Over two years since its initial release in arcades all over Japan, Dissdia Final Fantasy NT (New Tale) has finally arrived on the PS4, but, its pretty disappointing.
Dissidia lets you play some of your favourite characters from the Final Fantasy franchise ranging from FFI all the way to the latest FFXV, that should have set grounds for a pretty awesome game, but sadly it just feels like a direct port to console with some lazy additions to make it feel ‘like’ a console game.
Starting from the tutorial, the game doesn’t give you the complete information on any of the characters but kind of tasks to go online and check their move sets. With such a complex fighting system, I immediately got trashed by the AI cause I didn’t actually know any of my characters moves as I thought the tutorial would’ve gone through that.
Gameplay is definitely where the game shines, with its unique 3v3 play style, you’ll be either beating the other team to death or trying to beat up the opponents crystal (base) for victory in their 2 game modes. The depth of the fighting as well as the way the fight with/against each other is definitely a refreshing experience to the fighting game genre.
The graphics of course are nothing short of brilliant and each map is a beautifully detailed homage to different areas from the games.
The ‘story mode’ is not really story mode–its more of the developers just put in cut-scenes you have to unlock by playing other modes of the game either offline or online, the story itself was interesting, and the cut-scenes were beautiful but they should have followed the way Mortal Kombat or Marvel Vs Capcom Infinite did their story mode.
The Online Multiplayer is more or less going online and playing against other people to increase your rank and get treasure chests (which you can do offline too), in order to get new skins or avatars which of course don’t actually alter your characters stats. The interesting thing about multiplayer is that you’d be actually pairing with two other people to fight, meaning you guys would actually have to exercise teamwork and watch each other’s backs in order to claim victory. I tonally love this aspect of the game as well.
Lastly my biggest gripe of the game, they didn’t include offline multiplayer. This to me is an insult to any fighting game, I don’t really care if its a split screen 1v1 where the other 4 character are AI, but honestly a fighting game just isn’t the same if I’m unable to call over a few friends and just battle it out at home.
Overall, Dissidia Final Fantasy NT was a disappointment given its hefty price tag of $84.90 for the standard edition. I’m really hoping developers add new modes so that the game feels more like a console game rather than a cheap arcade port over.