Article Upcoming Title: Dissidia Final Fantasy NT

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A soon to be released title for the PlayStation 4 this fighting game let you play as protagonists and antagonists of the Final Fantasy series. In this you can fight 3v3, yes team based, after a little bit of research it seems that 1v1 and 2v2 options will also be available. This title is rather interesting though it seems to have gotten an arcade release in 2015 in Japan only. The PlayStation version is scheduled to be released January 30 2018, yup very soon. I played the beta the one day I had the time and it is an enjoyable game even if I have a complaint or two from what I’ve been able spot just by doing some quick matches.

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Gameplay, graphics and music

The battle flow is smooth if not a little chaotic at times with 6 characters running around on the stage trying to kill each other so is something some of you might have to get use to when playing full 3v3. There’s four classes in this game specialist, marksman, vanguard and assassin all characters have one assigned to them and all but the specialist follow a rock-paper-scissor system with marksmen being strong against vanguards, vanguards being strong against assassin and assassin being strong against marksman.

Specialists seem to be something on their own as they don’t follow the weakness triangle and have varied abilities.

Marksmen are long range fighters which usually make use of magic attacks seen throughout the games in some manner.

Vanguards are heavy hitters and the tanks of a team focusing on dealing the most damage.

Assassins are the fast ones; they have high attack speed and high mobility.

The battles are fast paced and usually not too long as there’s a time limit, at least in the mode I got offered in the demo. Is all about building up your bravery as much as possible via the bravery attack to then unleash HP attacks mixed in with EX abilities that can aid you in battle such a HP regeneration of your team, share your bravery or fling things like poison at the enemy team. Running up vertical surfaces and air maneuvers is a thing in this game too some characters can stay in the air for quite a long time as an effective way to either evade persistent pursuers or come down on them with a surprise from above.


HP Attack: Is the attacks you need to do in order to actually deal damage but it works in tandem with another thing in the game, bravery. Without it you cannot do much in terms of damage as you do damage equal to the bravery you have.

Bravery Attack: An attack used to build up your own bravery while taking it away from the opponents, the more you have the better as you build up more of it the number might change color indicating that you can K.O your current target with a HP attack.

This game comes with a level system, as you battle you earn experience and when you have enough you level up and the characters will learn new abilities as you go along. You can freely swap around these abilities as you see fit before a battle to spice things up a little. Some of these abilities might have additional effects to help you get the upper hand on the battlefield.

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The graphics are absolutely gorgeous; they really put some effort into all the stages and it really shows they’re beautiful and all offers different kind of terrain. The character models are just as good and it makes it even more pleasing to play when everything looks and feels like it fits….Aside from that one moogle that looks like a cartoon character in the start that one is really out of place but that’s the only issue I have there.

The music is what’d you’d expect it to be for a game that has Final Fantasy in its name and there’s music from the previous games, just the menu selection music is something I could listen to for a few hours and yes I admit I did just that I regret nothing.

I do have one major gripe, this game have a targeting system one that can be quite annoying to deal with at times, while you can lock on to an opponent and even switch between them for some reason is very hard to log on to crystal cores, something that plays a fairly important role in battles at times. I’ve had significant trouble targeting the crystals that would spawn across a stage.

Summons

You can summon powerful beings to aid you in battle and make things quite difficult for your opponents, this requires you to charge your summon gauge first before you can call forth your mighty ally. You charge it naturally by battling and by breaking crystals that’ll spawn on the stage from time to time. Once you have enough you can summon them and allies can help speed up the process. These beings help you passively both before and after they’re summoned by giving small boost such as increased HP before summon and increased HP and defense after summon, the effects appear to last for the remaining time of the battle. The summons are all some you know like Ifrit, Shiva and bahamut you only start with one when starting up and is random which one you get. As you level up you can unlock more, I managed to unlock a second one doing my time playing the beta.

Characters

There are characters from all the previous Final Fantasy games 1 through 15 as well as characters from Tactics and Type-0 in them giving you quite a nice selection with 28 and the developers have as started earlier intended to expand the roster further with a target goal at 50 characters in total, who else knows what they might add.

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Story, battle modes and more

The beta only gave limited options but is enough to give you a taste of the real thing without giving away too much. You unlock more of the story as you battle and earn something called memorias and unlock another cutscene that in some places branch off which is probably to offer inside into the same story but from different perspectives, the beta only allows you to unlock 4 but it does branch off once before it ends still giving you a little taste.

As for actual battling there’s online and offline battle modes, online is you battling against people from all over the world, I did not try it as online battling generally isn’t me in these games. For offline modes there was Gauntlet Battle which let you take on a series of battles of varies difficulty, you do get a bit an influence on how hard as you’re offers a set of fights with their rank clearly visible as bronze, silver, gold and platinum so you don’t just get forced into a really hard fight. You earn experience, gil and treasure pulls, I’ll get to this in a minute, depending on how well you do in these battles.

There’s also a rather good tutorial that lets you go over the basics as well as do mock battles so you can get use the controls and pace of the battles which was honestly a joy to see so you can get use to the controls in a battle rather than just slapping a character that just stands there and take the hits.

The beta mode also displayed another offline mode, sparring which was sadly not available so that gonna be a surprise for you if you decide to get the game.

Treasure pull is something you can use to pull treasures which are various items like weapons for the characters that can be used to customize them, each pull yield 3 random items of various rarities. The gil mentioned earlier you earn via battling can be spend in a in-game shop for what exactly I do not know as it was locked in the beta leaving yet another surprise for you to find out about on your own.

Join the battle January 30
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Well the only character I had consistent trouble with was Kefka, the AI easily had him land 3rd in points if that counts for anything. The rest of characters all seemed pretty even on that field.

I sadly never got to play 012 despite buying it due to time and then simply just forgetting about it, I played the first one and I still remember all the fun I had.