Review #553: Dissidia Final Fantasy NT

Final Fantasy's 'nice try'.

Geeze, just cut it out with Lightning, nobody likes here games!

 I liked Dissidia on the PSP, but I had a few gripes with it. I'm happy to report that Dissidia on the PS4 is pretty much exactly what I wanted from Dissidia on the PSP and then some. Critics have been harsh on this game, but that's probably because they can't wrap their head around the fact that this game is an Arcade game and not a triple A open-world, story-driven epic. Here, you pick up the controller and you fight, and that's it.

 The game plays pretty much just like it did on the PSP, but it axed the EX modes and introduced 3 on 3 battles. This is how you play the game: Each team has three stocks, or respawns, so the first team to suffer three losses loses the match. You go about this by landing Bravery Attacks, attacks that increase the Bravery number. Once you're happy with your bravery you then use an HP attack to translate your bravery into HP damage. Getting hit means you lose bravery, so you have to think twice. Will you accumulate a large number of Bravery points in order to kill an enemy in a single blow, or will you slowly chip away at an enemy's health? Successfully landing an HP attack will revert it back to its base, 1000, so it's not like you can just spam high-damage attacks. One of my peeves with the first game was customization, since I didn't like customizing movesets, and that's gone! Each character has a single moveset set in stone, which is great since there's filler. You only get to pick between three HP attacks for each character. Furthermore, each character has its own unique skill, executed with Triangle, as well as two slots for buffs and debuffs, done with Triangle+Up or Triangle+Down. These triangle skills run on a cooldown, so you have to be careful with them. Periodically 'Summon Cores' will spawn that, when broken, allow you to bring a Summon into battle to aid you.

The character roster is fantastic, even if it's mostly made out of pretty boys.

 Gameplay is fast and frantic and I love it. This is an arena-fighter with 6 combatants running around at the same time, but the game runs very smoothly, only dipping, and very little, when it gets too chaotic. It can be a bit tough to get a hang of the camera, L2 to target a foe on the left, R2 on the right, both to target the nearest foe and hold one of those to aim at a Summon Core, but you'll get the hang of it. Besides normal battling there're also Core Battles, in which you must fight to destroy the enemy's core while they attempt to destroy yours. What the game could've used would've been more modes. Give me a real practice mode in which I can fight a dummy. Give me an elimination match, where once a character dies he's gone for good. Give me something more.

 It also lacks more customization. Why can't I increase the amount of respawns per match? Summons are neat an' all, but it seems like as soon as a Summon Core appears everyone abandons what they are doing and runs towards them... how about letting me deactivate summons? There's a HUGE soundtrack, with great tracks, why not let me pick a song before a battle? But, worst of all, this is a fighting game... with no Offline Versus. Alright, so having two screens at the same time may have taxed the machine... so make it so that it can only be played in 2-on-2 or 1-on-1 battles. Turn down the graphics, do what you have to, but the game needed a Offline versus mode.

There's so much going on at the same time, and the framerate is SO smooth.

 The first thing you'll have to do upon booting up the game is entering the Gauntlet mode, in which you fight against 6 teams of enemies. And you have to do this, because you have to grind in order to unlock story mode. I'm not kidding. Story mode is unlocked piece by piece as you earn Memory Pieces, which are earned by leveling up your Player Level which is done by playing Gauntlet Mode over and over again. Or going Online. Doing offline single VS CPU battles doesn't give you anything, which is incredibly dumb. Regardless, you'll be grinding Gauntlet Mode a lot, because not only do you need Memory Pieces, you also need to level up individual characters because... the allied CPU is incredibly stupid and you need to level them up, by using them or having them on your team so that the CPU becomes more proficient with them. And you need to level them up, because it's not unusual for your CPU allies to do nothing as all three enemies gang up on you. You also need to grind for Character Levels in order to unlock alternate HP attacks. You also need to grind for Money if you want to purchase any cosmetics.

 Get ready to put in about 3 hours of Gauntlet if you want a single costume. Considering a successful run through a Gauntlet earns you about 600 gil and costumes are 10800 a piece... And weapons are 7600 each, so.... you're in it for the long haul. There're also in-game loot boxes, which thankfully can't even be purchased with real money, in which you may earn collectibles, but you'll be earning crap mostly. And it's a shame, because each character has about 2-3 extra weapons, as well as three colors for each of their two costumes. There's a lot of great stuff to unlock in this game, but the grind is ungodly tedious. It also should've made this customization more snappy, as it stands, you have to set presets for Skills, costumes and weapons for each individual character. This means that, when you're on the character select screen, you must press Triangle to enter customization mode, then press 'character', then find you character on the list and then go to 'EX Skill', 'Costume' and 'Weapon'. That's a lot of unnecessary menus. Presets are nice to have as options, not as something mandatory. They should've given players fast menus, like you do when picking CPU allies or enemies in mock battles, in order to pick a costume, weapon and skills.

It looks like a lot to take into, but it's very easy to get into the groove of things.

 And then, lastly, we've got the story mode, which is one of the game's biggest disappointments, next to the lack of offline versus. Unlocking it is a pain in the butt, plaything through boss battles is a pain in the butt thanks to useless allies, the final boss is a pain in the butt because he cheaply spams HP attacks... but none of that is what really makes it disappointing, rather, it's the story itself. It's garbage, the story is garbage. Which would've been alright, since this is a 'what if' game, but what it really needed was characters interacting with each other. These are characters that had, most of them anyways, a single game, so why not let us enjoy their personalities again, as they interact with one another? But nope, dialogue and character interactions are short and uninteresting. The badguys barely get any screen time, might make a quick quip here and there, and then they disappear. Final Fantasy I-X get 2 characters each(IV gets a third one, Kain), but the remaining eight characters, of which Kain is a part of, don't even appear on the story mode. There's a lot of stuff that is poorly explained or poorly written, specifically the Lightning/Zidane branch of the story, Lightning and Squall just disappear never to be seen again until the finale. It's a poor story, with poor fanservice.

 Here's the thing, the game is a blast to play. You've 28 iconic, and some not as iconic, heroes and villains from Final Fantasy, and there's so much glee to have as you see all these fantastic characters fight each other looking great thanks to current-gen graphics. And characters are very different from each other, not as much as, say, Guilty Gear, but you'll find that you'll be using different strategies with different characters as you experiment with their movesets. And as much as I had to grind, it never felt like a grind because I was having fun mowing down hordes of enemies. I just wish that getting the cosmetics you want was easier, and selecting your set-ups was faster than having to fix 3 presets per character, going through various menus. But here's the thing, where the game falters is on all the fluff, what really matters, the core gameplay, they got oh, so right. I don't think I'll ever tough the Story Mode again, but Gauntlet Battles? Count me in. Just wish that Offline single Sparring Battles would give points and that the game had a 2-Player offline mode.

 You know, as much as I complain about the game.... I absolutely adored it. It feels a great deal like Gundam Extreme VS, which is a good thing since that's one of my favorite games out there. I love the character cast and I love the gameplay. Would more bells and whistles would've been nice? Definitely. But they nailed the core gameplay just right, and it's a very easy game to just pick-up and play, which is one of the things I value the most in a game. And I understand why so many people dislike it, most people have moved forwards from these Arcade games, this is not what most people expect out of a game.
 But it's exactly what I love. Now gimme a 2 player offline mode and we're cool, Squeenix.
 9.0 out of 10