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Review

Final Fantasy Type-0 HD, SquareEnix (PS4)

Abstract: Final Fantasy Type-0 HD is a surprisingly solid addition to the gargantuan Japanese role-playing game franchise. A decidedly darker tone sets Type-0 apart from other Final Fantasy titles. Incredibly smart design decisions permeate the quick, skill-rewarding combat. The huge cast of party characters allows players to keep the game fresh through its completion. A nonsensical story, poor dialogue, and empty tedium between story quests detract from experience, but Final Fantasy Type-0 HD is certainly a game worth checking out for fans of the franchise or genre.

Final Fantasy Type-0 is a game I never thought I would get to play. Originally announced as Final Fantasy Agito XIII, Type-0 was later renamed and released on the PlayStation Portable (PSP) exclusively in Japan. This portable release was intended to be one of the three games that made up the ‘Fabula Nova Crystallis,’ an elaborate plan by SquareEnix to create three totally different games that all shared a similar universe and mythology. The first of these was Final Fantasy XIII, a traditional JRPG released for the PS3. The second was Type-0, a mission based mobile JRPG experience. The last was Final Fantasy Versus XIII, a more action heavy open-world RPG. Over the course of each games’ development, there were some radical changes. FFXIII went from one game to three, becoming the Lightning trilogy. Agito XII was renamed and restructured. And Versus XIII became what we now know today as Final Fantasy XV.

Initially, I was ecstatic about this tremendous initiative by SquareEnix. I had been a pretty avid Final Fantasy fan ever since I played FFVII, and was always hungry for more. My enthusiasm was quickly damped after I played through FFXIII. The game had some good elements, but was marred by many baffling design decisions. A confusing story and unlikable characters aside, FFXIII was a linear grind-fest that only became enjoyable 25+ hours into the game. Each subsequent FFXIII sequel felt worse than the last. Not completely dissuaded, I turned my eye to the other Fabula Nova Crystallis titles. I was relieved to see that Final Fantasy Type-0 had received fairly positive reviews, only to be crushed upon discovering that Type-0 had never made it to the states, and Versus XIII was stuck in development hell. When the HD remastered version was announced for a PS4 release, my interest was once again piqued. Right around its release date I felt hungry for a new JRPG to dig into and felt Type-0 would fit the bill. Plus, I’m a sucker for Final Fantasy. So I picked it up, and here were are.

Yep, that's a dead chocobo.

Final Fantasy Type-0 begins with a bang, as the Militesi Empire initiates a deadly assault on the Dominion of Rubrum, leading to an all out war between the two nations. The game is set in the world of Orience. The land is divided into four separate ‘crystal states,’ so called because each is led by a deity that manifests itself as a large crystal. After years of peace between the four states, Militesi sought to gain control over Orience, starting its surprise military campaign with a blitz on Rubrum. The intro to Type-0 was shockingly brutal, as graphic depictions of warfare littered the game’s first cinematic. Bleeding troops hobble to safety, Militesi troops execute the wounded by shooting them in the head, civilians are massacred in the crossfire. Even the franchise staple chocobos aren’t immune to the destruction, as the game starts with the brutal bloody death of one. I really enjoyed what Tabata and team were going for with the tone of Type-0. The is the first Final Fantasy game I have played that takes into consideration the death and suffering caused by the game’s central conflict. It helps to ground the fantastical world in reality, even if only slightly, making it inherently more tangible and affecting. From that point forward, the story progresses rather simply. You play as a group of elite cadets from Rubrum’s foremost military academy, Academia, known as Class Zero. As this strange student-military hybrid force, you are tasked with aiding Rubrum’s military campaigns: recapturing Militesi controlled territory, conducting secret infiltration missions, etc. As you get further, like so many other Final Fantasy titles, the game’s plot goes off the deep end. Despite the work that clearly went into creating it, the history and mythology of Orience is dense and impenetrable. Type-0 is written in a way so that only the most dedicated fans can piece together what exactly is going on, or what everything means. The last act in particular is a confusing mess and it comes out of nowhere. It provides no real sense of continuity, or finality, to the story and gives far more questions than answers.  Poor writing permeates Type-0’s entire story, but that is sort of expected for Final Fantasy games at this point.

I know exactly how you feel, Cinque.

Class Zero is the focus of the game, acting to move the global narrative forward as the central players within it. Class Zero also makes up your party of playable characters. Each character is named after traditional playing cards (2-10, Jack-Ace). There are fourteen total members, each with distinct personalities and fighting styles. You have the ditzy mace-wielding Cinque, the spear-using numbskull jock Nine, the rapier-equipped bookworm Queen, the stoic King with his dual pistols, and the know-it-all elitist archer Trey to name a few. As you can tell from these descriptions, Type-0 worked hard to make each of the 14 characters memorable and distinct. The price the game had to do so was steep, though, as no one gets any real character development, leaving them hollow stereotypes who exist just to exist. Type-0 keeps another franchise staple, too: the characters have horrible dialogue. I found myself physically cringing at the words, and delivery, whenever the characters spoke. Shallow personalities and bad writing aside, I found myself really enjoying the design of Class Zero. You could never confuse one character for another, as each one looks and plays completely distinct. I found myself constantly switching between characters to see how dialogue interactions changed or how they moved through the world (Cinque has a great / terrible run animation by the way). The real strength of this character diversity comes across in the gameplay. With fourteen (and more) unique ways to fight enemies, I would change my squad of three characters between every mission just to see how they played and synergized.

Just one of my many different party combinations.

This brings me to the combat in Type-0. Every RPG relies on a solid combat system, and I’m happy to report that Type-0’s is pretty great. For starters, the combat is fast and nimble, taking inspiration from action heavy systems like the one in Kingdom Hearts. Dodging is quick and essential. Battles are varied too, with an equal mix of magic, close quarters and ranged attacks. You can reinvigorate encounters whenever you want with how huge and different the cast of playable characters is. Not only that, but mid-encounter Type-0 allows you to switch between characters, changing up the way you play or getting off that heal your party direly needs. In what feels like a franchise first, health design feels more akin to a Souls game. Player and enemy alike hit pretty hard, and either one can be downed in a couple quick attacks. To be clear: health does not deplete nearly as quickly as a Souls game, but still goes down much faster than any Final Fantasy I can remember. And this is great. Encounters, even bosses, are over with quickly, definitely limiting the frustration the JRPG grindfest can cause. Final Fantasy has always pretty guilty of turning enemies into damage sponges. For example, a certain boss in FFXII can take over an hour and a half to kill, even with perfect strategies and max level characters. In Type-0, the hardest boss I ever faced was down in a matter of minutes. This adds to the quick feeling of combat, and I loved it.

Type-0 adds a lot of great skill-based elements to its combat, too. My favorite among them was the breaksight / killsight attacks. When locked onto an enemy your targeting reticle will change colors, indicating when an enemy is exposing itself to big damage, which usually occurs at some point during their attack animation. If you hit the enemy when the reticle turns yellow it is a breaksight, which deals massive damage. If red it is a killsight, and the enemy instantly dies. In this way Type-0 really rewards the players for attacking at the right moment, rather than mashing the attack button. It was so satisfying to bait out an enemy attack, only to kill it from full health in one well-timed gunshot. Killsights in particular allow the player to tackle extremely tough areas whenever they want, even if they are massively underleveled. While I was playing, I managed to clear a level 39 mission even though my party was filled with level 18 characters. My normal attacks did essentially no damage whatsoever to enemies, and I could die in one hit, but when I timed my killsights just right and dodged perfectly, I could down even the strongest foe. Further, Type-0 allows players the option to do specific combat challenges to earn rewards, like regenerating health or bonus defensive auras. These can be quite tough to accomplish and the penalty for failing them is death. This creates a nice risk-reward balance, and gives the player full control over how challenging they want their experience to be. Finally, as an aside, Type-0 also features some real-time strategy missions, which involve helping Rubrum troops capture Militesi controlled strongholds. I appreciated that the game tried to change up how you ‘fought’ your enemies, but the system was a little undercooked, ending up as pretty rudimentary and boring. The game lets you skip these, however, so it’s not an issue.

 

Combat was fantastic. SOs, Killsights and character swapping kept each encounter fresh.

Outside of combat, however, Type-0 has substantially less to do than its more fully fleshed out JRPG counterparts. Between missions you have a set amount of in-game time to do tasks, explore the world, etc. You can explore Academia, the homebase for Class Zero, but most of what that involves is micromanaging your characters’ stats and equipment. Everything you do (aside from fiddling around in the menus) consumes the time you have between story quests. Talking to people can give you expository cutscenes and items, but takes up 2h. Leaving Academia to explore the Orience takes up 6. Super-difficult expert trials consume 12. I liked the feeling of having too much to do in such a limited amount of time, but just wish the things you were tasked with doing were interesting. Most people you talk to have a few nonsensical lines and then they give you a Hi-Potion or something. Exploring the world is pretty weak. There’s honestly not a lot to do or see. Towns are never more than one screen, with a shop or two and nothing else. There are a few optional dungeon areas, but they are generally short and unsatisfying. And none of this even addresses the issue that, on your first playthrough, most of this content is just too difficult to complete. By the end of the story you should only be about level 35. So much of the world is filled with level 40+ monsters that getting through it is nearly impossible. You can only dodge every attack and land killsights for so long without making a mistake. And this is a clear design choice, as Type-0 begs the player to play through the game again on NG+. To make sure you go through the game a second, or third time, Type-0 locks off a lot of content through these level gates. I understand why the developers want to encourage a NG+: it gives your game more ‘replay value.’ But it just does not work for Type-0. In a game with a more compelling world and more decipherable mysteries like Bloodborne I’m all for NG+. Not so much here.

Flying around isn't as fun as it looks. Talking to people around Academia
isn't much better.

As a final part of this review, I wanted to talk about how effectively Type-0 was ported from PSP to PS4. I’ve never been a stickler for graphics and the like (gameplay and story are king in my book), but the discussion is worth having here. There is a tremendous generational leap between the PSP and the PS4, and when looking at the graphics it really shows. The game is a smattering of different levels of graphical fidelity. Floor and wall textures look like they are from a PS1 game; many of the NPC models and environments look PS2-era; monsters and attack animations from a PS3 game; and only Class Zero character models look PS4 (since they were pulled directly from the high resolution pre-rendered cutscenes from the original game). Also, to compensate for making the visuals look nicer, intense motion blur was added to the camera. Now, the camera in Type-0 is already problematic. It is erratic and way too fast. But with motion blur on top of that, seeing much of anything while rotating the camera is difficult. Over time you get used to the crazy, blurry camera and find ways to mitigate its negative effects. I just stayed locked onto enemies at all times to keep the camera (relatively) fixed. Still, it was a major frustration for the first couple of hours while playing.

 

The motion blur can get really bad in combat. I quickly found ways to work
around it, fortunately.

Overall, I was quite impressed with what Final Fantasy Type-0 HD had to offer. I was taken aback by how much I liked the combat system, with smart choices all around. Type-0 was certainly more enjoyable than FFXIII, I can say that much. The game’s flaws are obvious and problematic, but if you can put up with them and see things through, you’ll be treated to a pretty solid JRPG.

Final Fantasy Type-0 HD

3/5