If you happen to get access to the beta of Dissidia Final Fantasy NT happening this week, then congrats! However, jumping into the game blind will make for a miserable experience. This isn’t as straightforward as any normal fighting game. Here’s some five tips to help you get a grasp with the battle system and gain the upper edge.
Bravery Attacks Are Your Bread And Butter
Each match last four minutes, the first team to take down three opponents wins. In order to do HP damage to your opponent, you need to rack up Bravery Points, the big number you will see on the bottom. From the initial 1000 points, you need to rack up as much of the Bravery Points and then cash it in as a HP attack.
Don’t mash square to pull off HP attacks! All your combos lie in the Bravery attack (for Asia, it’s circle instead of X). Each time you deal a Bravery attack, you steal points from the opponent and vice versa.
If you whittle down all the Bravery Points of an opponent, they will be broken (and you gain the Bonus Bravery Points based on the Break Bonus). It’s a good time to pull off an HP attack, or retreat and change targets. It will take a few seconds to recover from broken state and regain back 1000 points.
Rack Bravery Points Up Then Cash It In
Build up a steady amount of Bravery Points with Bravery attacks, then cash all those points in with an HP attack. If your number starts glowing purple, it means that one HP attack can take out one of the opponents in one hit. If you see that on the other team, it’s time to focus him down and steal those points. So it’s good to keep stealing your points and then cash it out with a big HP damage.
You can see at a glance how much your HP damage would do to any opponent by looking at the bar on their character. If it flashes (and your Bravery Points glow purple), that means if your HP attack lands on them, it will be an instant kill.
Getting The Inputs Right
Not all abilities are mapped to a single button press. Thankfully, you won’t need to do any pretzel motions, let alone a quarter circle. Your bravery attacks can be altered in three ways: forward+circle, back+circle, and just circle. Some moves also work by holding down the button to charge. Most combos work starts from just the circle button so be mindful of your button presses. It’s okay to not move around- some characters are even encouraged to stay put.
Activating EX Skills also behave the same way. Just pressing triangle activates your character-specific EX Skill, while holding forward+triangle or back+triangle activates EX Skill 1 or 2, the ones you get to pick before the battle.
There are also a few unique inputs that you might not notice at firsthand. For Lightning, you can change between her two paradigms by hitting L3.
For the full movelist, you can check out Primaguide’s official move list here. There are no descriptions of the character-specific EX skill in the beta, so be sure to check that move list.
Summons Can Swing The Tide
During the battle, a crystal shard (referred to as a summoning core) will appear randomly on the stage. If you can get damage enough of the crystals to fill up your summon bar, you can call in the summon you selected. It’s important since these summons bring various buffs, but it can help swing the tide if you’re running out of time- throughout the period the summon appears the clock stops.
To target the crystal, hold L2 +R2 for a while. Once your meter is filled, find a safe spot and hold down the touch pad to perform the summon. It’s much faster if more people in the team do it as well, and you can perform the summon in mid-air.
Getting Your Bearings On What’s Going On
Let’s be honest, the UI is an information overload and looks messy on screenshots, but when you play it’s not distracting, for the most part. You need to check this guide on what exactly each of the UI element means, but here’s a few bullet points on what are the things to look for:
- The arcing lines show who are targeting you
- The numbers on the lock-on show which teammate is also targeting the same opponent
- Glance over the bravery points to see which teammate needs help and which opponent is
- The mini-map shows where the crystal
- The Break Bonus is the amount of bonus Brave Points gained when you break an opponent
- The top left shows how the summoning meter is progressing for both teams (Your team is on the top)
That’s the five things you should be aware about before jumping in Dissidia. If you need a character recommendation, just play everyone but the Specialist class for now. Cloud, Squall and Terra are solid first picks for each of their respective class (Vanguard, Assassin, Marksman). Once you start to understand the systems, then you can try out the Specialists, as they play outside of the established systems. For example, Vaan is encouraged to dish out HP Attacks as each successful one that doesn’t result in a kill will add up Bravery Points to make for his lack of good bravery attack combos.
Dissidia Final Fantasy NT closed beta is commencing this week and will be out on January 30, 2018 for the PS4.