It's no secret that the original Final Fantasy Type-0 was released almost four years ago on the PSP before recently hitting America shores this month on current gen consoles. A member of the announced Fabula Nova Crystallis, along with Final Fantasy XIII (now it's entire sub-series), the Japan only Final Fantasy Agito mobile game, and the upcoming Final Fantasy XV (originally Final Fantasy Versus XIII). Despite getting a very positive reception in Japan, where it was added to the PSP's Ultimate Hits collection, it was unknown if American fans would ever get a chance to see Type-0 in action. After fans let it be known that there very much was a market for it outside of Japan, Square-Enix decided to release it as an HD Remaster for Playstation 4 and Xbox One. Well... was the wait worth it?
From the very start of the game, it's very obvious that the tone in Final Fantasy Type-0 is much different from the majority, if not the entire, Final Fantasy series. We see blood, blood! Wartime killing, and the death of a bloodied chocobo. The entire opening scene sets the tone of the rest of the game, giving it sort of a gritty sort of feel to it. War plays a central role in the story, as this is very much a story about conflict between nations and the young men and women who fight for their country. While we've all seen war-based (or partially war-based) stories in the series, such as the rampant wars started by Alexandria in Final Fantasy IX, and the wars between Archadia and Rozzaria that Damascus gets caught in the middle of in Final Fantasy XII, this story just feels different. The story still takes the usual twists and turns we've come to see from Japanese RPGs, which isn't a bad thing. It gives a feeling of familiarity into something that feels so vastly different, at least in the onset.
Despite the early feelings of a departure from the usual tone of Final Fantasy games, the game still brings with it many throwbacks to it's lineage. The aforementioned chocobos, Moogles are seen throughout Akedemia, much of the music is based upon classic tracks from previous games, classic summons return as Eidolens, and there is a character who looks like the long lost sister of Lightning from Final Fantasy XIII. Even the setting of Class Zero from Akedemia will remind some fans of SeeD from Balamb Garden in Final Fantasy VIII. While it seems to many fans that Square-Enix has forgotten what makes a Final Fantasy game a Final Fantasy game over the past few iterations, it's refreshing to still see moments like the ones in Type-0.
While this may be a high definition remaster, it's still not hard to tell that this is, at it's core, a four year old PSP game when you're looking at it. The color palette is more varied, and some of the textures are more defined, but it can't completely cover up the handheld bones of the game. By no means is the game "ugly", but it looks far from a Playstation 4 game, which makes the choice of releasing it strictly for Playstation 4 and Xbox One odd.
There is a feeling that Square-Enix went back to what fans loved about Final Fantasy, it continued it's recent trend of changing and evolving the core combat in their games. Combat in Type-0 is handled more along the lines of a Kingdom Hearts game, than a Final Fantasy game. But then again, there's been no such thing as a typical Final Fantasy combat system, post-Final Fantasy X. Upon engaging an enemy, your party of three cadets quickly begin taking care of their enemies. Players control one member of the party, while AI handles the other two. Your basic attack is handled by Square, while Triangle and X can be mapped with any of the abilities or magic you unlock and learn as you progress. Circle is somewhat context sensitive. While moving, Circle will allow you to dodge and maneuver quickly around your foes. While stationary, it will cast a defensive spell/ability that you map to it, be it a block, magic Wall to repel enemies, or the basic Cure spell. To make things more manageable, R1 is used to "lock" onto your targets which does make things easier landing hits on the target you want (especially with some of the more hectic characters to use, like Sice). However, there were times that I felt as if the locking on mechanic was broken to an extent. I'd be walking towards my intended victim, but hitting R1 would not lock onto it immediately despite multiple hits. Now, eventually I would get lock onto my enemy, and it really only happened in the opening moments of the random encounters from the overworld. But it did hamper my abilities to quickly dispatch foes.
While you do have a party of three cadets, which you choose who you want to bring with you, you can quickly switch between them with a hit of the left or right D-Pad button. This is handy when you need to switch to a ranged fighter to dispatch enemies that are out of melee range, or if you want to cast a spell that the usually decent AI is taking too long to. When one of your cadets falls in battle, you can quickly replace the downed member with a fresh body with a simple hit of the up button on the D-Pad. All in all, everything works well in spite of the few hiccups.
When heading into battle or on a mission, you have a pool of 14 cadets to choose from. Each one has their own strengths and weakness, and they all feel different from one another in battle.They also tend to follow the basic Final Fantasy class type: You have your bard, a samuari type character, a dual wielding dagger character, a monk and so on. You're given free reign to develop them as you'd like, to a degree. When leveling up, your characters earn AP which is then used to unlock different abilities that can then be used in battle. Perhaps you'd rather have your Deuce have two spells equipped instead of a spell and an ability, or have your Eight have two stances available instead of a spell equipped. You can do that, which lets you mold your team into how you'd most like to use them. The chance to do that is refreshing, however since you can only swap characters at save points or when someone dies during combat, if you build a character only to find out that those combinations of abilities do not meld well together, you can find yourself at a disadvantage.
With having such a large cast of characters that will all be needed and only earn experience while in battle, there are times when you'll have to "grind" to get everyone to par since having a low level character can hinder you on tougher missions if you need to pull them into battle. Whether you hate grinding or not, Type-0 does it's best to alleviate that pain, as you have quite a few ways to get your characters experience. Between missions, you can listen to lectures in your classroom, some of which reward experience points. You could also use the training grounds to earn experience for whatever character you choose. It also helps that battles are so fast paced, that grinding via the random overworld encounters doesn't take forever.
The game is not without it's flaws though. With so much to do, the game does not always do it's best to explain some of it's mechanics to you. You can level up your spells via "phantoma" that is harvested from defeated enemies, but the game does not do much more than tell you "Hey, you can level your spells using this machine here". I found myself dropping points into the various spells parameters (such as MP cost, casting time, and power), watching the gauge I was leveling go up as another one went down. Does this mean as I leveled MP Cost, the spell power was going down? I don't know, and the game didn't elaborate on it either. For another example we can look at the battles on the overworld. As you run from city to city, you'll see the return of random encounters for most of your battles. However, there are also some enemies that you can see, that will engage you in combat when touched. Early on, these enemies were mainly Dual Horns, which fans of Final Fantasy X will recognize. What stands out from the usual fodder found in random battles was that these dual horns were all level 99 as opposed to how normal enemies were mostly scaled to my parties level. Never once was it mentioned to avoid these monsters or even that they were there. Situations like this are few and far between, but they padded the difficulty at times when I found it unnecessary.
This leads me to the two major complaints when it comes to the game: the camera and the voice work. I don't think it'd surprise me if I heard of people getting motion sickness when it came to the camera. I'm not talking about the camera as it follows your character around, but when you move it around via the right stick. Square-Enix apparently turned the speed up to 11, as it will fly around with the slightest touch, which showcases the blur as the environments around whip by. Personally, I did not find it as terrible as some, but it is definitely jarring as you're exploring, or trying to navigate to certain items or to certain hallways.
The voice work, though, is more of a mixed bag. While none of it stands out as amazing, it has it's many ups and downs with more downs than ups. While there aren't many instances of down right terrible work, the ones that are bad are quite bad and even the best characters can't make up for it. Party members Cinque and Nine are hands down the worst offenders. Cinque sounds as if she's secretly the child robot from Small Wonder smuggled into a Final Fantasy game, her speech disjointed, awkward and devoid of all emotion. Nine, though, is more a victim of writing than acting. Nearly all of his lines are punctuated with "hey!" or "yo!", sometimes multiple times in one paragraph. It's completely unneeded and kills his character at times, I'm not even sure why anyone would think ending one sentence with "hey" is a good idea". We're talking about times when you'll see him saying something along the lines of "I'm not going to take that, hey! You're not going to get away with that, yo!", or "That's supposed to make me feel better, hey?" Granted, I paraphrased those lines, but still. It's ridiculous and more than a few times, cringe worthy. Most of the other characters are decent and some good. Although, don't expect any to crack your personal favorite RPG character lists.
It's been a long time waiting for Final Fantasy Type-0 to hit our shelves and came during a time when the question of whether Final Fantasy is still worthy of all the fanfare it gets. Once you actually play the game, it's hard not to see why it did so well overseas and why so many fans wanted to see it localized. It may not challenge anyone for the title of best RPG in this console generation, it is without a doubt one of the best Final Fantasy games since the change of direction that came with Final Fantasy XII. It both brings enough changes to stay relevant in a time when the industry is dominated by open world, action-focused western RPGs, as well as the feelings of the classic Japanese RPGs that have seemingly started to drift away from the console scene. There is a ton of content available to the player, a decent at worst/interesting at best story as it's backbone, and fast-paced, tight combat to fall back on. The flaws that are very evident aren't enough to bring the package as a whole down, but are glaring enough to keep a good game from being great. If the direction Square-Enix went with Type-0 is indicative of where they want to go with the series as a whole, as opposed to what we got in Final Fantasy XIII-2 and Lightning Returns, there could be a very bright future in the series.