I don’t know how Square Enix keeps managing to do this. Every few years they dig up one of their coolest old franchises, brush it off, promise something exciting, and then proceed to shoot it straight in the foot before it even gets out the door. This time the victim is Dissidia Final Fantasy, a series that used to be one of the most stylish and downright entertaining crossovers in gaming. And what’s the big triumphant return after eight years? A mobile game. Brilliant.
When the news dropped, I did that thing where you read the headline three times hoping you’ve misread it. “New Dissidia announced.” Great. “Eight years since the last one.” Even better. “Exclusive to mobile.” Oh. Of course it is. I swear you could hear the collective sigh of every PSP veteran echo through time. This isn’t what anyone meant when we said we wanted Dissidia back.
I remember when Dissidia actually meant something. The first game on PSP was pure magic. It was Final Fantasy doing a fighting game, and somehow it worked. Cloud versus Kefka. Squall versus Zidane. Tidus getting slapped around by Sephiroth while an orchestra screamed in the background. It was chaos, but it was glorious. Dissidia 012 made it even better, tightening the combat, adding story context, and turning what could have been a gimmick into something that actually felt like a celebration of the series.
Even Dissidia NT, for all its flaws, at least looked the part. It might have tripped over its own competitive ambitions, but at least it swung for the fences. It had spectacle. It had energy. When it hit, it hit hard. But now we’re looking at a version of Dissidia that feels stripped of everything that made it special. A mobile game just doesn’t fit. The soul of Dissidia is in its movement, in its weight, in the speed of its clashes. You can’t bottle that up into touch controls and cooldown timers. You can’t cram an aerial duel between Lightning and Terra into a vertical screen and call it progress.#
And that’s before we even talk about the obvious. It’s going to be another live service. You know it, I know it, the marketing team knows it. There’ll be stamina meters, login bonuses, limited-time banners, and probably three different currencies to unlock Cloud’s slightly shinier sword. The whole thing will feel less like a celebration of Final Fantasy and more like a slot machine wearing a cape. We’ve seen this story before. Opera Omnia wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t Dissidia either. It was a decent enough turn-based RPG stuck in the endless treadmill of daily grinds and server shutdown dates. The problem is that Square keeps mistaking “mobile accessibility” for “long-term engagement,” and every time they do, another one of their great series gets buried under a pile of in-app purchases.
The saddest part is that Dissidia had a real chance for a comeback. We’re living in a time where crossovers and nostalgia are printing money. Fighting games are having a renaissance. The Final Fantasy brand has never been stronger. Imagine a modern Dissidia on PS5 or PC built with the kind of care Tekken 8 or Street Fighter 6 got. Imagine a refined combat system with a real story mode again, maybe something that digs into the weird mythology of Cosmos and Chaos. That’s what people wanted. That’s what this series deserved. Instead, we get a gacha fighter for your phone that will probably die before you finish the tutorial.
I get that mobile games make money. I understand the business logic. But there’s a difference between chasing trends and understanding your audience. Dissidia fans aren’t asking for convenience. We’re asking for commitment. The original games demanded focus and skill. They were messy but passionate. You can’t replace that with a one-handed auto-battle system. You can’t replicate that kind of energy on a commute. It’s like trying to play chess on a touchscreen that only lets you move once every ten minutes unless you pay for premium pawns.
It’s hard not to feel deflated. When I saw the teaser image with the silhouettes of ten characters, I felt a flicker of hope. For a moment I let myself imagine a proper console revival. Then I saw the words “mobile exclusive” and everything inside me just deflated like a Moogle at the end of a long shift. It’s not even that I hate mobile games. There are brilliant ones out there. It’s that this series doesn’t belong there. Dissidia isn’t supposed to be a background distraction. It’s supposed to feel like an event.
Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe there’s a world where this turns out better than expected. Maybe the combat will feel slick and satisfying, the monetization will be fair, and the story will surprise everyone. I’d love to be wrong. I’d love to eat my words. But history isn’t on their side. When Square Enix says “mobile-only,” it usually ends with a sunset notice and a sad tweet a year later.
And look, I want to believe in Nomura and the teams behind this. Dissidia meant something once. It was one of the few crossovers that didn’t just cash in on nostalgia; it built on it. It made every fight feel like a clash of legends. There’s no reason that magic can’t come back again. But this? This doesn’t feel like the return of a hero. It feels like watching a legend turned into a collectible card.
So yeah, the new Dissidia looks arse. It’s hard to be polite about it. I’m not angry because it exists. I’m angry because it could have been so much more. This series deserved a real comeback, not a cash grab. The worst part is that when it inevitably struggles, they’ll take it as proof that nobody cares about Dissidia anymore, when the truth is the opposite. We care too much. That’s why this stings.
Maybe someday we’ll get the proper revival this series deserves. Until then, I’ll stick with Duodecim and remember what it felt like when Dissidia was about glory, not gacha.