YMMV / Dissidia Final Fantasy (2015)

• Audience-Alienating Premise: The Final Fantasy series is an RPG franchise famous for its deep stories and characters. The original Dissidia and its prequel were Fighting Game-RPG hybrids with a ton of character customization options and lots of single-player content including a long story mode, which helped make it accessible to fans of the series even if they weren't into fighting games and multiplayer games. Dissidia NT stripped out the RPG customization mechanics and heavily dumbed down the single-player content to a series of cutscenes with the occasional boss fight, focusing on creating a pure fighting game balanced around 3v3 online multiplayer. The result is that the fanbase just didn't take to it like they did the PSP games, and many lost interest in it soon after launch.
• Awesome Music: As usual for the Final Fantasy series.
  • "Massive Explosion" is an awesome song in the style of The Power of Rock as you kick ass in battles.
  • "Dare to Defy" is an epic track that beautifully represents the excitement, intimidation and the hopefulness of the final battle.
    • "The Dragon Sups" is the befitting theme to finish off Shinryu once and for all.
• Base-Breaking Character: Y'shtola became one when she received her rework that changed her entire playstyle. Some preferred her pre-rework for being a support-orientated character and very good at it, able to debuff opponents, heal allies, and set up team combos reliably, and post-rework her moveset is more generic and she was nerfed too heavily and isn't as effective as she was before. Others say that she was too good before her rework since she could set up traps and powerful debuffs to easily combo opponents, and with competent teammates she was unbeatable, while her rework made her a more well-rounded character that can still pull her weight and keep true to her intended niche without being overpowered.
• Broken Base: Contested Sequel aside, this also applies to the characters. While many of them had their general moveset and playstyle preserved from the PSP games rather faithfully, others had their gameplay entirely reworked, either mechanically, thematically, or both.^ExampleVaan in 012 had a large pool of Bravery attacks that each used a different weapon type from Final Fantasy XII and covered various strategic options, and he only had a handful of HP attacks that were slow and close-ranged; in NT he only uses swords as his weapons and has a small pool of basic Bravery attacks, and his niche is that he can equip two HP attacks and landing them repeatedly triggers Concurrences that deal additional Bravery damage. Naturally for each character, fans disagree on if their new playstyle or the original is more fun and/or more fitting for the character.
• Catharsis Factor: Even with the Excuse Plot of the game, it is still satisfying to finally be able to fight and kill Shinryu after he was The Unfought and a Karma Houdini in the past two.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Before the Summon revamp, most online summons consisted of Shiva, Bahamut, or Alexander. This was because they had the best overall bonus to teams at the start of a round and because they had very strong summon attacks when used. Shiva in particular was more popularin choice due to being able to help with Bravery management (in the past). That isn't to say the other summons were not used; you just rarely saw them.
  • There's always often going to be a team comp that has one or more members equipped with Mighty Strikes for one of their secondary EX Skills. The Bravery damage boost it gives is often considered too good to pass up.
  • Prior to her changes, Y'shtola was the most used character for offline matches because of how quickly she could level up characters (thus unlocking their HP attacks and chat lines) via Core Battles; it would not be surprising to see many players with her at Crystal A for her offline rank. After her adjustment/refresh, her effectiveness in this exploit dwindled, however.
  • When fighting the summons in the story mode, since only player KOs lower the team's life count, the most common strategy is to use the best long ranged option as the Player Character, and spam ranged Bravery Attacks until you can nuke the boss' health.
• Contested Sequel: The game being an Actionized Sequel that focuses on 3v3 combat has been a contentious matter. Some don't mind seeing the RPG elements removed, as grinding for experience and equipment was tedious and made the PSP game very grind-heavy, and now they can focus on the actual combat element. Others feel it dumbs the game down too much and detaches it from its Final Fantasy RPG roots while also making the characters feel less unique, as players could make builds for characters that suited their playstyles, while the new game makes each character feel the same each time you play, with minimal ways to adjust it.
• Epileptic Trees: With numerous characters not getting a third outfit when the game's active development shut down, it's widely assumed they would have gotten such outfits if the game had continued. Particularly among the villains, many of them had outfits or EX Modes from the PSP games that could have been recreated; datamining reveals the name "Discord Incarnate" for Garland's third outfit (the name of his third outfit in 012), so this likely would have been the case for other villains.
• Evil Is Cool: Spiritus is well liked for his badass and attractive design, calm and reasonable personality, and his Hidden Depths that he's not really evil, he wants to preserve the world as Materia does; he just has a different attitude towards it and is happy to play the role of her Arch-Enemy in the name of continuing the cycles of war to keep the world alive.
• Faux Symbolism: Materia and Spiritus represent Science Versus Magic — their names mean "matter" and "spirit", Materia's domain and outfit have lots of gears and clockwork imagery, while Spiritus' domain and outfit are more like an ancient temple and his clothes have elemental symbols on them. However, these affinities have nothing to do with the plot of the game or their opposition to each other, it's just for the sake of giving them each a distinct aesthetic. One scene has Terra, Lightning, and Y'shtola, discuss what kind of world the two might create if they took over, one of technology or one of magic, but given that this is the franchise that coined the term Magitek, there's really no conflict in those ideas.
• Fridge Horror: Everyone in this Cycle comes from the ends of their home games and returns to them after defeating Shinryu. This raises an unsettling question about the villains who died in their home games^*(Namely, everyone except Garland, Golbez, and maybe Sephiroth): are they allowed to come back to life? Or do they have to go back to being dead, including the sympathetic ones like Kuja and Jecht who arguably deserve a second chance?
  • This can lead into a Fridge Tearjerker for the those two as well. It was established that everyone remembers everything from their respective games and the previous cycles. And knowing what happened in some of those previous cycles and what Shinryu's motives for bring all of the warriors here, it is possible that they would rather stay dead.
• High-Tier Scrappy:
  • Characters that are focused on long-range projectiles are typically cited as being too overpowered. While they have some Competitive Balance such as their HP attacks often being easier to dodge and having poor close range options, the map sizes make it easy for long-range characters to sit back and toss out attacks, then retreat, preventing melee focused characters from getting to them. Characters like Y'shtola, Kefka, Ace, and Golbez can throw powerful attacks that prevent melee focused characters from closing in, trapping them in a Cycle of Hurting that allows them to easily gain Bravery by standing still. This is especially true of Ace, who can often win fights by simply launching attacks in tight corners, preventing players from getting to him, while he can safely get Bravery to finish off a player.
  • Yuna for a long time was considered by the Japanese playerbase to be extremely annoying to fight, due to her spammable EX skill, Wakizashi being a solid-tracking-projectile while being usable with a glide function, and her Holy staying on field for a long time. This resulted in Yuna being one of the best characters to control the neutral with while making her very hard to punish for it, and many were happy when she finally got nerfed.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In the original Dissidia, it was teased that maybe the playable characters aren't really the characters, but advanced Manikins implanted with their memories that have achieved sapience. This game's ending implies that has actually become the case now — the warriors have departed home, and the memories they've left behind have been used to create Manikins in their images for Materia and Spiritus to command instead.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: The story-mode for NT has received flack for being very short once you get past the frustrating and tedious grind to unlock memoria to unlock the next chapter of the story. The content in it is only several small cutscenes, a few battles against Manikins or an antagonist from the other faction, and battles with the summons, with most of the cutscenes being fairly short and often uninteresting since the characters are very minimal in terms of expression and personality. As nice as the cutscenes look, many wanted a 012 length story-mode filled with more interactions, and did not get it.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Roster-wise, a common complaint about the villain side is that there are no new villains added to neither the arcade version nor the PS4 port, despite there being four mainline games released after the last game came out, and the game now including both Tactics and Type-0 characters. This is especially bad as the game removed Gabranth, Gilgamesh, and Feral Chaos, meaning that the roster of villains is actually less than the previous game^note barring DLC.
• Just Here for Godzilla: A lot of players admit that despite the game's many flaws in their eyes, being finally able to expire Shinryu's Karma Houdini Warranty by having every hero and villain gang up on him was downright satisfying. In fact, the premise of being able to cave his head in after two games of getting away scott free was a major draw for veteran players to buy the game and play the story aside from playing the new characters.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The fact that Team Ninja developed this game has prompted jokes asking about how the game's Jiggle Physics will look, particularly in regards to Tifa. The choice of developer has also invited Dead Fantasy references (though Word of God confirmed that none of Team Ninja's franchises were planned to appear in the game).
  • People had a field day with Noctis's losing animation, since the closeup makes it look like he's having The Immodest Orgasm.
• Narm Charm: Two choice lines include "Damnable sky serpent, learn some manners!" and "Why must every single person meddle in my plans!?" Coming from most characters, these lines would be groan-inducingly bad. But coming from Exdeath, they're cheesy enough to work.
• The Scrappy: Materia is disliked for her rude and arrogant behavior towards even her own champions, her Knight Templar attitude toward Spiritus and his champions, and she gets ridicule for her outfit, which is best described as a bikini inside a giant shuttlecock. She replaced Cosmos, who had a humble, wise, and caring personality more befitting of a benevolent goddess, and is a rival to Spiritus, who was very well received as an antagonist both for his personality and his design. Some even wondered if her unlikability was intended as foreshadowing for a Face–Heel Turn in a future storyline, but it wasn't (or if it was, those plans were scrapped when support for the game ended).
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Time limits. A-OK in online play, a miserable handicap in the offline modes. On higher difficulties, the A.I., when it's not beating your ass red, is easily evading you and playing keep away until the timer runs out. Mind you, only you take a loss if the time runs out even if you're in the lead of the match. Many players found themselves losing offline not because the enemy was better, but because they couldn't manage to catch up to an enemy repeatedly while also being harassed by the other units.
  • Unlike in the PSP games, getting Wall Rushed doesn't give you immunity invulnerability from an enemy's attack, only a second Wall Rush does and many characters can combo Wall Rushing Bravery attacks into another Bravery attack, or even an HP attack, with their target having no opportunity to dodge. Additionally, getting hit with an HP attack requires you to either get Wall Rushed or fall to the ground before you can recover, during which time your opponent has probably dashed away and their Bravery has recovered; this makes any form of retaliatory play impossible because your opponent will always have time to back off after landing a hit, and nullifies the "high-risk" part of the PSP games' "high-risk, high-reward" balance with high-power HP attacks leaving the user vulnerable.
  • There is no penalty present for ganging up on a single target. While this means that the other members of the units team can harass the other players or go for the core, many players have expressed frustration at being unable to play fairly since other players will simply take turns slapping them around and into walls. If a player gets ganged up on while at low HP, its borderline impossible to survive; especially as characters are different from each other, with the differing playstyles allowing combos to block down the target. The one way to punish people from doing this is have one of the teammates left alone to land a potent AoE HP attack that can possibly land a triple hit, or better yet, a triple kill.
  • The way match-making works appears to be direct wifi connections, which is something players are not happy about as it means online matches are filled with so much lag that it becomes unplayable. Making this even more frustrating is that the lag seems to be almost one-sided, meaning while one player experiences lag, the enemy team might not seem to suffer it, resulting in a defeat not because you play badly, but because the player quite literally could not fight back.
  • In offline play, your A.I. strengths are tied to the ranking they are at. If you're in Mythril tier and your ally is bronze, he/she is going to be the handicap in the battle. You'll have to raise them equally to get them up to snuff. Thankfully, the game shows some mercy by leveling up the ally in question (though not as much as if you had controlled them).
• Ships That Pass in the Night: Noctis x Lightning had a small following in the early days of XIII, back when XV was still called "Versus XIII", but it died down as the years went on. The addition of Noctis to the roster here, the introductory cutscene which sees him paired up with Lightning and the Warrior of Light as a travel companion, and finally the battle trailer where Noct and Light teamed up to fight Sephiroth saw the idea flare back to life.
• Signature Scene: Most players mainly remember the penultimate cutscene before the Final Boss, which is the clash between the heroes and villains that was supposed to lure out Shinryu and the initial beatdown the two forces laid on Shinryu when he came out. General consensus is that it was the only good part of the game's Excuse Plot of a story.
• So Okay, It's Average: The ultimate fate of the game. If they haven't got burned by the total focus on competitive arcade fighter gameplay, then consensus seems to be that the plot is weak but the character interactions and attention to history can carry it somewhat. As well, the actual game itself is amusing but nothing special nor interesting enough to give it lasting power.
• Special Effects Failure: In one scene in the story mode where Firion is supposed to have an arrow notched to fire at Exdeath and Kefka, he clearly is not holding an arrow and the string of his bow isn't pulled back. Particularly odd as a scene where Bartz uses his bow to attack Exdeath does have him actually pulling back the bowstring to fire visible arrows.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • The fact that the game has changed a number of features, such as removing the customizable movesets for bravery attacks, and removing EX Mode and EX Bursts, is a disappointment for many fans.
  • The PSP games had you pick a character and play through their individual story with battles against other characters and using the map in different ways. You saw the character's arc and had a boss fight at the end, with 012 adding in a world map containing optional side content to level your character up — a nice addition in general. Here, you play online matches to level up and unlock "Memoria" where you then watch a one-minute cutscene that is not linked to any specific character storyline while maybe having some fights depending on which option you picked. The change has not gone over well. It also did not help that the story feels like an Excuse Plot more so than either games before.
  • The removal of many combat features from previous instalments, like lowing the number of summons available and changing the combat to have only three-on-three. You want 1v2, 1v3, 2v2, 2v3 or just single combat? Nope, you need to drag a few unwanted participants with you just to get the fight you wanted.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Golbez doesn't get a single line of dialogue in the Story Mode, and the Cloud of Darkness gets only two. Further, outside of the final battle, Golbez only appears in one cutscene, and all he does in it is stand around listening to the conversation, so he may as well not even be there. This was rectified when Kam'lanaut was added and Golbez got a scene to have a conversation with him.
  • Kain, Ramza, and Ace, are basically Advertised Extras — they don't appear in the Story Mode at all. Like Golbez, they got to have scenes in updates, but this only highlights that the three are completely absent from the base game's scenes, even in the final battle.
  • While the Season Pass characters got scenes added for them in an update, only Vayne, Kam'lanaut, and Snow interact with the base roster — Locke, Rinoa, and Yuna, only appear in a single scene together. This means that players never get to see them interact with the other representatives from their own games, even though Rinoa and Yuna are Official Couples with Squall and Tidus. The second wave of DLC saw no new cutscenes at all, denying Gabranth, Tifa, Zenos, and Ardyn, any screentime outside of battles.
  • Neither Materia or Spiritus is playable or even takes part in battle as a boss.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Unlike in the original Dissidia, the heroes are shown not being happy to have been summoned by Materia, and are annoyed by the idea they have to fight again, with Materia being framed in a questionable light during her cutscenes. Combined with Materia's more battle focused mindset compared to Cosmos, the game seems to hint at something building between the heroes and Materia, especially factoring in the developers originally wanted Cosmos to be more Light Is Not Good, giving Materia the chance to follow-up on that idea, but nothing comes of it due to the Excuse Plot nature of the story mode, making it seem like it was done for no reason.
  • Now that all the involved characters have their full memories back, it should make for even more interesting character dynamics this time around, right? Sadly the characters all split off into two or three-person groups outside the first and last cutscenes, and as a whole the game is an Excuse Plot that doesn't have a lot of interest in exploring character interactions.
  • The characters discuss how the two constants remaining from their previous trip to World B are the moogles and the summons. However, only the "E branch" (Lightning and Squall, and Zidane and Terra) actually brings this up and has the characters interact with the moogles and the summons, the other story branches don't even acknowledge they exist and concern other plot points. This becomes all the more unusual when all of the summons are fought in story mode, and the E Branch shows the moogles can sense the locations of summons and lead the heroes to them, but no cutscenes in the other parts of the story show this happening — the summons are just fought in the middle of the story without any explanation and the characters don't acknowledge in-story that they even fought them. Additionally, after the stories converge, the summons are not mentioned again and they play no part in the final battle with Shinryu, and you don't even get to use a summon in gameplay, which makes the entire sideplot concerning the summons a "Shaggy Dog" Story.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The Manikins are back. But instead of polygonal crystalline versions of the cast, they look exactly like them with a hazy color filter over them and smoothed-out textures. The result is something unsettlingly and most certainly non-human. The new heavy and deep, metallic echo filter in their voices certainly isn't helping matters.
• Uncertain Audience: Hand-in-hand with Audience-Alienating Premise. Most Final Fantasy fans weren't interested in a pure fighting game that had very little customization (beyond aesthetics, anyway) and single-player content, and the need to grind in versus battles to be able to even unlock the story mode content was seen as a drag. For fans of fighters, they were turned away by the focus on 3v3 gameplay and unfamiliar gameplay mechanics not often found in fighters that were critical to being good (Bravery, EX Skills, summons); some even opined that Dissidia NT played more like a MOBA than a fighting game. Finally, the team-based gameplay meant that battle expected all six players that had been randomly matched up to A) have an even skill level to keep it fair, B) work together well as a team, and C) have a strong internet connection. The last one in particular was a very sore point, as online matches could lag to the point they were unplayable. One reviewer summed up all these problems thusly:
  "The fighting game community was alienated by the team-based gameplay, the Dissidia fans were alienated by the unfamiliar gameplay style, and anyone without a solid Internet connection couldn't enjoy the game at all."
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • The original Dissidia had aerial combat as a major part of its gameplay, with many characters more proficient in aerial or ground attacks than the other, and several arenas had major vertical elements to them or were entirely vertical. In this game, the vertical element is heavily downplayed - while there are still characters better at one type of attack than the other, most stages are relatively flat with a few ledges or slopes to break things up. Several stages don't even have that and are just large, open areas.
  • As in the original Dissidia, arenas here have alternate versions in which their appearance changes in some way. However, these changes are just aesthetics and have no impact on gameplay — the Omega Arenas in the original Dissidia often had gimmicks that could significantly impact how a character played and completely change the stage's layout. The arenas in NT could have allowed even more variance in how the alternate stages affected gameplay.
• Unexpected Character:
  • Y'shtola being the representative for XIV was certainly a surprise when the roster was revealed. While popular, Y'shtola was arguably Demoted to Extra after A Realm Reborn, and has been mostly a side-character for the following two expansions. By contrast, Minfilia, Thancred, Yda, and especially Alphinaud are more important characters within just the Scions itself, and that doesn't include other important characters like Aymeric and Estinien. Still, her appearance here helped generate good-will towards the game.
  • Ramza is the first Dissidia character to be from a Final Fantasy spin-off instead of a numbered title. Furthermore, unlike Ace who was originally going to be part of a compilation in the same setting as Final Fantasy XIII, Ramza comes from the oldest spin-off setting in the series.
  • When it was announced that the first DLC character would be a villain from the newer half of the series, a lot of people speculated that the character would be Caius or Ardyn, or at least would be a representative for XIII or XV, since those games had hero characters in Dissidia but not villains. The character revealed was Vayne. With most having presumed Gabranth would return as the villain representative for XII, Vayne's reveal was rather surprising.
  • When the fourth DLC character was announced to be a male character from the newer half of the series, most people were expecting someone from XIII or XV. Cue Kam'lanaut. What makes him even more surprising is that he wasn't even the main villain of the expansion pack he came from (Rise of the Zilart), he was The Dragon to the true main villain, his brother Eald'narche.
  • Zigzagged with Snow. While he was fairly high on players' lists, and the #1 choice for another XIII hero rep, what players weren't expecting was for Snow to be the villain representative for his game, using his Lightning Returns incarnation with his half-cie'th arm as his weapon.
  • The reveal of Zenos was a surprise, not because of the character, but because of the confirmation that more characters were to be added. The season pass had delivered the six DLC characters it included and as 2019 began the game seemed to not be doing so well, so fans were pleasantly surprised to see that new characters were still intended.
  • Not a character themselves, but rather a costume, was the announcement of Noctis' prototype Final Fantasy Versus XIII outfit, as all talks of the game, including old designs, had largely been kept in the dark by Square Enix. It not only came out of left field for a lot of fans, but was also a surprise to Nomura himself, who had revealed that they hadn't even been allowed to say the name of Versus XIII during the reveal livestream.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: One point that even the game's detractors concede is that the game looks gorgeous. The characters' appearance captures their PSP designs excellently and with PS4-level graphics they look better than ever, and as new costumes and weapons rolled out for them they kept up that level of quality. The arenas of the game are also more visually impressive than the PSP games and encompass a variety of locales, like the plains and forests of Cornelia, the scaffolding of Midgar, and the town square of Alexandria, and all of them look colorful and lively with a lot of effort put into recreating them exactly as they looked in the original games.
• Woolseyism: Summoning in the original Japanese version involves every single character simply calling out the summon's ultimate attack and then its name, making for a consistent but dull experience. The English localization has all 28 characters provide unique summoning incantations for each of the seven summons, turning the same seven incantations in the original to a whopping 196 in the localization, with more characters still to come. A large number of fans enjoy this unique spin on things better than the original's questionable Gratuitous English.
• WTH, Costuming Department?: Materia's bizarre cage-dress over bikini outfit, which people have uncharitably compared to a shuttlecock. Her random crown-like hat also made people snark about how silly it looks, especially compared to Spiritus' fairly intimidating design.

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