The cutscenes are all the same, but 013's story mode has been improved using all the new stuff from 012. So the original Dissidia story gets all the new stuff like the world map (where you can run around to the next dungeon and talk to your party members, etc), better dungeon grid system, assists, etc. Even the dungeons themselves seem to have been reworked to better accomodate the new KP and Chain systems, while the original "par"-like dungeon system (forgot what it's called) was scrapped.

But remember that although the game contains 013, you only unlock it after beating the entire 012 prequel story, and then 013 picks up right where it left off. This means that until you get there, you're stuck with the new six characters for the whole story mode (none of the original Dissidia characters join your party during 012).

Difference now it seems is that beating one chapter of 013 does not unlock Shade Impulse, you have to beat it with every single character. I personally wouldn't have gone to the trouble of doing it in original Dissidia if i knew 012 was gonna make me do it all again. It's not all bad though, the game at least has a "Skip All Cutscenes" mode so you can blast through the parts you've already done (especially if you're already levelled up) and as mentioned, 013's story mode was improved a lot.

Lack of horror/giant battlegens was apparently just an amazing streak of bad luck. Meanwhile, story 000 I entered a gateway where I'm fighting a level 95 feral chaos. It's a 5 on 1 party battle but he has 59,000 HP and he basically becomes invincible against brave attacks after 60 seconds due to a massive x90 booster bonus. Kain lasted longest but Firion managed to deal the most damage alone...but by the time I got to Firion's part in the lineup Chaos still had 33,000 hp left. Not gonna happen.



edit: I take it back. Firion is really a champ. Totally reaffirmed my love for him.

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Some stories can't be told with words, some legends are meant to die

I figured as much, and that's fine, I only really want to play as Lightning. I am glad to hear they made that change to Shade Impulse. Hopefully they changed it back to the original version where the cutscene where Cosmos gets destroyed or whatever after they all have their crystals doesn't play after every character's ending?

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[In Yarr we trust.]

You can't play impulse til you've finished every story, cosmos' death only plays after beating the last story mode.

013/000 has a couple new scenes concerning the Warrior's past. I found them enjoyable. Seems 000 is where the meat is but it's hard as hell since all my lv100 characters are gimp and as Ket has mentioned, there's no coliseum to grind on.

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Some stories can't be told with words, some legends are meant to die

I didn't like in Dissidia how it played after each story. Apparently that was a change for the NA version of the game. Glad they changed it though, means I only have to skip it once now :P

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[In Yarr we trust.]

Ket, in my time playing 000 it seems that that's honestly the best place to grind for gear. You can repeat gateways after clearing them. If you buy item drop/battlegen increases from the PP shop it'll help, I've been getting nice gear I wouldn't have had access to otherwise. Don't even remember getting this thief's cap but it'll help, drop rate+20%. You can also go to quick battle, keep on prepping for a fight until you see the enemy with something you want and just keep rematching him in hopes it'll drop. It's a bit desperate but ehhh.

I need 1 electrum for Kain's level 90 lance. I've seen no electrum anywhere, in order to make electrum I need hi-elixirs which were an easy common drop in the original's coliseum but now I have no idea where to obtain these besides maybe 000 treasure chests. Simple creation items like the elixir series and chocobo crap have become rare. I haven't tried changing my play plan though, kept it on the black chocobo since I started. Maybe the treasure chest chocobo has more than exp accessories in this game. There are still no guides on gamefaqs for item lists.

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Some stories can't be told with words, some legends are meant to die

Face off against level 130 feral chaos in a 5 v 1 party battle
Chaos has 128,000 hp
Begin with Firion
Deal 83,000 damage alone
Rest will be cake
Hit retry instead of proceed to next battle
Smash own head through wall


and victory a little while later. Took the whole team (Firion, Squall, Cloud, Kain, and the Warrior) to get it done, with most of the damage done by Firion. Beating 000 unlocks Feral Chaos as a playable character in the pp catalogue along with the final report.

Meanwhile I randomly got some items I was able to take out of the labyrinth. First off you need a geomancer job card active, second, seems you have to be lucky enough to actually find an item card that's got the tent/cottage symbol on it. When you reach the goal you're able to take those items out with you. When you re-enter you can bring them back in but if you don't hit the goal you'll lose them. You can also choose to enter without them. Those items are the only kind that can go in and out of the labyrinth, which is funny considering the exit trophy screen shows all the crap you obtained inside.

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Some stories can't be told with words, some legends are meant to die

Through sweat and blood I finally reached the first "green" Feral Chaos with my woefully under-equipped team. This post is a bit bloggy but what the hey.

Things slowly got easier once I went out of my way to grind the items I needed for the basic damage accessories in the 1-on-1 battle mode. Til now I'd been using only the first +3% damage accessory, and now I have the +3% +5% and +7% all equipped at once along with about 2.5x amount of boosters and I feel like I can actually put a dent in the enemy now.

That said, once I hit level 90 everything suddenly got hard again as the enemies all upgraded to the new tier of equipment. It's a bit stupid that all of the gear is now Level 1, 30, 90 or 100. Whatever happened to all the gear progression from Dissidia? It gave you a reason to hold on to all that gear for levelling up new people and made you and your opponents get slowly stronger as you levelled up. Oh well.

I kept reading that to beat Feral Chaos you should use Firion. Well that's a pain because my Firion is Level 11. I read as a backup you should spam Yuna's Mega Flare, and at least she was Level 60. Well I tried that and it didn't work at all, he dodged every hit of it.

So screw that, I had to try and beat it the old way. At first I tried Tifa but it became apparent very quickly that he dodges HP attacks way too easily, and I was going to need BRV>HP combos. So instead I decided to bust out Team Dissidia. Made a new party with some of my Level 100s from Dissidia and requipped them with everything I had: Cloud, Terra, Jecht. I haven't played these guys in ages though and Jecht in particular I was pretty sure I wouldn't be able to combo properly any more.

Terra first: He dodges Meltdown too easily, and reflects Holy Combo back in your face pretty much every time, so those weren't going to work. So instead I spammed Tornado, because like most AI, it runs the fuck away when it sees it. I kept luring him to the top of the stage and then using Tornado to trap him up there, and it worked pretty well, but I only managed to knock about 15k HP off of him before he got a combo in and took her down.

Cloud next: Cloud shined in this fight, and here it became obvious that BRV>HP attacks were the way to go. Landing Omnislash Ver.5 was extremely easy after dodging any of his attacks in mid-air. A few retries and I was able to get him all the way down to 24k HP left using Cloud.

Finally Jecht: Jecht was my "main" back in Dissidia but I hadn't played him in 012 yet so I knew I'd have a lot of trouble pulling the combos off. I managed to get the hang of his mid-air combo > Jecht Blade pretty quickly so I stuck with that for the whole fight, fighting basically the same way I did with Cloud but with a much harder to pull off combo. Unfortunately, this took hours of retrying still, because if you got one thing wrong he'd combo you to oblivion. I eventually pulled it off with some lucky assist timing and learning to Air Dash *past* him (instead of to him) after using assist so that I'd be waiting in the right place to continue the combo after Bartz (the assist) wall rushed him.

I was on VC with Kio while I was doing this and she got to hear me swearing for hours. The lesson learned here is that doing it the "right" way sucks.

It took me like 4-5 hours of retrying to beat this guy, and he's not even the real thing. I'm kinda dreading the full one unless I finally stumble upon some equipment. I'm wearing the Battlegen+50% accessory though and I'm finally getting some stuff. Gonna have to go grind some gateways.

When you get to the level 130 Feral Chaos you have Jecht as your assist. He's spectacular. Since you use Jecht in your party I don't know who you'll end up having.

Firion has always been my main, I used him to kill 130 and 150 Chaos in the original so after a lot of time using Kain and the Warrior in 012 it was easy to get back into Firion for the tougher fights. I prefer Firion to Cloud because he can fight from far away, meaning his blocked attacks won't stagger him into counters, and with long/medium/short range brv>HP combos he can control the enemy's movement and set the pace of any ground fight, which was key for FC.

I had trouble as Squall because his HP attacks are hard to connect. Kain I just basically stuck to jump. The quickness, the incorporated dodge, and the fact that he can hit anywhere on the board with it made him deal more damage than I expected to get out of him. I took Cloud for #4 despite not actually having a ton of experience on him. I did ok with him, would have scored the kill but I screwed up and went EX Revenge instead of EX mode. Kept Warrior of Light for last so that I'd have a solid anchor for the final battle, by the time I got to him Chaos only had a few thousand HP left though.

I had fairly basic accessories all around. Firion had some EX absorption boosts that ended up being useless, I should have focused on assist boost. Firion was absolutely kicking the crap out of FC though since his attack was something like 10 higher than FC's defense thanks to a Lufenian Pole pickup in a gateway. Thanks to that I was able to focus on breaking instead of spamming HP attacks.

The gates you'll be going through will have enemies up to level 128ish. There are some pretty helpful item pickups on the gateway maps though. Red chests lead to tough fights with great rewards.

You probably know this by now but for the love of god make sure to equip EXP<>HP on everyone. Huuuuuuuge help.

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Some stories can't be told with words, some legends are meant to die

As far as I can tell, the assists are all completely random. If you leave and re-enter any gateway, you get a different one. I had to leave and re-enter the Feral Chaos gateway to change my party setup, and the dungeon ended up changing from a Squall assist to a Bartz assist.

I found a gateway just north of the green feral chaos's gateway that has a blue chest behind a Level 97 Tifa (not too hard) and then the exit right behind a Level 70ish 2-person enemy party (easy). The blue chest seems to always have a piece of random Level 100 "Lufenian" gear inside it, weapons, body, hats, you name it. So I just repeated that gateway over and over a dozen times and all of a sudden I've gone from crappy gear to pretty decent gear. Each time I did it, the assist character was different.

Yeah I've been rocking EXP>HP since the first Dissidia, especially since once you master it it costs 0AP. Though admittedly, EXP>BRV can be handy sometimes, the brv boost after gaining exp basically means you're never left with 0 BRV after a HP attack.

Right now playing the last gateway again all the assists are the same as the first time I went through. Might be unique in this way since it's the final dungeon. Good call on that farming gateway, I'll check it out. As it stands I only have a few Lufenian parts. The pole is strong but the only person in my party who can use it is Firion, the rest are using Save the Queen except for Squall who's using Fomalhaut.

I used to do EXP<>EX sometimes in the original game. I had Firion's accessories set up so he had something like 10x ex gain and a boost to duration. Once he went in he didn't come out. I considered bravery but stuck with HP and (at least in Firion vs Chaos) it was noticable. I rallied back from low HP three or four times. It also helps when travelling through the dungeons.

Video just finished uploading, this is the first part of my lv130 FC fight. Like an idiot I didn't bother equipping Counterattack, would have added a ton of damage. Also should have picked a better summon.

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Some stories can't be told with words, some legends are meant to die

That video makes it obvious how underpowered I must have been. You're hitting for 40-70+ damage a hit, and I was hitting the weaker Feral Chaos for 4 damage even before his accessories boosted his defense (then hit for 0 damage thereafter).

Honestly I don't know how to explain it. I hit normal level 100+ opponents for only 3 damage per hit on the knife attack. When I fight lv100 Feral Chaos in quick battle he's got more defense than the ultimate 130 version. It's possible they give him shit defense in exchange for the massive HP boost.

That said, Firion was hitting twice as hard as my other members.

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Some stories can't be told with words, some legends are meant to die

Went through the final feral chaos gateway again. All the assists were the same except ultimecia and jecht were switched up. I've been farming the gateway with the level 97 tifa bluebox. Every time I enter it's shantotto, zidane, or gabranth.

Beat FC with Firion solo in 11 minutes. Now farming lufenian gear. Don't really know what else to do at this point since I can't figure out how to farm materials for ultimate weapons.

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Some stories can't be told with words, some legends are meant to die

Finally realized the advertised ability for Kain to cancel post-attack animations by hitting triangle is actually just a unique version of Air Dash he has. Pretty cool, he can immediately combo into more brave attacks, and in ensuing attacks any crit bonuses (like counterattack) remain active. Makes him a totally different character.

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Some stories can't be told with words, some legends are meant to die