropped because he broke a non-disclosure agreement by reporting on his website that he was going to be in a new Final Fantasy game.
  • In the arcade game, Garland is voiced by Kouji Ishii, due to the passing of Kenji Utsumi.
  • Gabranth is now voiced by Keith Ferguson instead of Michael E. Rodgers. Why exactly is unknown but according to some rumors, Square Enix could not get in contact with Michael E. Rodgers after XII so went with Keith Ferguson instead.
• Urban Legend of Zelda: In the grand Final Fantasy tradition, it's accumulated a few.
  • Rumors abounded that Chaos could be unlocked as a playable character, as could his unique summon Shinryu for usage. Of course, neither is true without using hacks.
  • A widely-believed myth is that Sephiroth is specifically coded to use Hell's Gate on Aerith when she uses Holy, perfectly recreating the infamous scene of her death where he descends from above to stab her as she prays for Holy. Actually, it's because when using Holy Aerith has Block Mid block priority, meaning only High Priority attacks can damage her and stop the attack; Sephiroth has no Mid or High priority Bravery attacks, so he has to use an HP attack to stop Holy, and a combination of his likely positioning relative to Aerith coupled with Sephiroth's AI in general means it'll probably (but not always) be Hell's Gate that he uses.
  • Sazh was rumored to appear in 012 because of his immense Western popularity, either alongside Lightning or as the only XIII rep due to the latter's unpopularity^note Her popularity in Japan was generally unknown at the time due to lack of communication from the language barrier.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Kain was supposed to be in the game as the representative of Chaos for IV, but because of the nature of the story they felt that Kain wouldn't work as Cecil's foil, as well as letting them use Golbez to characterize him better.
  • Initial trailers of the game showed a scene with the Emperor, Garland, Kuja and Ultimecia telling Squall and Firion about Cosmos' true nature being the one of a Goddess of Death, suggesting that Light Is Not Good. This got a Hand Wave in an Official Quest for 012 that Cosmos is a "Goddess of Death" in that she helps maintain the cycles of war where people keep getting killed and revived, but otherwise it's not clear if this was the original intent of the scene.
  • Also in trailers, the dialog before the fight between Squall and Warrior of Light at Memoria is about the purpose of the crystals, and the latter knowing something Squall doesn't, but that doesn't seem to be nice to know. In the actual game, their dialogue is entirely different.
  • Trailers showed Garland irritating Kuja and the two of them fighting. In the finished product, it happens in a cutscene and it doesn't go any further then them preparing to fight until Jecht shows up, at which point Kuja takes off.
  • There was also some backstage talks about the consideration of Lightning making it to the roster, but was shot down because Dissidia was released before XIII and Lightning's inclusion would spoil the skills that she'd use in the game.
  • Seymour was considered for the game, but due to Seymour having a closer connection to Yuna over Tidus, they went with Jecht instead.
  • For 012, the developers considered Eald'narche or Kam'lanaut to represent Final Fantasy XI on the Chaos side, but decided to go with Prishe as another warrior of Cosmos, who was originally considered for the first game but was left out in favor of Shantotto.
  • The game was originally tailored to be another Kingdom Hearts spin-off. However, the team ultimately decided that it would be a bad idea to make the Disney characters fight one another.^note Disney's opinion on the matter is unclear, though a more traditional fighting game from Disney Interactive featuring various villains and Beast was cut for the same reason.. Square Enix would retool the idea with a Final Fantasy skin, and the rest is history. The concept of using Kingdom Hearts characters in a multiplayer setting later inspired the multiplayer modes of both Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days and Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep.

---