Final Fantasy is one of the biggest series in gaming but unusually each numbered game is disconnected from the rest of the series. This sets the series up perfectly for crossover games, Nintendo got the Theatrhythm games for the 3DS while Sony got the Dissidia games for the PSP. They were fun titles with 2 characters fighting it out in 3D arena that they dash and clash around in an attempt to recreate the action of the Final Fantasy 7 Advent Children film. It actually kept a good chunk of RPG mechanics and surprisingly lengthy single player campaign. Following these there was a new entry in the series made for Japanese arcades that proved very popular so it inevitably got a home console version and that is Dissidia NT.
With its arcade origins a lot of the RPG elements have been stripped back, but since it is not a console game they’ve added in a brand new story mode to the experience. And to be fair to them it’s actually a fairly enjoyable experience, it’s not an amazing stand alone story but like you’d expect it is made up of more fun fan service (not the sexy kind) interactions and even some pretty cool unique boss battles. However everything they’ve done to handle and present this story mode is bizarre and baffling.
If you are after a single player experience chances are the first thing you will do is boot up the story mode, so you watch the first cutscene and then you are immediately stopped, see the story mode is laid out as a grid path made up of many nodes with each of these nodes requiring an item called memoria to unlock. To get this memoria you have to increase your player level which can be done by completing fights either offline or online, I’m assuming if you are after a single player experience you’ll be doing this offline (you’ll want to do it offline for reasons I’ll get to later).
The main offline mode is gauntlet mode where you go through a set of 6 fights with whatever 3 characters you want (one you control and 2 AI controlled). You’ll play through this to build up memoria and unlock story mode nodes and you’ll notice that when you unlock the top branch this path restricts you to battles that are just 2 v 2 (and doing these unlocks a gauntley variation that is also 2 v 2). Given the previous PSP games were 1 v 1 these fights would be a great way of easing players into the new games battle system, but you’ll have to do a bunch of the 3 v 3 fights to unlock this totally negating that benefit.
As you go through the story mode you’ll unlock some pretty cool boss fights where you face off against Final Fantasy summons, but when you first come to these they are brutal. Thankfully one thing they’ve changed for these fights is that if the AI characters are incapacitated this does not decrease your teams lives, only your own defeats do this. However for now the AI are pretty useless and just end up being bravery fodder for the boss. (Side note for people who haven’t played Dissidia you have bravery points and health points, bravery attacks decrease the enemies bp and increase you own, hp attacks use all your bravery points to decrease the enemies hp and as per tradition 0 hp means defeat). I say for now because each characters has an offline rank (E to A for each rank level bronze, silver etc). The higher the rank/rank level the better the AI plays that character, to increase the rank you have to use that character (or have them as the AI controlled characters) for offline play or they’ll also be automatically raised to Rank E of whatever rank level the player is. The gist of this is that if you don’t want the AI teammates to be a liability you have to be playing with them in the offline modes.
One other elements that helps make the story mode levels and bosses manageable is that for every 5 player levels you’ll increase your story mode bonus level with this bonus dictating the amount of health you have, it’s pretty noticeable that the game is balancing the story mode on the basis of you gaining these bonuses since you might run into some of the regular 3 on 3 fights where the enemies have more health than you until you bump up that bonus level.
What this all adds up to is a story mode that has mandatory grinding every single step of the way. Given that the game did strip back on a lot of the RPG elements to make it more arcade friendly it’s strange that the one thing they’d choose to keep from RPG’s is grinding.
The David E Gamery 