Developer: Team Ninja
Publisher: Square Enix
Platform: PS4

Translating the Dissidia Final Fantasy games that originated on the PSP system to the PS4 was never going to be easy. The original & its sequel Dissidia Duodecim were some of the most feature rich games, not just on a handheld but possibly of all time. But now that the series has been given more of an online multiplayer focus in an era of microtransactions & incomplete games, Square Enix & developer Team Ninja have had more ways than ever to mess this one up...but did they?

The core gameplay of Dissidia Final Fantasy NT remains largely the same as its predecessors, this is a fighting game where you play as one of the protagonists or antagonists of the mainline Final Fantasy games, with some more obscure characters thrown in there for good measure. Each character has a set of attacks which build ‘bravery’ allowing you to do an increasing amount of damage with powerful & unblockable ‘hp attacks’ at which point your bravery resets to its default value. Watch out though, as your bravery decreases when hit with a bravery attack & a huge bonus is given to those who whittle their opponents bravery down to 0. This is usually the tipping point of any fight.

The movesets of the characters themselves have been streamlined, the player can no longer tweak & customise beyond choosing a hp attack and 2 abilities. These abilities usually take the form of an area-of-effect buff or debuff & are available to all characters. It is by no means a bad thing that each character now has a permanent movesets as team Ninja has done a superb job in balancing the roster of characters. Where before certain characters like The Emperor were hard to get to grips with due to there being so much choice of sometimes complex moves, in this game each character is similar enough that it’s easy to pick up & play with any character yet everyone still has a distinct feel & playstyle to them. To compliment that, there are also a few summons to choose from which give various kinds of buffs but can only be called after destroying crystals that appear around the stage. Once called they have the potential to wreak havoc on the other party. The way these summons zip around the stage is the most visually stunning aspect of Dissidia NT, they were also the cause of some of the most intense & action packed moments in my time with the game.

Succeeding takes more than just learning your own character though, knowing what you’re enemy is capable of goes a long way, in doing this you can stay just out of the enemy’s reach whilst hurling long range magic at them or use the game’s incredibly satisfying dodging mechanics to draw them in for close range attacks. Decent players will know for instance that it’s a bad idea to stand underneath Cloud or Noctis as they will undoubtedly launch a quick downward thrust. Tidus is another character that can catch inexperienced players off guard, his main attacks branch out from a dash and are often preceded by a dodge. Attacks can be strung together by hitting opponents against walls or timing a dash just perfectly so that their recovery coincides with your follow-up strike. This time you won’t be fighting alone, a basic match consists of two teams of three & supporting each other with buffs or interrupts increases your score. The score doesn’t have any bearing on the outcome though, the victor is the team who incapacitates any of the opponents team a total of three times.

The single player AI is always a huge worry with these kinds of games & is almost always either too hard or too easy. The PSP games had incredible AI which had several tiers to it. The highest tier posed an incredible challenge but nevertheless remained fair & it seems that Dissidia NT has managed to keep that tricky balance intact. At times it can be frustrating when an enemy dodges perfectly despite their focus being on another character or place entirely. It also annoys me when they constantly run away when they know they’re about to lose but hey, that happens online too!

The game delivers information to the player through a UI which is much improved from the garish & utterly huge arcade UI. There’s still an option to use the original but I really do think the arcade UI is one of the most convoluted, typically Japanese UI’s I have ever seen. What the game does not do, is give the player any resource whatsoever to look up what each character’s individual moves do. This is important because many moves are context sensitive, requiring button holds, dashes or specific conditions like Shantoto’s ‘enraged’ effect to execute. Each character also has a unique ability which work on a timer like other abilities, Warrior of Light for example can use ‘Holy Chain’ which forces nearby enemies to target you. I still wouldn’t know this however if I hadn’t looked it up online. The game is in dire need of an encyclopedia detailing every move in the game, otherwise you can only learn most characters effectively by trial & error.   

There are an array of stages from various Final Fantasy games but again, they don’t work as the previous Dissidia stages worked. There are no destructible environments & the stages seem far less intricate, with barely any verticality. It’s clear that Team Ninja wanted to do away with Dissidia’s more complex level design to focus entirely on the combat, a mistake in my opinion but I can see where some people would prefer this. I see no reason why traps couldn’t have been implemented in some of the stages & more than anything else I hope this is included in a later update.

As well as playing online, there is a story mode though it is by far the most disappointing aspect of Dissidia Final Fantasy NT. It consists of a small number of standard battles as well as some boss fights against the games’ summons. These boss fights are frustrating, the combat is clearly not designed for this kind of fight & you pretty much have only two options cheese the hel out of the AI or get lucky. The game outright tells you that close quarters characters are the most effective here but this is simply not the case as usually staying far away from the summon is the only way of avoiding its incredibly cheap attacks. 

There is no world map in story mode, no dungeons with different ranks of chess pieces governing the challenge of encounters. Here we have a few branches of a very simple, very boring story which can be gradually unlocked by playing online. Looking at the story “map” you might think its various paths correspond to time as they follow on to the right, but certain characters appear in multiple nodes in the same column with no discerning what happens first. So the layout of the map is completely arbitrary & this may be the least creative way the story could have possibly been delivered….and damn is it delivered through some terribly voice acted shells of characters we know and love.

Voice acting in Dissidia Final Fantasy NT is either wooden & devoid of emotion or intensely shrill & annoying in the case of some characters. The worst offender is the moogle which constantly shrieks “tips” at the player, luckily you can turn this off during the battles which I did immediately after my first one but unfortunately you can’t just kill the moogle outright. The voice acting and sound design in general is also not even recorded very well, with ear piercing sibilance, unbalanced sound effects & some that are simply devoid of all impact. Most of the voice actors seem to have forgotten what their characters sounded like in previous games, they weren’t that great before...but now they’re even worse. Most of the characters have the exact same generic, American accent but there are some exceptions of course. Shantoto & Kefka are the most entertaining as not only do their voice actors have license to add a lot of panache (Shantoto says everything in rhyme & Kefka just is plain crazy) they also make you forget how dull the rest of the characters are. You can tell how shallow & simplistic the story is by the majority of the dialogue which never seems to go beyond one line cliches like “We must press on” or “If we work together we can overcome this.” 

Luckily the story is not the only way the game conveys progress to the player. This is something most fighting games fall down on but Dissidia NT does a reasonably good job. Items are given to the player frequently through treasure, essentially a loot box with no option to pay real money thank Odin! Collectables include a nice array of outfits & weapons, more variety in music to be heard in battles & finally, icons you can display on your character card featuring tonnes of characters from all the Final Fantasy games. These items are nowhere near the number found in previous Dissidia games which featured thousands of combinations of armour, weapons & accessories (though none of those changed character appearance) so though I was expecting a bit more, seeing weapons like Cloud’s Force Stealer in the game is exciting. It would be a shame to ruin it with something like Ultima Weapon paid dlc, which I’m sure Square Enix are well on their way with. 

Finally the music, which is mainly Nobuo Uematsu compositions arranged by Takeharu Ishimoto. The main theme however has seen a pretty epic makeover, the main melody of this never gets old & good thing too because you’ll be hearing it on loop whilst preparing for matches. A lot can be said about just this track actually, compared to the original arrangement of the theme. I always thought returning to the D each time carried a lot of impact whereas now the melody descends the first time round then reaches its peak before another descend on its second run. These predictable motifs almost make the new version more repetitive despite technically being less so. The fact that many of the world map tracks have already been arranged by Ishimoto for the PSP games just makes me think more of the missed opportunities surrounding the game’s story mode but of course I don’t need to say much more about the iconic Final Fantasy music on offer in the battles of Dissidia NT. It never fails to get me humming along.

In the end, though I could complain endlessly about what I didn’t get from this game, what I did get was one of the most varied yet balanced fighting games around. Mechanically, the game feels smooth as butter to play. Most of the games’ flaws such as poor sound direction can be chalked down to Square-Enix’s usual laziness & cost cutting antics. I am incredibly glad the game was given Team Ninja because as we all know, Square-Enix have forgotten how to make games & this would have been a complete disaster in their studio’s hands. I really hope the online community can continue to thrive because this is definitely a game worth returning to regularly.   

Pros:

• Balanced & tight combat across all playable characters.

• Vibrant visuals & stunning art direction.

• Epic arrangements of Nobuo Uematsu classics.

Cons:

• Lazy, simplistic story that almost ruins the game & has no value.

• Horrific voice acting.

• Poor sound design & sound direction.