Saturday, April 11, 2015

Final Fantasy Dissidia update

No not Dissidia on the PSP...no not Dissidia Duodecim on PSP either.  This is an entirely new game coming to Japanese arcades sometime this year.  The game was originally announced early this February.  The first game from the series in five years, the arcades Dissidia will feature a 3 VS 3 battle system.  The game’s first trailer shows the Onion Knight from Final Fantasy III, Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn’s Y’Shtola, Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy VII,  Terra Branford from Final Fantasy VI, Lightning from Final Fantasy XIII, and Warrior of Light from Final Fantasy.  I'll post that original trailer below:


Lots of images and information under the cut so enjoy!




Flash forward to April 10th and Square held a closed conference announcing more details on the title.

The user interface for Dissidia Final Fantasy on arcade has a lot going on. Here’s a little breakdown on the key features that you’ll see on the screen:


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  1. Play Time
  2. Battle Log
  3. Party Status: indicates a party member’s health, Brave, and enemies they’re being targeted by.
  4. Player’s Status: the icon that is assigned to the triangle button is part of a new system called “EX Skill”. The large number you see is the Brave number. This is basically your attacking power.
  5. Influence HP: decreases as you or your allies fall. The team that loses this bar first, loses.
  6. Target Line: shows a red line when you’re being locked-on, and a blue line when you’re the one locking-on an enemy.
  7. Break Bonus: Shows the bonus points for doing a Break on the enemy.
  8. Navi-Map: shows the position and other details of the enemies and your allies.
  9. Enemy Team’s Information: shows the enemy party and their details.
  10. Chat Icon: is made into a touch panel. The chat function will come in handy when you want to show some spirit or pump up your party members.

Brave and HP Attacks:
2015-04-10_041855 Attacks come in two varieties of “HP Attack” and “Brave Attack”. The “Break Bonus” indicates the player’s attack power, and doing an HP Attack will result in taking this number away from the target’s health. A Brave Attack will instead take away from the target’s Break Bonus number.

EX Skills:

2015-04-10_042302 “Cast Protect on allies to raise defense,” “Cast Slow on enemies to slow their movements,” and “Provoke the enemy to gather targets,” are some of the many support skills you’ve seen in the Final Fantasy series that you’ll get to use the game.

Again, the EX Skills feature other abilities like Terra’s “Trance” or Cloud’s “Limit Break,”  and other characteristic abilities of the characters, bringing you a wide range of strategies to take put to use in combat.

Summoned Beasts:


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By filling up the team-cooperative “Summon Gauge,” your party can call out powerful Summoned Beasts that temporarily help out as your fourth party member. Again, the auto-ability of the Summoned Beast will also activate in battle, giving your party a nice advantage.
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What you see above is Ifrit. Ifrit is the malevolent deity that’s engulfed in hellfire. He can control blazing fire to burn down enemies.
 
Now I'm not sure about you but that battle hud looks pretty crowded.  The Brave points system seems to be returning but the summon system is a little different from our two previous titles.  I will say though, Ifrit looks pretty badass.

Square Enix revealed that Koei Tecmo’s Team Ninja are developing the game.  Sony Computer Entertainment president Atsushi Morita made an appearance during the press, and revealed that Dissidia Final Fantasy is being developed while using the PlayStation 4’s core system of technology.  While this means that the game will likely see an eventual PlayStation 4 release, a PS4 version hasn’t been “officially” announced yet, and they say they would like for fans to first enjoy it in arcades.  According to a Square Enix producer, there won’t be any development toward a console release until at least a year after the launch of the arcade version.  So I'm sad to say we won't be seeing any news of a future console release until at least mid next year, if not much longer after that.

 
At the April conference we also received a brand new trailer showing more of the fighting system and a new battlegroud (Midgar) as well as a look at Ifrit in action.
  
The official game's website also gave us a few new screenshots which I'll post below.
 
Warrior of Light







Onion Knight





Terra Branford








Cloud Strife



Lightning






Y'shtola






We also got a very special announcement at the conference.  Dissidia will feature 50+ characters.  50!  That's far more than Duodecim's roster of 31 playable characters.  Also mentioned was that the God Chaos and Goddess Cosmos are absent from the game and instead a pair of new Gods will take their places.

We did get one very special playable character announced:  Ramza Beoulve from Final Fantasy Tactics (or War of the Lions if you've only played the PSP port).  Famitsu reports that Square Enix revealed Ramza during their Dissidia closed conference. The version of Ramza included in the game will be designed by Tetsuya Nomura. Unfortunately, no further details were announced.








  

Also just released today via Siliconera was a trailer for FF XIV character Y'shtola.



So far this is all the news that has been released to the press from the closed conference but you can be sure that if any more news comes to light I'll post it here!  Do you guys have any specific characters you'd want in the franchise?  Any hopes of oft forgotten or often unused summons you'd like to see included?



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