When comparing Dissidia Final Fantasy NT vs NieR: Automata, the Slant community recommends NieR: Automata for most people. In the question“What are the best games on PS4 with a female protagonist?” NieR: Automata is ranked 2nd while Dissidia Final Fantasy NT is ranked 49th. The most important reason people chose NieR: Automata is:
The combat in NieR: Automata is fantastic. It has a hack-and-slash feel to it, with an emphasis on agility and showy acrobatics. With the fluid and responsive controls, you can switch seamlessly from using swift attacks with your weapon to devastatingly strong attacks as you combo them together. You also use customizable ranged missile attacks from your personal robot pod, such as powerful laser beams or a giant hammer attack. It can be difficult to win battles sometimes, especially on the harder gameplay settings, but it's worthwhile to keep at it and watch yourself progress and improve.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Characters are balanced
The Final Fantasy fighters are separated into different types of specialties: assassins, vanguards, and marksmen who all have strengths and weaknesses relative to one another, as well as specialists who fall into a category of their own. Characters like Cloud who wield huge, powerful swords as vanguards are effective at punishing lighter assassin-type fighters. Marksmen cast barrages of spells from afar, like Y'shtola with her black and white magic. They're great at against vanguards who move slowly, but weak against assassins like Lightning who are adept at quickly getting in close and interrupting their casts.
Meanwhile, specialists are more versatile in their move sets, but they require a lot of time before unlocking their full potential, without any major strengths or weaknesses. This rock, paper, scissors-type of gameplay balance helps to solidify everyone's identity as a fighter based on their weapons and personal style.
Pro You can summon giant guardian deities to help you pull off victories in cool ways
After filling the summon bar by hitting enemies, players can choose to summon these giant Final Fantasy guardian deities who stay on the battlefield and deal constant damage to the enemies, often able to help a losing team pull through to a victory. The water serpent Leviathan loops dangerous tides of water throughout the field to trap the other team, while the intimidating dragon Bahamut fires down powerful beams of energy that explode, severely wounding anyone caught nearby. Each summon also grants special passive effects to their team during battle: Alexander, the great protector, raises HP and defense, while the fiery demon Ifrit helps players quickly reduce their foe's stamina.
Pro Polished graphics and designs
Each of the Final Fantasy characters have flashy battle styles, and their gargantuan summon deities are slick, clean and full of detail. Particle effects and vibrant, colorful magic spells look impressive on the battlefield, and characters look great casting them. Older series characters look stunning with modern PlayStation 4 graphics, such as Kefka from Final Fantasy VI on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System with his menacing face paint and gaudy, circus-like outfit reminiscent of a court jester.
Pro Plenty of fan-service
Dissidia Final Fantasy NT features protagonists and antagonists from each mainline Final Fantasy game, like Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII and Noctis from Final Fantasy XV. During story cutscenes, characters from different games interact with one another, like Lightning from the Final Fantasy XIII games agreeing to team up with Squall from Final Fantasy VIII. In battle, they can summon the classic guardians like Bahamut and Ifrit. Victories in battle earn currency and unlocks, like as cosmetic upgrades to change the color of a character's clothes or their official alternate designs, such as Lightning's red and black outfit from the third game in the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy.
Pro Fast-paced, action-packed combat
The combat in NieR: Automata is fantastic. It has a hack-and-slash feel to it, with an emphasis on agility and showy acrobatics. With the fluid and responsive controls, you can switch seamlessly from using swift attacks with your weapon to devastatingly strong attacks as you combo them together. You also use customizable ranged missile attacks from your personal robot pod, such as powerful laser beams or a giant hammer attack. It can be difficult to win battles sometimes, especially on the harder gameplay settings, but it's worthwhile to keep at it and watch yourself progress and improve.
Pro Unique storytelling with a real emotional impact
NieR: Automata's outlook on storytelling is incredibly special. To get the full experience, you have to run multiple playthroughs of the game, each of which offers a new experience and perspective. Your world view of the story events and characters expands drastically as you complete each playthrough, playing on your expectations to help you develop a deeper emotional bond with the protagonists and become invested in their plight.
Things take a real turn on your third playthrough, putting you on an emotional roller coaster all the way to the true ending. The plot twists and knocks on the fourth wall elevate the story to a truly unique place. Getting all the way to the very end can be a religious experience from how much heart and meaning you discover in the symbolism.
Pro It's got a hauntingly beautiful environment
NieR: Automata is set in a post-apocalyptic landscape after Earth has been overrun by hostile machines, and the artists really nailed what that would feel like. Abandoned and overgrown cities litter the landscape along with old refineries, graveyards, and eerie forests. When you add the beautiful soundtrack to the experience, it fills you with a bittersweet mix of loneliness and hope.
Pro Varied genre-spanning gameplay elements
NieR: Automata has different types of gameplay to keep things interesting. From the very start, you're on an on-rails bullet hell section, and then you switch over to the more traditional action RPG style of fast-paced combat. Things change up again not long after with some side-scrolling platforming from a 2D view. Later on in the story, there's a hacking mini-game where you navigate a tiny ship through a short puzzle, with the music changing to a charming retro sound to fit the theme and mood. This is a game that doesn't stay boxed in a single genre.
Pro An incredible amount of content
Outside of the main story, there's plenty of optional content to dive into. The side quests are the best way to get to know the characters and lore of the world, with some of them giving clever and subtle foreshadowing of the game's most critical events. There are also weapons to collect and upgrade, each of which offer nice little tidbits of lore after you get them to max level. And after reaching a certain point in the story, you get access to Chapter Select that lets you go back and replay whatever you want. You can easily spend 60+ hours exploring the world and still have much more to do.
Pro Gorgeous, ethereal soundtrack with amazing vocals
NieR: Automata's music is out of this world. It's so stunning and elegant in a way that nothing else can really live up to. The soundtrack manages to emotionalize the game through music, from the action-packed tracks with hard-hitting wind instruments and percussion, to the softer, somber songs that encapsulate the hauntingly beautiful environments and story moments you encounter. Vocals in the lore's indescribable language makes the music even more memorable, adding to the ethereal quality of the sound. This soundtrack is definitely one that you can go back to again and again without getting sick of it.
Cons
Con Awful story mode progression
Story mode cutscenes can only be unlocked one by one after fighting dozens of arcade or multiplayer battles first, causing a terrible stop-and-go pace for watching the plot unfold. Sometimes the cutscenes are only 20-30 seconds long, and then you're forced back into more battles before you're allowed to progress to the next scene.
Con Soundtrack is subpar
Remixes of tracks from the original Final Fantasy games for Dissidia NT are considerably lacking, sounding like mere demos or unfinished pieces. Songs such as The Extreme, the final battle track from Final Fantasy VIII, feel empty and soulless, not at all like the larger-than-life theme with the eerie female chorus chanting in Latin and the energy of the piano backing the vocals. Almost every song in NT lacks what made the original tracks so great.
Con Gameplay speed slowed down from previous Dissidia titles
The flow of battle in Dissidia NT is noticeably slower than in the PlayStation Portable and PlayStation Vita games, with dashes bogged down by stamina bars, and downed combatants given periods of invincibility while they recover. There's a frustrating pace to combat where you can't freely travel around the field without pausing to recover stamina, and successful barrages of attacks on enemies are interrupted by their free seconds of invincibility until they're able to be targeted again.
Con Battles are too chaotic
With six players on the field at one time, all of them performing flashy attacks, chaining huge casts of magic one after another, and zipping and dashing around the field, there's too much to keep track of at once. There are arcs of red and blue lines meant to denote who's targeting you and who you're targeting, respectively, but these can get lost amid the chaos of particle effects, smoke, and obstacles such as cliffs and walls. It can be difficult to quickly notice when you're targeted by two or three players at once if you're not already a safe distance away, leading to sudden, irritating defeats.
Con No dedicated servers for online matches
Multiplayer battles run on peer-to-peer connections instead of dedicated servers, meaning that one of the six players in the battle acts as the host for the match. The quality of everyone's connection depends on the host's internet. If host's connection is bad, they may not notice too many issues on their end. If you're the host, and you're running a wired connection from your router or modem to your PS4, then you have little to worry about. If someone else is the host and they have an awful connection, then be prepared for a lot of lag.
Con Limited open world
Even though NieR: Automata is technically an open world game, it doesn't always feel like it. It's more that there's a big open space in the center of the ruined city you explore, with branches that lead off to vastly different environments, like a desert, a village, and a few other places. These locations aren't that spacious, either, and it's a bit of a stretch to even imagine all of these places being so close together in the first place. It's not too much of an issue as long as you find the story and combat engaging enough.
Con Second playthrough can get repetitive
Once you get to Route B, your second playthrough, you may find that too much is the same. There are some big differences, such as the new way you get to see things play out, but a lot of it rehashes Route A, your first playthrough. There's a ton of hacking you have to do as well, which gets pretty boring after repeating it over and over again. But if you stick with it, Route C and onward are absolutely worth the time spent getting to that point.
Con Some boring fetch quests
The pacing gets messed up when you're forced to run certain fetch quests near the start of the game. This is somewhat forgivable after the fun and action-packed introductory level, but the quests themselves are still a drag to play through. Some of the side quests can also boil down to the same thing. Even though these quests give a lot of useful information about the world, they're not all that fulfilling, and you may dread having to repeat them when playing through the game again.
Con Buggy on PC
Some players complain about the game crashing, freezing, their save files mysteriously disappearing, and more. As of June 2018, over a year after the game's initial release, there is still no patch to fix these problems. Not everyone on PC will have these bugs, but it's still quite prevalent. If you continually run into issues, your best bet is to find a mod or play the console versions instead of waiting on an official patch that may never happen.