Crossover projects that mix characters from different games/media into one „mishmash“ are certainly very appealing to video game publishers. If we exclude Kingdom Hearts, crossovers are mostly part of the martial arts games field (Marvel vs Capcom, Smash Bros.). Given that in such games players have the opportunity to inflict physical damage on the characters that are hated; it is clear where their attractiveness comes from. This time Dissidia decided to once again include many characters from the Final Fantasy series in its Dissidia Final Fantasy NT.
The new Dissidia has shifted the focus of the fight between two characters to a much more complex performance of three against three. With this approach, the whole RPG progression system, which marked the first two parts, was thrown into the second plan, while the glamor became the main topic of the NT sequel. I suppose this was done in order to attract more players to arcade machines, since countless effects and loud music are the main selling material, but I think it has lost a lot of its charm in comparison to its predecessors.
Fortunately, there is also a fun way to fight with Bravery and HP attacks. Each fighter at the start gets a certain amount of “bravery” and when performing the Bravery strikes, the attacker’s Bravery bar is filling up and the bar level of the attacked character decreases. Once we are filled up on bravery, we can also run an HP attack that takes the same amount of health from our opponent that we have in our Bravery bar. However, you need to be extremely cautious here, since after running the HP attack your Bravery bar temporarily stays at zero and you are quite open to attack from the opponent. In addition, there are various EX attacks that we open by leveling the characters, summoning that will exert a massive attack on the entire field, and increase our co-fighters statistics and countless other mechanics, such as dodging, controlling the space with quick dashes and connecting the combos.
Unfortunately, here come the first problems because the tutorial system is rather poorly done and will not prepare you to truly enter the full depth of the fight. Additionally, all the complexity and the ability to fight fail when the camera is rather poorly controlled. The locking system on one fighter is corrupted, since in all that chaos I wondered most of the time which person I was actually attacking. It is an especially strange feeling when you lock a view on an opponent, he jumps, and the camera looks into the sky while your other opponent is being cut like a döner meat.
There are 28 characters from all the major parts of the Final Fantasy franchise and they can be divided into four groups: the Vanguard physical fighters, the fast-paced Assassins, the Marksmen attacking with distance missiles, and the Specialists who can change shapes. The fighters look pretty good and for some older characters original concepts were used to embody the 3D model, which will be a big plus for the fans of the series.
The rest of the technical part is not to be praised, nor criticized. It is obvious that the maps were made at a fairly low resolution, probably because of the performance maintenance due to the chaotic amount of motion and the effects on the screen. Luckily, music and voice acting are in place and quite impressive, especially if you take the Japanese voices into consideration.
And the content did not offer anything unprecedented – there are standard arcade fighting, network multiplayer, tutorials, various plugins that are open to virtual currency and “Story” mode. The story mode is under quotation marks as it is actually a set of animations and a couple of battles that we open up by collecting Memoria tokens in other battles. This is just anticlimactic, since you open an animation, look at it, go back to the standard combat, and fight for half an hour to earn a new token, look at the new animation and then start from the beginning.
What’s worse, the content of the story is not interesting enough to make you go through that suffering. The story revolves around the standard fight between good and evil, the gods Materia and Spiritus, and besides few funny scenes of interaction between characters, the action will not bring you anything even if you are a fan of Final Fantasy.
It’s only possible to test your skills in network battles, because there is no local multiplayer, so we are condemned to exchange blows against players where a slightly bad network code will bother you just as much as the camera. In addition to that, lobbies are pretty empty, so good luck with finding experienced fighters instead of rather light AI fighting.
The NT in the name of the game is an acronym for New Tale, but this is certainly not the story I will talk about for a long time. The excellent elements of the fight did not stand out because of the rather poorly crafted camera system and the locking of the opponent, and the new players won’t have much use of the mediocre tutorial. All of this, especially with the absence of important mods such as the local multiplayer, and the mediocrity of those mods that are there, makes Dissidia Final Fantasy NT one of the few Final Fantasy parts I will barely remember.
