After doing a "Quick Review" of my experience with Arms Global Testpunch, I decided to share another one with you all, this time an Playstation 4 exclusive game, Dissidia Final Fantasy NT. If you wonder why I am doing "Reviews" of things that isn't a full product, this is why is not in the review section. Is just my way of generating discussion about something that may interest people. Is not often I get to participate in such things, beta are exclusive to select few people and it excites me to know what you think. 
Started as a spinoff game to the well received Kingdom Hearts, lead producer of said game Tetsuya Nomura, set out to make a game that appeals to western audiences. What started as a spinoff title to a popular game series, ended with what appears to be a celebration of another popular series, Final Fantasy. Dissidia Final Fantasy was released for the Playstation Portable in 2009 (2008 if you are from Japan) The game main focus is the use of the main protagonist and antagonist characters across the first 10 games in the series making more of a all-star game like Super Smash bros. The Goddess of harmony and God of Discord, Cosmos and Chaos was locked in a battle in a world of their own. Both of them begin to summon their champions from other worlds, Cosmos summons the Heroes while Chaos summons the Villains, drawn into the new world, they must do battle for each of the summon leader to put a end to it once and for all.
The player may pick from any of the 20 characters, one hero and one villain from each of the first 10 games. The gameplay is done in a small arena that allows player to run on walls, grind on rails,,and perform grounded or aerial dashes similar to Kingdom Hearts games. The game follows common traditional JRPG style gameplay with having various items to purchase, equip and level up, though the game has said features, it focus more on the competitive aspect of 1p VS CPU or 1P VS 2P active combat system. The game also features a traditional menu based combat system for people who want to have a less active playstyle similar to Final Fantasy instead of Kingdom Hearts. You can play a story mode that completes the story of all the characters, there is a arcade mode which is basically just fighting random CPU characters until you defeat them all, survival mode that goes on until you lose. Either was if you are a Final Fantasy fan and/or Kingdom Hearts fan, this game should appeal to you.
Dissidia Final Fantasy NT is a home console port of a arcade game. Development assisted with Team Ninja of famed games such as Ninja Gaiden or Dead or Alive Series, the game improves on the original game made almost a decade ago, makes is way to the PS4 system exclusively. Now having more than 20+ characters to choose from the main series up to 14, the game shifts from the single player fomula to a team based formula of 3 VS 3. Having such a thing, the game is now considered a tactical strategy game (as Final Fantasy games have been), while keeping the same fast action paced gameplay the original game was. This explores a new way of converting a game that was mostly a competitive one-on-one action base game to a team strategic operations game, not only allowing more players to join in on playing but encourages you to play with others.
Upon starting up the closed beta application, the main menu is nice and clean with just a matchmaking for online mode, a practice mode for preparation and a tutorial mode, which is basically a instructional video. (Is exactly as I describe, a instructional video made specifically to teach you how to play. There is not much to say here as you can see from the picture, unless you want me to talk about how good the game looks.
The closed beta has only 14 characters to choose from, they are the main heroes from each game up to Final Fantasy 14, (There is more characters not listed here cause they was not playable, but it includes more characters from the main series as well as spinoff such as "TYPE-0 HD" and "Tactics, war of the lions" The biggest change of this game is the character classification. There is 4 types of classes in the game. Vanguard, Assassin, Marksman, and Specialist. The name of each character and their class will be listed below.
After you pick a player, which while I'm at it will say the presentation is on par with Dead or Alive 5 in both amazing looks and how is presented, you get to choose from a EX skill set you can customize when the full game is available. They are various skills you can use during battle like healing your allies or poisoning a enemy. You are sent to the briefing screen where the matchmaking process begins. After a long wait of what seems like forever, (Somewhere under 5 minutes) you get matched up with random players. You can communicate with the teammates using a simplistic chat system integrated into the game by holing a direction on the directional pad and pressing one of the 4 face buttons to use any of the character's specialized voice recordings. This allows players without voice communication to still enable team functions. Simple things such as "HELLO" "SORRY" "I'll take on X" "Summon the guardian" Are all done this way. Alternatively you can just use voice chat with the team you playing with. From the briefing screen, to the pre-battle loading screen, to the actual battle, to the battle end results, you have on each situation a total of 16 voice commands to use. Before your team goes into battle, you can vote on a summon guardian to use, the choice is random among the 3 selected players. So far there is only 7 selectable.
Stages for battle was chosen at random, they are based on past Final Fantasy games, each with their own terrain with scaling walls and other such things. Like the previous games, the arena is small and makes for abstractions to battle with, allowing you to run on the walls, or hide behind them for protection. So far, there is no rails or grinding but the air dash still persistent. Using dash to get close or away from enemies is important in movement as well as blocking and dodging attacks. The dash has been tweaked. Instead of performing a repeated number of air dashes, you can perform one long dash that is timed for as long as you do so without touching the ground for a recovery period, I assume is placed to prevent the runaway playstyle that some people do.
The game uses a unorthodox combat system, players have a life bar that is measured by the traditional Final Fantasy HP system. But in this case you have 2 attacks, one is a HP attack that targets the HP meter, and the other is Bravery attacks that targets the bravery. The main battle system works like this. Your bravery is your value of attack power when you perform a HP attack. In other words, you and the rest of the players have a HP and Bravery, use bravery attacks to take the opponent's bravery points, then use the HP attack to deal HP damage. The goal of the game is to reduce the other team's player's HP to zero. Once is done, they loses a "Extra life." Each team has 3 chances. If one person loses, then it decreases, once a player on each team loses 3 times, the team loses. If time is over before then, the team with more chances left and combined total of HP is the winner.
This game gets pretty chaotic with 6 players, you have to target a specific player you want to fight, change targets accordingly so that you can fight effectively against them. Your attacks will focus on the target only, just realize multiple players can target you at the same time as well, so this creates some very bold 2-1 or 3-1 matchups that is very overwhelming. You can always use the quick chat commands to get team assistance and strategy. You can destroy summon crystals that appear on the field after a period of time during battle to earn summon points, once you achieve enough, any of the team members can perform a summon which takes time and leaves them unguarded. This game focus on each player facilitating their role on the team to optimize it for winning victories. The summons can do various things from damaging random places on the field with elemental attacks, draining bravery, as well as supporting your team with other status effects. At the end of the day, your job is to pick one of the 3 enemies and fight them based on your advantage over them with the class matchup pairings.
The main problem with the game is the matchmaking. This game chooses to focus on a team based arena fighting game with different character classifications as stated before. But during my time with the game, I been paired with duplicate characters. Some people choose the same character I did, and some choose different ones but still same class variation. I had assumed the game would pair you with people using a different class than your selected one. Since this is a beta, the main focus of it was to collect player testing data to make improvements for the final complete build of the game, as well as stress testing the network servers for online multiplayer. With that said, I assume in the final release, there will be a better matchmaking option or least a party group team based custom game lobby (I can go on adding more descriptive words but I think i made the point clear) Anyway if you did play like me, you would find it cramped with people picking the same characters you did either on teams or fighting against them as well as same class. While each player makes the character, is still would seem more efficient to have more balanced teams of varying class types instead of a team of the same character 3 times over, or team of 3 vanguards while other team has assassin, marksman, and specialist. Either way is just a impression of a beta test, in the final game, I'm sure it would stick to this idea cause some people prefer such teams. My point is in a beta which gives you very short time span and limited access to things, you would wanna see as much as you can within that time, variety is encouraged, it would have allowed variety without discouraging players to forcefully switch characters to experience them.
As previously stated, there lot of stuff going on during the combat, is probably not easy to keep up. There is no team leader, your number doesn't represent a ranking system of any kind, it simply for reference purposes. For example, there is a voice chat command for "I'll take on 6" Meaning you can use that to notify the other team members which enemy you choose to focus on. This is good allowing them to know your target for which you feel competent enough with the matchup advantage in your favor. If playing assassin who excel at close range combat is good against marksman who excel at long distance combat, then you can make it known to your team. This also helps prevent the 2-1 or 3-1 overpowering gameplay.
At first glance, the HUD system looks like a lot of clutter itself. There a lot going on the border of your screen. Your bottom left is your Team stats, the hp and Bravery points, bottom right is the other team stats, the bottom is your stats. The top left is both the team lives counter (extra chances) and their summon gauge, as well as the timer. Once stated, destroying summon crystals which appears on the field will grant you summon points needed to perform the summon. You can also obtain summon points for damaging the enemies. A break occurs when you use enough bravery attacks to damage the enemy's Bravery points to zero. During the break, you receive a bonus of your summon gauge as well as forcing the summon crystal to appear on the field. When a break occurs, the character receiving the break is at disadvantage. Their bravery slowly recovers to their starting point (the amount you start the battle with) You can still lose more bravery or gain it back through attacks but your HP attack will always do zero until you recover from break. You can instantly recover from it if you land a HP attack as well as if you have not suffered the break attack your Bravery becomes zero when you deal a HP attack damaging your enemy.
There is various strategies that can be used mostly adapted from the previous games in the series. Bravery attack until break, then HP attack with break bonus, use long ranged attacks against close range playstyle, make use of your dodge and counter, just to name a few. But with the new battle system it may be either improved or useless. That is the dynamic of this game, adding a 3-3 instead of 1-1 battles, requiring more coordination for each player support overall.
By the end of the test, some people may either be turned on even more to playing the game or turned off. This is a opinion I formed based on people who played the previous games on psp. If you haven't played the game yet, you may consider wanting to by the amount of features that it offers. While I like the idea for so much variety in the game including the all star cast of beloved characters and playability of a fighting game, one who played a lot of the original game (I mean a lot, I own the Dissidia final fantasy psp bundle i Bought in 2009 that game with a PSP art on the system, 1 GB Memory stick, and both the game disc with the Final Fantasy 7 Advent Children movie.) I find the game exciting to play at first but frustrating at the lack of matchmaking features I explained earlier. While I did win some victories, I found myself losing a lot because of the combinations of team members vs opponents I was matched with. I appreciate the amount of innovation with the chat system for quick communications, but the problem is "The teammates actually trying to follow the plan" while you can choose to focus on a better advantage class matchup for your character, you can still get overwhelmed by the entire enemy team and the 2 supporting players on your team being useless. Assuming the full game will allow private team matchmaking with friends and voice chat before facing off against others would be much needed improvement, to cooperate with people willing to adapt to various situations, having a lead strategist of some kind. This is where most online team based multiplayer games rely, on a functioning team.
In the end, I had some fun. The game is functional, It runs at 60FPS, even on the non pro ps4 4k systems. (but just like Kingdom Hearts games on ps4, the GAME runs at 60FPS while everything else is 30FPS) If unless you are in the gameplay, you are not seeing 60FPS. The cut scene to summon monsters, the start of the fight, the ending, the tutorial video, most of anything cinematic is 30FPS. Besides that, the game looks great, the presentation reminds me of Dead or Alive 5 or any game released after that (which is about 5 years ago) and even sounds great. I mean just look at the screen shots. Is amazingly detailed, but what you expect from Square enix or even Team Ninja, presentation and graphics are their strong points. These screenshots was captured using the ps4 system in 1920 X 1080, I don't have a ps4 pro system so I don't know of a 4K option yet, and it has yet to be discussed from the developers.
I hope people will look forward to playing this in January, I hope the beta gets the devs the necessary improvements they needed, hope new players to the game will want to try it, thinking it will offer a lot to anyone, but if it doesn't, then I suppose is okay. A team strategic arena fighting game isn't for everyone, sure isn't for me but still I'm willing to try cause it seem to be carefully taking the balance into consideration. With Team Ninja assisting, I have hope. If you have interest in playing this game, I suggest you find a way to get hold of the PSP games first. Both psp games Dissidia Final Fantasy and the second game Dissidia (012) Duodecim Final Fantasy, which is essentially a remake of the first game as well as a prequel of the dev team wishing to improve on the original. You can try the game on your psp or playstation vita system either by buying the UMD disc (PSP only) or download from Playstation store on a ps3 system then transferring them to the system (taking use of the psvita backwards compatibility feature)
Dissidia.... Final Fantasy!?
Started as a spinoff game to the well received Kingdom Hearts, lead producer of said game Tetsuya Nomura, set out to make a game that appeals to western audiences. What started as a spinoff title to a popular game series, ended with what appears to be a celebration of another popular series, Final Fantasy. Dissidia Final Fantasy was released for the Playstation Portable in 2009 (2008 if you are from Japan) The game main focus is the use of the main protagonist and antagonist characters across the first 10 games in the series making more of a all-star game like Super Smash bros. The Goddess of harmony and God of Discord, Cosmos and Chaos was locked in a battle in a world of their own. Both of them begin to summon their champions from other worlds, Cosmos summons the Heroes while Chaos summons the Villains, drawn into the new world, they must do battle for each of the summon leader to put a end to it once and for all.
The player may pick from any of the 20 characters, one hero and one villain from each of the first 10 games. The gameplay is done in a small arena that allows player to run on walls, grind on rails,,and perform grounded or aerial dashes similar to Kingdom Hearts games. The game follows common traditional JRPG style gameplay with having various items to purchase, equip and level up, though the game has said features, it focus more on the competitive aspect of 1p VS CPU or 1P VS 2P active combat system. The game also features a traditional menu based combat system for people who want to have a less active playstyle similar to Final Fantasy instead of Kingdom Hearts. You can play a story mode that completes the story of all the characters, there is a arcade mode which is basically just fighting random CPU characters until you defeat them all, survival mode that goes on until you lose. Either was if you are a Final Fantasy fan and/or Kingdom Hearts fan, this game should appeal to you.
Alright, so what is Dissidia Final Fantasy NT!?
Dissidia Final Fantasy NT is a home console port of a arcade game. Development assisted with Team Ninja of famed games such as Ninja Gaiden or Dead or Alive Series, the game improves on the original game made almost a decade ago, makes is way to the PS4 system exclusively. Now having more than 20+ characters to choose from the main series up to 14, the game shifts from the single player fomula to a team based formula of 3 VS 3. Having such a thing, the game is now considered a tactical strategy game (as Final Fantasy games have been), while keeping the same fast action paced gameplay the original game was. This explores a new way of converting a game that was mostly a competitive one-on-one action base game to a team strategic operations game, not only allowing more players to join in on playing but encourages you to play with others.
Upon starting up the closed beta application, the main menu is nice and clean with just a matchmaking for online mode, a practice mode for preparation and a tutorial mode, which is basically a instructional video. (Is exactly as I describe, a instructional video made specifically to teach you how to play. There is not much to say here as you can see from the picture, unless you want me to talk about how good the game looks.
Cast of Characters
The closed beta has only 14 characters to choose from, they are the main heroes from each game up to Final Fantasy 14, (There is more characters not listed here cause they was not playable, but it includes more characters from the main series as well as spinoff such as "TYPE-0 HD" and "Tactics, war of the lions" The biggest change of this game is the character classification. There is 4 types of classes in the game. Vanguard, Assassin, Marksman, and Specialist. The name of each character and their class will be listed below.
- Vanguard = Warrior of Light, Firion, Cecil, Cloud (the main balanced character, focus on close to mid range combat by having a skill set of attacks that can damage players from close up or a short distance away.)
- Assassin = Squall, Zidane, Tidus, Lightning (a more rushdown heavy character who focus on dealing lots of damage from close range only combat and many attacks during each combo with very limited projectiles.)
- Marksman = Terra, Shantotto, Y'Shtola (the opposite of Assassin in which they use powerful magic from distance to shoot projectiles and attack from safe distance to pressure enemies and almost no close range combat skills.)
- Specialist = Onion Knight, Bartz, Vaan (mostly rely on setting up situations sorta like a gimmick, such as a role for supporting teammates, or having better movement than the rest or getting stronger over time of battle.)
After you pick a player, which while I'm at it will say the presentation is on par with Dead or Alive 5 in both amazing looks and how is presented, you get to choose from a EX skill set you can customize when the full game is available. They are various skills you can use during battle like healing your allies or poisoning a enemy. You are sent to the briefing screen where the matchmaking process begins. After a long wait of what seems like forever, (Somewhere under 5 minutes) you get matched up with random players. You can communicate with the teammates using a simplistic chat system integrated into the game by holing a direction on the directional pad and pressing one of the 4 face buttons to use any of the character's specialized voice recordings. This allows players without voice communication to still enable team functions. Simple things such as "HELLO" "SORRY" "I'll take on X" "Summon the guardian" Are all done this way. Alternatively you can just use voice chat with the team you playing with. From the briefing screen, to the pre-battle loading screen, to the actual battle, to the battle end results, you have on each situation a total of 16 voice commands to use. Before your team goes into battle, you can vote on a summon guardian to use, the choice is random among the 3 selected players. So far there is only 7 selectable.
- Ifrit = Fire element
- Shiva = Ice element
- Ramuh = Lighting Element
- Odin = None (maybe death?)
- Leviathan = Water
- Alexander = Holy
- Bahamut = Wind
Gameplay
The game uses a unorthodox combat system, players have a life bar that is measured by the traditional Final Fantasy HP system. But in this case you have 2 attacks, one is a HP attack that targets the HP meter, and the other is Bravery attacks that targets the bravery. The main battle system works like this. Your bravery is your value of attack power when you perform a HP attack. In other words, you and the rest of the players have a HP and Bravery, use bravery attacks to take the opponent's bravery points, then use the HP attack to deal HP damage. The goal of the game is to reduce the other team's player's HP to zero. Once is done, they loses a "Extra life." Each team has 3 chances. If one person loses, then it decreases, once a player on each team loses 3 times, the team loses. If time is over before then, the team with more chances left and combined total of HP is the winner.
This game gets pretty chaotic with 6 players, you have to target a specific player you want to fight, change targets accordingly so that you can fight effectively against them. Your attacks will focus on the target only, just realize multiple players can target you at the same time as well, so this creates some very bold 2-1 or 3-1 matchups that is very overwhelming. You can always use the quick chat commands to get team assistance and strategy. You can destroy summon crystals that appear on the field after a period of time during battle to earn summon points, once you achieve enough, any of the team members can perform a summon which takes time and leaves them unguarded. This game focus on each player facilitating their role on the team to optimize it for winning victories. The summons can do various things from damaging random places on the field with elemental attacks, draining bravery, as well as supporting your team with other status effects. At the end of the day, your job is to pick one of the 3 enemies and fight them based on your advantage over them with the class matchup pairings.
Cool, a "Allstar" Final Fantasy game! Are there any downsides!?
The main problem with the game is the matchmaking. This game chooses to focus on a team based arena fighting game with different character classifications as stated before. But during my time with the game, I been paired with duplicate characters. Some people choose the same character I did, and some choose different ones but still same class variation. I had assumed the game would pair you with people using a different class than your selected one. Since this is a beta, the main focus of it was to collect player testing data to make improvements for the final complete build of the game, as well as stress testing the network servers for online multiplayer. With that said, I assume in the final release, there will be a better matchmaking option or least a party group team based custom game lobby (I can go on adding more descriptive words but I think i made the point clear) Anyway if you did play like me, you would find it cramped with people picking the same characters you did either on teams or fighting against them as well as same class. While each player makes the character, is still would seem more efficient to have more balanced teams of varying class types instead of a team of the same character 3 times over, or team of 3 vanguards while other team has assassin, marksman, and specialist. Either way is just a impression of a beta test, in the final game, I'm sure it would stick to this idea cause some people prefer such teams. My point is in a beta which gives you very short time span and limited access to things, you would wanna see as much as you can within that time, variety is encouraged, it would have allowed variety without discouraging players to forcefully switch characters to experience them.
As previously stated, there lot of stuff going on during the combat, is probably not easy to keep up. There is no team leader, your number doesn't represent a ranking system of any kind, it simply for reference purposes. For example, there is a voice chat command for "I'll take on 6" Meaning you can use that to notify the other team members which enemy you choose to focus on. This is good allowing them to know your target for which you feel competent enough with the matchup advantage in your favor. If playing assassin who excel at close range combat is good against marksman who excel at long distance combat, then you can make it known to your team. This also helps prevent the 2-1 or 3-1 overpowering gameplay.
At first glance, the HUD system looks like a lot of clutter itself. There a lot going on the border of your screen. Your bottom left is your Team stats, the hp and Bravery points, bottom right is the other team stats, the bottom is your stats. The top left is both the team lives counter (extra chances) and their summon gauge, as well as the timer. Once stated, destroying summon crystals which appears on the field will grant you summon points needed to perform the summon. You can also obtain summon points for damaging the enemies. A break occurs when you use enough bravery attacks to damage the enemy's Bravery points to zero. During the break, you receive a bonus of your summon gauge as well as forcing the summon crystal to appear on the field. When a break occurs, the character receiving the break is at disadvantage. Their bravery slowly recovers to their starting point (the amount you start the battle with) You can still lose more bravery or gain it back through attacks but your HP attack will always do zero until you recover from break. You can instantly recover from it if you land a HP attack as well as if you have not suffered the break attack your Bravery becomes zero when you deal a HP attack damaging your enemy.
There is various strategies that can be used mostly adapted from the previous games in the series. Bravery attack until break, then HP attack with break bonus, use long ranged attacks against close range playstyle, make use of your dodge and counter, just to name a few. But with the new battle system it may be either improved or useless. That is the dynamic of this game, adding a 3-3 instead of 1-1 battles, requiring more coordination for each player support overall.
Closing
By the end of the test, some people may either be turned on even more to playing the game or turned off. This is a opinion I formed based on people who played the previous games on psp. If you haven't played the game yet, you may consider wanting to by the amount of features that it offers. While I like the idea for so much variety in the game including the all star cast of beloved characters and playability of a fighting game, one who played a lot of the original game (I mean a lot, I own the Dissidia final fantasy psp bundle i Bought in 2009 that game with a PSP art on the system, 1 GB Memory stick, and both the game disc with the Final Fantasy 7 Advent Children movie.) I find the game exciting to play at first but frustrating at the lack of matchmaking features I explained earlier. While I did win some victories, I found myself losing a lot because of the combinations of team members vs opponents I was matched with. I appreciate the amount of innovation with the chat system for quick communications, but the problem is "The teammates actually trying to follow the plan" while you can choose to focus on a better advantage class matchup for your character, you can still get overwhelmed by the entire enemy team and the 2 supporting players on your team being useless. Assuming the full game will allow private team matchmaking with friends and voice chat before facing off against others would be much needed improvement, to cooperate with people willing to adapt to various situations, having a lead strategist of some kind. This is where most online team based multiplayer games rely, on a functioning team.
In the end, I had some fun. The game is functional, It runs at 60FPS, even on the non pro ps4 4k systems. (but just like Kingdom Hearts games on ps4, the GAME runs at 60FPS while everything else is 30FPS) If unless you are in the gameplay, you are not seeing 60FPS. The cut scene to summon monsters, the start of the fight, the ending, the tutorial video, most of anything cinematic is 30FPS. Besides that, the game looks great, the presentation reminds me of Dead or Alive 5 or any game released after that (which is about 5 years ago) and even sounds great. I mean just look at the screen shots. Is amazingly detailed, but what you expect from Square enix or even Team Ninja, presentation and graphics are their strong points. These screenshots was captured using the ps4 system in 1920 X 1080, I don't have a ps4 pro system so I don't know of a 4K option yet, and it has yet to be discussed from the developers.
I hope people will look forward to playing this in January, I hope the beta gets the devs the necessary improvements they needed, hope new players to the game will want to try it, thinking it will offer a lot to anyone, but if it doesn't, then I suppose is okay. A team strategic arena fighting game isn't for everyone, sure isn't for me but still I'm willing to try cause it seem to be carefully taking the balance into consideration. With Team Ninja assisting, I have hope. If you have interest in playing this game, I suggest you find a way to get hold of the PSP games first. Both psp games Dissidia Final Fantasy and the second game Dissidia (012) Duodecim Final Fantasy, which is essentially a remake of the first game as well as a prequel of the dev team wishing to improve on the original. You can try the game on your psp or playstation vita system either by buying the UMD disc (PSP only) or download from Playstation store on a ps3 system then transferring them to the system (taking use of the psvita backwards compatibility feature)
