It’s Different, But More Streamlined Than Past Games
The first two Dissidia titles weren’t your typical fighting games. They were surprisingly complex in how they let you equip your characters with various items, assign summons, level-ups, and customize movesets. It could all honestly be a bit overwhelming, especially if you were just wanting to jump into some matches, but Dissidia NT does away with a lot of that complexity.
Equipment is now completely gone, with you only being able to alter the look of each character’s costume and weapon. Character movesets and gameplay have also been streamlined, making each character have three Bravery attacks mapped to X, X+forward, and X+backward. These change in the air, of course. Additionally, each character now has one, sometimes two, HP attacks to use and three skills that are on a recharge during battle. This is all still fairly complex, but it’s a far cry from the way Dissidia used to be, with more emphasis now on the differences between each character and their respective classes.
There’s two other big changes that Dissidia NT makes to its formula, first of which is an emphasis on 3vs3 battles. The past two games were essentially 1vs1 duels, but now you’ll need to use teamwork to win each match. This results in an experience that feels far more hectic than before and definitely takes some getting used to. The second change is introducing summons into the actual battle instead of just granting players various stats or boosts when invoked. Summon Crystals periodically appear on the battlefield, and by smashing them you can build up your summon meter. Once full your team can call forth your selected summon, which will devastate the field with massive attacks, hurt enemies, and grant your party buffs. This means that while you’re trading blows with the other team, everyone’s trying to make a mad dash to the crystals and build up a summon. Dissidia NT may have the same core gameplay that the series is known for, but there’s enough changes here to make it something new.
Characters Are Nicely Varied
Dissidia NT separates its cast of characters into four different classes: Vanguard, Marksman, Assassin and Specialist. The movesets of these three classes differ greatly, and although each character within a class fills the same role, they work in very different ways. This is a testament to the variety bestowed upon each character in the game. No one feels like a reskin or a reuse of a different character, and they each have their own strengths and weaknesses. For example, Sephiroth has incredibly powerful and long-reaching Bravery attacks, however his HP attacks are very tricky to land. Meanwhile, Tidus’ Bravery attacks aren’t incredibly powerful, but he comes with a skill that does a ton of damage and makes it easy to combo into his wide-reaching HP attack. Each character is full of these kinds of little differences, meaning you need to take time to learn how each one works.
Vanguards make up the majority of Dissidia NT’s roster, with lots of characters that are good at getting right up close and personal. Marksman are the best way to mix things up, as these characters are focused on moves at a long distance that keep enemies away, and they oftentimes come with skills that can support the tea as well. Specialists meanwhile feel like a good mix of the two, with a selection of long-range and close-up attacks, and they each have a specific strength too.
These differences in how characters play aren’t the only reason the cast is varied, as just the general roster provides a nice selection of the best from Final Fantasy. Each game, I-X, has its main hero and villain playable, and beyond that there’s some nice additions to round things out. Shantotto, Lightning, Y’Shtola, and Noctis represent the later games. It’s also fantastic to see Ramza from Tactics and Ace from Type-0 imagined in the Dissidia universe, rendered with the power of modern systems. Part of what makes Dissidia so fun is seeing all these disparate characters come together reimagined from their original forms in their respective games. With six more characters planned as DLC too, we’re bound to get even more variety.
There’s Definitely a Learning Curve
Jumping into Dissidia NT, one thing will quickly become clear: there’s a lot of learning to do. Even though it’s more streamlined than past games, NT is still incredibly complex and the fact that there’s six characters in each match can make it hard to follow everything going on. Matches are fast and furious, and there’s so much going on at one time that it feels immediately overwhelming. It certainly doesn’t help that the tutorials in the game are genuinely terrible at teaching you things. Each tutorial is pages of text telling you what to do. The biggest problem here is that it doesn’t give you button prompts or anything once you’re in control of the character in a tutorial. This is a crucial mistake as you don’t have a link between performing that button combo and your character performing the action onscreen. It’d be much more effective to remember if you could see these things at the same time as opposed to having to read through pages of text to remember everything you just read.
Still, you can learn everything in Dissidia NT on your own. As someone that played hundreds of hours of the past two Dissidia games, it still took me a good 5-6 hours of playing NT before I really felt comfortable with everything. I learned movesets and button combos quickly, but it really took a while to get used to the 3vs3 matches. I can’t overstate how hectic things can get, especially when a summon enters the fray. You constantly have to make an effort to watch what’s going on with your teammates, where your life stock and summon bar is at, and who’s attacking you. Most importantly, don’t get discouraged if you pick up Dissidia NT or try out the beta and find yourself overwhelmed. Just stick with it and you’ll learn the ropes before long.
It’s a Ton of Fun, When You Get the Right Team
Once you do learn everything and get in a rhythm, Dissidia NT can be an absolute blast to play. These battles do a great job of capturing that absurd Final Fantasy battle feeling you see in something like Advent Children, and the game looks absolutely gorgeous, especially on PS4 Pro with HDR. It feels great to pull off dodges at just the right time, only to turn around and unleash a huge combo on your enemy, or nail a huge HP attack at just the right moment.
Teamwork can go a long way in Dissidia NT, and communicating (while difficult to do on the fly) can help. Ganging up on enemies or rushing to shatter a Summon Crystal improves your chances, however, this is if you get the right team. Considering the steep learning curve, it can be a drag to get teammates that just don’t know what they’re doing. It’s a tough game to learn so it’s not necessarily their fault, but I got quite a few games that were just completely mismatched, both in my favor and not. Perhaps this could be solved with a better matchmaking system. Right now you have player levels that go from Bronze E-A, to Silver E-A, then presumably Gold and whatever else. Because of this it seems like Dissidia NT might be the most fun when you get two friends together and make a squad to play online. I still had a great many good matches, but finding horribly mismatched teams can certainly put a damper on the fun, despite the over-the-top gameplay.
Unfortunately, the beta gives you only a very brief look at the single player offering in Dissidia NT. There’s four cutscenes you can watch from the story and one gauntlet mode in single player, leaving very little context of how these modes will actually work. As we get closer to the release of the game, look for us to comment on these aspects.
The Servers Need Work
One thing that was made abundantly clear by this beta is that the servers for NT definitely need work. Considering it’s such a quick game with so much going on, lag can really make things difficult, and boy did I hit some rough patches. Maybe 40 percent of my games had some degree of lag. I had a good few that were almost slideshows because it slowed down so much, rendering things almost unplayable. It was enough of a problem that it put a damper on my fun, not to mention the minutes I spent waiting for matches in the lobby at times. This was all after testing my connection with other games as well, to make sure things weren’t going bad on my end.
Of course, it’s important to say that this is a bet and that’s exactly what it’s for, working out technical like this. Still, the connection issues I had made me hope that Square Enix can really fix these problems for the full release, and continue to improve things after. We’ll have to wait for the full release to see if these problems only apply to the beta, or if they’re persistent in the main game as well.
Published: Jan 17, 2018 11:00 am