All I wanna do is play Dissidia Final Fantasy NT (F2P Edition coming to US March 12 + Steam)

King of Posters
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Has anyone else here been playing this? I’ve racked in around 60 hours now and I don’t see myself stopping any time soon. I think I’ve only delved into around 5 or 6 characters so far so I’ve still got, like, 23 more characters to explore.

Every character of course has unique movesets but there are two kinds of attacks in Dissidia. First you have a large number of Bravery Attacks which are relatively quick and varied in their utility, and hitting with these raises your damage potential and lowers your target’s. Then you equip one of several HP attacks that deal actual HP damage equal to however much damage potential you had raised, but these attacks are typically so slow that they can be dodged or counter-attacked before activating. So there’s a risk/reward system of trying to increase your damage potential but risking losing it before you can use it.

HP attacks are purposely difficult to hit with because being a 3v3 game, Dissidia NT is designed to encourage teamwork. The two steps to success in a match are:

  1. While an enemy is focused on your teammate you hit them from behind with a bravery attack
  2. When you see your ally hitting an enemy with a bravery attack, you join in with a Bravery/HP attack of your own for a guaranteed hit

That two person combo is the core of the game. Even with randoms online it’s easy to intuit that you want to stick together and keep an eye out for when someone scores a bravery hit so you can be close enough to combo into an HP attack. In the chaos of an actual match that can be more difficult in practice, but it’s an easy gameplan to understand.

I think the 3v3 format also works surprisingly well as opposed to a lower number. 2v2 is oddly easy to manage because you can see one person at all times and then you can mentally track the second person with peripheral vision. But adding a third person adds just enough extra information that it’s not as easy to keep track of and isn’t as manageable by yourself, so you rely on teammates to have your back.

I really like how well designed the cast is and how intuitive their role in battle become once you understand the game’s fundamentals. I like how important managing vertical movement and vertical space control is, and how it’s a part of character moveset designs. There’s also this EX Skill system where you can equip additional abilities that add some extra ways to fine tune your individual playstyle and team roles.

The Summon system is also intelligently done, where they provide team wide buffs when summoned but to summon them you have to destroy these Summon Cores that periodically appear on the field, forcing both teams into close quarters and moving the conflict to the different part of the environment.

The strategy surrounding the targeting system is neat, in that you have the FF12 style targeting lines that show you when and from where you’re being targeted and they turn red when you’re being actively attacked. But you can play with this expectation by attacking and then switching targets to remove your targeting line, or moving up on someone using only the radar and then switching targets right before you attack to catch someone by surprise.

Overall I’ve been finding it to just be a really cool game. I did not expect to like it as much as I do. If anyone else got it let’s team up sometime!

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I’ve put 108 hours into the game so far.

Good Things

  • The action feels good. Team Ninja has been developing action games for years and they made sure that carried over into Dissidia NT. A lot of melee combat in online games tend to feel off, with hit boxes feeling larger than natural and the hit response coming at odd times of the animation, give it a loose janky feel. But Dissidia feels like regular action game, just like Ninja Gaiden or Bayonetta. All of the attacks have a good sense of impact and rhythm, with flashy effects and strong sounds to really sell the hits. It just feels good to hit people in a way most melee combat in online games tend not to.

  • Movement is interesting. A lot of the game takes place in the air since you can jump many times and also air dash into the air at any target. You can also climb walls or recover mid air if you get blown back. Different characters excel at hitting at different heights so playing with your vertical height in the 3D field is really important. You’re constantly jockeying for a height advantage but different character excel at different heights, and you have a dash meter that limits how long you can stay airborne so flight management is an important part of general movement and gives the combat an extra dimension to play in rather than just being a grounded affair.

  • Great variety in cast. The cast are designed to fit within four overall character classes (heavy, speed, shoot, and unique) but everyone has their own gimmicks that differentiate their playstyles even within those archtypes. Some characters favor defensive abilities, some are better playing offense, some have support buffs or debuffs, some are built around harassment. And with the addition of customizable EX Skills you can further fine tune any particular character’s playstyle even further. Every characters’ attacks and movelists feel different and offer their own rhythms so everyone is fun to play. There are 28 characters with more coming as DLC so there’s is a lot to chew through.

  • Compelling team play. The team aspect actually accentuates the combat mechanics rather than getting in the way. Scoring hits by comboing with allies feels extremely satisfying because it takes effort to maintain a tight knight formation and conscious situation awareness to play off of each other like that. It takes practice for it to become natural but it’s immensely satisfying to pull off. Since the characters all have their own gimmicks different team compositions can control space or support each other in different ways, and the customizable EX skills allow you to adjust team composition even further. You can choose skills to fill a certain role (offense, defense, etc.) or choose skills that complement each other’s abilities to setup combos.

  • The Summon system keeps match flow interesting. Your team chooses one of several summons that grants you a team buff but you can summon it mid match by breaking Summon Crystals that appear periodically. Activating a summon causes the summon to appear to cause massive damage but also activates additional team buffs, making it an important boon and the summon crystals an important target. The summon crystals work to force both teams into close confrontation, each trying to to destroy it themselves, and keeps players from playing passively the entire time. The random placement of the crystals also keeps the match moving to different parts of the map, making you play in the different environments a single map can offer.

  • Graphics r good. The game is very effect heavy, with every attacks causing huge hit sparks or explosions. All of the attacks have unique colors and effects, and with 6 characters fighting at once the field gets absolutely filled colorful explosions and fired and laser beams. It can be overwhelming at first but as you learn the characters’ movesets it becomes very readable and the effects make attacks easier to notice.

  • Every character has unique chat emotes to communicate mid-battle (everyone has their flavor of"I need help", “I’ll target enemy X”, “Focus on summon”) but there’s a lot of extra emotes just for chatting. You can tell people you’re Captain Basch, say Hi to people, command your allies to become your slave, or talk about turtles. Organically having dumb conversations with your dumb chat emotes is somehow really fun.

Bad Things

  • Lag. Apparently the game uses P2P connections between all 6 players and you’re more likely to run into laggy matches than in other games. Lag will cause the game to constantly pause, your inputs might not register, attacks may not register as you’d expect, or characters may rollback to different positions while you’re looking at them. Whether it’s the fault of the netcode being poor, 6 player matches increasing the odds of one person being on bad wifi, or a smaller player base increasing the likelihood of running into the same problem players, I don’t know. But it’s a consistent enough occurrence that you’ll a lot of people talk about it.
  • Not a lot of content outside of just playing online matches. If you want to playing online that’s fine. You can jump into ranked matches or lobbies and play to your hearts content, and I’ve had no trouble finding matches while playing solo. That’s all I’ve done for most of my game time. But there isn’t much else. There’s what is essentially an arcade mode but I don’t imagine that’s enough for more people. And the story mode amounts to just an hour of cutscenes you can slowly unlock by playing the other modes. It’s not something you should be buying the game for.
  • The game didn’t sell well so I don’t know how long the player base will be alive, but I haven’t had any issues with getting online matches so far.

So far it is my game of the year. A++. (The only only other new games I’ve played this year are DBZ and Sword Art Online). It’s all I’ve done in my freetime for the past month and I’m not sure when I’m going to stop. I haven’t played anything else like and it’s fun to learn the ins and outs of its unique systems. Playing with random people works out to be fun more often than it doesn’t because even in matches where your team is out of sync you have your own personal combat abilities you can rely on and feel growth in, but when you get a group that works together it feel sublime. There’s also at least one year of new characters and free maps so there will be reasons to keep coming back.

I high recommended it despite the caveats. You can find it on deep discount regularly as well.

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So who do you main and what are the top tiers you constantly see used? Is there a good balance?

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The game actually feels well balanced. Part of the reason for that could be that, generally speaking, characters within in a particular class will deal roughly the same damage with their attacks, not counting any special abilities. Character differentiation comes down to their utility and most characters have well rounded enough movelists and unique enough special abilities that they can fill a role on a team in their own way. That uniformity means that characters’ individual attack ranges and angles and their special abilities take more prominence. Everyone feels good at something but no one feels good at everything so every character feels like they have something to contribute to a team.

Class differentiation is stark because Heavy/Vanguard characters are the best at super-armoring through attacks and dealing damage, Speed/Assassins are the best as getting around projectiles or sneaking up on enemy blindspots, and Shoot/Marksmen are the best at area control. All of those capabilities are useful to a team so every class is important, butevery character provides their own flavor of their respective class no flavor feels more useful than any other. Your team composition will just change how offensive or defensive you want to be, what kind of formation you want to take to make most advantage of AOE attacks, or what angles you can attack from that compliment multiple team members and make it easier to combo off each other.

So overall the balance feels good. I think it’s easier to point out characters who do not seem popular, like Exdeath, possibly due to how complex his considerations are (he plays a support role with three forms) or Golbez, who loses a lot of his strength if he takes too much damage and takes a while to return to full strength. The matchmaking seems to take composition into account and will try to make teams well rounded so I have rarely been put into situations where I felt my team just did not work.

I think some of the more popular characters I’ve seen are Cloud and Sephiroth (maybe because of FF7’s popularity but also because Cloud has some annoying HP attacks and Sephiroth has long range), Vaan (because he is good at spamming HP attacks), Terra (powerful looking projectiles and has a strong defensive tool), and Tidus (very acrobatic and evasive aerial movement). But I’ve seen every character in matchmaking. I don’t feel like there’s a character no one plays or I don’t see regularly. So that’s nice.

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Oh, and as for my mains,

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The Emperor is a marksman who focuses on throwing out persistent threats rather than quick projectiles. He has slow moving fireballs that will follow enemies for 10 seconds and stationary traps that trigger when someone gets too close. I can keep throwing things out and and let my attacks for the harassment for me instead of worrying as much about about aiming or timing. No one needs those skills anyway. You will constantly score hits when your fireball slowly creeps up on enemies or who are in the middle of attack animations and your traps stun enemies for so long that you or your allies can combo into HP attacks. So he’s a great support Marksmen who can be even more annoying if everyone gets grouped up in close quarters and. You can just set a trap in the middle of everyone and watch what happens.

I also like Vaan due to his emphasis on HP attacks. The general rule of Dissidia is that you equip one of your character’s four HP attacks but Vaan is a Specialist who can equip two HP attacks from a total of eight at his disposal. His HP attacks also get stronger the more you hit with them so he’s unique in that he’s all about doing constant HP damage instead of trying to build your bravery first. He has few bravery attacks so that’s less to think about! Most characters threats come from bravery attacks so while you will loose BP when hit it’s not like you’ve lot HP and you can just build your BP back up. But Vaan will chip you to death and so he’s particularly annoying and being annoying is fun.

But more recently I’ve spent the most time with Garland. He’s a Vanguard who’s attacks just look really cool. His attacks get better the more he hits people and his animations are all just really cool and look powerful. His sword can transform into chains that can hit really high above and below him which makes his great and attack people at angles vanguards typically cannot, he has some long lasting projectiles that can score hits from far away. He also has a varied suite of HP attacks that let him adjust between super offensive, with a close range AOE or a vertical hammerfall, to somewhat less offensive, with two kinds of projectiles, depending on your team composition. But overall I just love how strong his attacks animations look. He’s supposed to be one of the heaviest characters and the game really sells it with his animations and effects.

I still haven’t really played around a dozen characters though so I’ve still got a lot of people to try out. I also still have no idea how to play Marksmen. Maybe they require more patience than I’m used to having in this game. I also don’t know how to get people off me with any of the marksman. I just don’t feel comfortable with them yet.

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You can get the game for $27 right now if anyone was interested in it but didn’t want to go in at full price.

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So how do you feel about this character pick? He’s the first third character from a specific game in this one, right?

A sucker for any FF6 representation but Edgar with chainsaw though. That intro is just the best.

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There was a supposed leak of the upcoming DLC characters and it’s two for six right now. Vayne wasn’t too hard to guess and Locke had some clues (and an outright psuedo-reveal a couple of weeks ago) but is a bit more eye brow raising since he doesn’t fit into the hero-villain pairs you’d assume the game would work on finishing (11, 13, 14, 15, Tactics, and Type 0 still don’t have villains). I personally would have loved to see the game keep working on filling in those pairs but I think Locke looks cool regardless. I really like his ostentatious shirt, head scarf, and scabbards. To be honest I never played very far in FF6 so I don’t know much about him.

In Dissidia he looked surprisingly straightforward compared to the first DLC character Vayne but after reading about him I think he’ll work just fine. The first things you can see are that his attacks are short and sweet, both in startup and in total time from start to finish. That’s good because the less time you’re stuck in an attack animation is less time you can get hit by your target’s teammates.

He has a high reaching vertical attack off the ground (0:44) which is going to be very useful because those angles are always difficulty to see attacks coming from. That’s the kind of thing you’ll seem more in Assassins than other classes, but he also slams the opponent back down vertically towards the ground, making tandem attacks by your partners easier than if Locke had blown them far away into the distance.

One of his HP attacks shown has his dive downward before coming back up for the attack. That evasiveness is always nice since you can turn someone’s offense around on them.

His gimmick, though, is that he does more damage against people who aren’t targeting him. Attacking people from behind is the name of the game in Dissidia NT, even moreso for assassins due to their quick speed, but even more moreso for Locke. That, his ability to dash cancel his dash attacks (no other character can do this), as well as his particularly high movement speed makes him seem like he epitomizes the Assassin class.

His base moveset is lacking two attacks compared to his peers (down+Bravery both on the ground and in the air) but that’s probably a consequence of his EX skill. His EX skill is Steal if you use it on someone targeting you. This gives you either either an HP or MP potion which can be spent to increase your HP or BP by 100, respectively. You can also cancel Steal into any attack so it acts as a combo starter.

However if you use his EX skill on someone who is not targeting you then it turns into Mug, granting you one of three pieces of equipment which can then be spent like the potions. Master’s Scroll does a multi-hit melee combo, Soul of Thamasa does a multi-hit long range spell combo, and Brigand’s Glove temporarily buffs Locke so that all of his attacks get the damage buff he typically gets from attacking enemies from behind and his EX skills gauges fill faster.

He’s basically a ganker. He looks like he’ll be a lot of fun if you lik fast characters. His attacks look very linear though so you aren’t going to be tagging people off axis or catching badly angled dodges as easily.

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Oh two other things.

On the update stream where Vayne was announced the game director accidentally let’s Vayne’s name slip early in the stream and everyone busts his butt for the next 10 minutes. It’s pretty funny.

But the big thing is that a couple of weeks ago they announced that the cast will be getting Character Refreshes. The game has been out in arcades for 2-3 years now but instead of stopping development on this entry and working on a sequel they decided they’re going to keep updating the current Dissidia, keep releasing new characters, but also slowly update the existing cast of characters to modernize them with the game’s current design sensibilities and meta (and improve their graphics and effects a bit). The first character getting the refresh treating is Warrior of Light, who’s getting a stronger emphasis on his Shield of Light parry. The buffs you get for parrying attacks are stronger, you can cancel it into anything, and you can expend it to make all of his HP attacks into upgraded versions with special properties.

So not only are we getting new characters but we’re also getting re-designs of the old characters. Good stuff!

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This is real good.

And character refreshes sound like a pretty interesting way to do updates in our modern Games as a Service days. Reminds me a bit of the first big updates to Team Fortress 2 where they made gameplay changes and gave alternate loadouts to one or two character classes at the time in periodic big chunky updates.

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Yeah, it’s an interesting decision. It lets you work on maintaining your current userbase but I have to imagine it restricts how bold of a change you can make to characters. Since characters are slowly getting updated you still have to make sure your overhauls aren’t too unbalanced compared to all of the still-old characters.

But I guess it works out for console owners because I doubt we’ll get these updates past the first year so at least we can get in on the character refreshes. It would be funny if we get half of the refreshes and not the other half though.

Also the game is $20 on Newegg. I think that’s a pretty good price for this game.

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This just occurred to me but the FF4 reps are Cecil, Golbez and Kain. I think Cecil and Golbez were there from the start and Kain was added later.

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Angelo from FF8 was announced, with Rinoa as an assist.

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Something about this art bothers me, like her face looks photoshopped even though it’s a CG picture. But in game I think she looks really good.


I haven’t watched the second video that breaks down her movelist but she looks very cool. She looks to be one of the faster marksman in the roster and the dog/puppet mechanic looks very cool. That could create a lot of weird and hard to see angles of attacks. Google translate makes it sound like her winged form grants her stronger attacks in exchange for having her HP constantly drain. Losing any amount of HP is a huge deal so I hope it’s worth it.

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This has got to be one of the weirder ways to try and remarket a game

Sure is one way to spin those review quotes!

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I kinda wanna pick this up except I imagine everyone still playing it online is psychotically good at this point. Rip

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I don’t think it will really be that much of an issue. It being 3v3 means you can just stick to a partner and assist them as you learn the game, going in for hits while an opponent is distracted. And the levels are large enough that you have a lot of room to run away and make some space if you’re trying to play safe. There will of course be times where you’re getting double teamed but that’s just the name of the game and ideally your partners will be trying to bail you out.

Re: the commercial, that sure is, uh, different. It never felt like SE knew how to advertise the game but that’s some instant meme status stuff right there. I imagine there’s just one or two people trying to make whatever ad they can?

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I’m almost certain they have no marketing budget left and this is some marketing folks at SE America doing this because they’re fans of the game and the internet is free distribution.

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Is this game cheap yet

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The regular edition is currently $20 on Amazon (the steelbook edition just comes with a different case and some stuff for the Final Fantasy TCG and Dissidia Opera Omnia mobile game). I’ve seen the Cheap Ass Gamer twitter tweet it going lower than that at brief times on either Amazon or NewEgg via a newegg coupon code (lowest I saw was around $10 a few weeks ago at one of those sites) but I think $15-20 is the typical sale price.

Some day I’ll fine some people to play this with, but I will be ready for that time. (Well, I guess I could get five more PS4s if I wanted to be really ready).

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I ordered it used from gamefly at 17.99 + s&h

here’s hoping it’s just used and not USED iykwim