On October 5, the official Final Fantasy twitter account tweeted an ‘Dissidia NT accolades’ trailer of sorts. Due to its high focus on multiplayer opposed to its RPG predecessor, the said game is widely considered a failure by both gamers and critics. The Dissidia franchise has established itself as a once-a-decade release for the Final Fantasy series, bringing in major characters from several of the FF games. I could tell you in more detail about why the new Dissidia NT sucks, but let’s talk about that horrendous trailer first.
Accolades? Are you sure?
Like I previously mentioned, FF tweeted out what was meant to be an ‘accolades’ trailer, but the contents are highly suggestive of otherwise. If you check out the tweet, you can see that the ‘praise’ for the game is usually occupied with a negative adjective. What’s even more sickening is that the NT publicity staff tried to twist these criticisms around to their favor… seven months after the game’s release.
I love you guys but this is the worst promotional tweet I’ve ever read
— Goku S. Pumpkins 🎃 (@fd3355) October 5, 2018
As you can probably tell, a lot of people were very vocal regarding the trailer. It does however, rake in over 200 retweets and 800 likes. Unsurprisingly, this is more engagement than their latest DLC character announcement, Kam’lanaut.
Saving mobile data? I’ll write up on just how wrong this trailer is for you. The first ‘accolades’ the trailer shows is from IGN, which wrote, “a strange game”. Take note that IGN gave this hot pile of crap a 6.9, and I’m almost sure they gave it that score for sh*ts and giggles. Another highlighted accolade is from the New York Daily News, which said “A beautiful mess”. Which is exactly what it is, and not in a good way!
Disgusting
Why all the hate?
The sole purpose of Dissidia NT is to serve as a 3v3 multiplayer brawler, stripping characters of features to encourage you to cooperate and pick your characters for the interest of team composition. This, on paper, is actually a great idea for a multiplayer game, except Dissidia NT executes it so poorly! It doesn’t have dedicated servers, meaning you’ll be getting tremendous amounts of lag if anyone out the six people you play with has bad internet.
It doesn’t even have good match-making options. You don’t get set the most important preference when it comes to match-making: regions. It’s not impossible to be matched with an opponent all the way across the world. Having no dedicated servers only amplifies the problem! That’s to say if you manage to find a match at all. Several people have complained that the multiplayer outside of the U.S. is already dead. This is an easy fix. Simply port the game to PC, and allow for crossplay, like how they did with FFXIV.
Speaking of which, interested in FFXIV? Check out our guides for FFXIV (you’re going to have to scroll a bit).
Fans want a better Single-Player campaign
The original Dissidia, introduced back in 2008, has a very rich campaign, filled with almost hundreds of hours of content. The revamped iteration of the game, Dissidia 012: Duodecim only added to that experience. What with character arcs, a mainline story, reports and a refined RPG-system in ADDITION to multiplayer modes, gamers and critics gave this masterpiece very high numbers, and were reflected by sales.
Dissidia NT strips down their single-player campaign to a bare minimum, coming up with a lack-luster story with just barely enough charm. To make matters worse, the single player campaign has almost zero replay value. You can only access the battles by jumping out of the campaign into a different segment of the game. This makes the campaign battles look nothing more than restricted, preset AI matches.
So as you can see, poor single player content, and poor multiplayer support. No one in their right mind would support this game with no promise of customer improvement. To make matters worse, SQEN is continuously developing DLC, when there are plenty of obvious problems they need to fix.
The gameplay and combat is fun, and gets loads better with friends. Unfortunately, we never get to experience the best it has to offer. Greed and poor management killed a great franchise. Considering other publishers like EA and Activision have already made this mistake, it is sad to see Square follow down the same path.
