Square Enix, you’ve been doing so well with mobile games. So many of your gacha-based titles didn’t feel terribly exploitative! Final Fantasy VII Ever Crisis means you get characters for free, and there are great event pieces of equipment. Dissidia Final Fantasy Opera Omnia featured tons of characters, major and minor, tied to campaign missions and side stories, and the gacha involved weapons. It’s so easy to point to one of these types of titles and point out an example that was worth playing. But now the company released Dissidia Duellum Final Fantasy, and it’s one of the most pay-to-win, poorly handled gacha games I’ve seen in the last few years.
As with past entries in the series, Dissidia Duellum Final Fantasy features heroes from different installments coming together to fight the forces of Chaos and evil. In this case however, everyone’s pulled to modern day Earth. There, they fight monsters in Tokyo in order to keep them from stealing the vitality of innocent civilians. However, it seems classic Final Fantasy villains are also behind some of these incidents, as Cloud saw Sephiroth summoning a Behemoth to attack people and make copies of him. We follow these characters, known as Ghosts by individuals in the city, as they team up to fight back and restore crystals.
Here’s why the story, which would otherwise have some potential, is unfortunately disappointing. It’s tied to a season pass and competitive multiplayer. You basically need to go through ranked battles to unlock episodes and LINE style “Fine” text message conversations. The idea is novel, and some of the group texts can be fun to read through, but I really wish it’d been handled differently.
Part of this is because Dissidia Duellum Final Fantasy is a pay-to-win type of game. The idea isn’t bad. There are 3v3 fights that involve defeating enemies around crystals with attacks and Abilities to claim them, earning Bravery for yourself and your allies. (You can also get Bravery by defeating the enemy team members by using your standard attack and Abilities to wipe out their HP.) Each character can equip five Abilities at a time, with some specifically tied to them and others being general pool ones for everyone. Everyone also has a role, with Krile being a Support healer, Lightning an Agile attacker, and Rinoa a ranged mage. If you get 9,999 Bravery, then you can cause a Burst that allows you to actually attack and deal damage to the boss once it appears. If you time a Burst out to execute special Abilities alongside allies against a boss, you can trigger a combo of sorts to deal more damage. The team to take out the boss before time runs out wins. Doing well lets you climb the ranks, and winning can also mean getting a crystal that, after enough time, can be tapped to get a new Ability.
The general idea behind combat is honestly fine. It feels sound. You do need to use different strategies for each person. So a Krile player needs to watch allies’ HP and perhaps work more on sharing her own Bravery to refill theirs so they can attack bosses. I’ve found Gaia works best as a player-killer, getting Bravery by defeating opposing heroes and debuffing their speed so they never get a chance to attack the boss. (Prompto makes a good player-killer too!) Cloud, Lightning, and Rinoa should always be going for the bosses. I will say that, at the moment, it can feel very repetitive due to the limited number of bosses and maps. Hopefully, that could be remedied as the scope grows.
The first problem is the Abilities. You get these via the gacha. The best ones are, as you imagine, the four unique abilities tied to a character. But because it’s random if you get them, you might not even get the least rare option for a person (R). And the two URs might be totally out of reach. Unless you fully invest, and then somehow get lucky enough to get duplicates and +1, +2 ,and so on, you aren’t going to have a moveset that will be ideal. It becomes pay-to-win.
My two “mains” in Dissidia Duellum Final Fantasy are Krile and Gaia. The former needs at least one of her URs and her R to be viable. I’m barely getting by with just Nightingale and Sealed Sacred Light, since the party attack-boosting Hopeful Cheer and UR regen skill Legend of the Deep Forest are so critical, by supplementing generic full-party heal and support skills. And do you know why Gaia is my other main? Because I got her Spell-in-Waiting R Ability, Hopeful Dance SR, and Diamond Destroyer UR. I have almost her entire ideal moveset and got +1 for the R and SR skills, which meant I was pretty much forced into using her.
It’s annoying.
The second problem involves the characters. In the traditional Dissidia Final Fantasy console games and Opera Omnia, all of them were free. You might need to unlock them via playing the campaign or experiencing side stories, but they would be in your roster for free. Here, you can pick Warrior of Light, Terra, Cloud, or Lightning as your first free character. The Battle Pass free version also grants you the ones you didn’t pick (eventually). Want more options? You need to get Character Tickets to get new units. You can’t just pay the in-game currency for pulls, either. You need to pull a certain number of times on the Ability gacha to earn one ticket, with others sometimes given away as gifts or event rewards or sold in (real cash) bundles in the in-game shop. If you get five Character Tickets, you can pick exactly who you want. If you don’t, you can risk a pull on the focus or general banner to try and get someone randomly. However, that also means you could just get a new costume or color variant for someone you already own.
It’s a terrible system.
I also didn’t find the single-player element to be too much fun. This can be found in the Challenges section for each character and involves facing fights in nodes on a grid. You can use copies of characters from folks on your friend list as NPC allies to go into 3v3 fights to earn things like Growth Eggs, currency, music, and Job Medals. When equipped, those loadouts can offer in-battle boosts. It’s just more of the same, without some of the Ranked rewards, and it didn’t feel influential enough to entertain me.
There are two things that make Dissidia Duellum Final Fantasy worthwhile, and they’re elements that I think and hope might end up preserved after Square Enix shuts this down. One is that the soundtrack is amazing. This is already on sites like YouTube Music, and I’m hoping we see physical copies. It consists of remixes of character themes and tracks from their original titles. They’re so good. The other involves the real-world costume and character design for Final Fantasy heroes. Again, they’re fantastic. Especially for folks like Krile, Terra, Cloud, Zidane, Rikku, Iroha, Balthier, Lightning, Gaia, and Clive. I do wish the alternate options so far are more than just color swaps, but the modern outfits are largely wonderful, even if they aren’t too different from existing ones like in the case of Rinoa and Prompto. It makes me hope for an art book eventually.
The thing is, I can think of ways Dissidia Duellum Final Fantasy could be fixed. Give everyone immediate access to all characters, and make the Character Tickets unlock the additional costumes. Fine, have the Abilities on the gacha banner, but perhaps offer an option to outright buy the four unique skills for each character in the shop. Instead of making the story feel so reliant on going through multiplayer battles, instead tie them to the Challenge mode so we don’t need to wait around for a full party or invest in a competitive mode we might not enjoy. Focus on making it enjoyable and not so reliant on other people and RNG to succeed. Of course, the amount of retooling means we’ll probably see the title fail, rather than get adjusted and relaunched as something that feels far less greedy. But hey, at least we got some great music and fantastic character designs!
Dissidia Duellum Final Fantasy is available for mobile devices.