Final Fantasy Type-0 is a port of a PSP title released in 2011 in Japan, and never in the rest of the world. Originally called Final Fantasy Agito XIII, it was supposed to be one of three games linked by the Fabula Nova Crystallis mythos, along with Final Fantasy XIII and the game formerly known as Final Fantasy Versus XIII. In a strange move Type-0 remained a Japanese exclusive, despite being the most “Final Fantasy” of all the games released in the trilogy. Had it been released on the PSP four years ago it would have been considered the “true” release of the strange Fabula Nova experiment. Now in 2015 as an HD port for a console, it is a hard game to review. On the one hand it has an interesting world, interesting premise, a lot of variety, and a different take on some core Final Fantasy and Fabula Nova concepts. On the other hand it has several problems, some of which are built into the design of the game, and others which seem to come from porting a PSP game to an 8th generation console.
The Dominion of Rubrum, the Militesi Empire, the Kingdom of Concordia and the Lorican Alliance. These four nations lived in Harmony until the Fire Natio- Erm… Militesi Empire attacked! This is a bit of a cheap shot. The world is reminiscent to Avatar: The Last Airbender, but it is not stolen of course. The four nations use magic powered by the magic of each crystal called magitek (which will sound familiar to FF 6 veterans). The Militesi Empire using this magitek technology comes up with two powerful weapons: the Ultima spell, which in this incarnation of the franchise has become a weapon of mass destruction. The other weapon is a crystal jammer, which severs the members of the other nations from their crystals, disabling their magic and their magitek to make them easier targets for the Empire to invade.
We start the game as the Empire is attacking the Dominion of Rubrum, and taking down its troops easily as they cannot use their magic to fight back. Just as all seems lost, a group of teenage cadets arrives in the middle of the battle. Able to use magic, they help destroy the crystal jammer, and beat back the invading force. You find that they are Agito Cadets, students that have gone through an experimental procedure to allow them to cast spells from a different source than the crystal. They are then transferred to the Rubrum military academy, where the leadership of the dominion decides the students will be the ones that will play the pivotal role in the effort to reclaim their territory.
Final Fantasy Type-0 actually makes good use of the plot to introduce interesting details into the story. It seems to deal with death a lot more than other Final Fantasy games. When people die, the crystal erases them from the memories of the living so that they do not suffer. This instills characters with a special type of terror at the prospect of death where there is no memory of them. As this is a war story, this theme that persists throughout the game. Type-0 also takes advantage of this to link it to the gameplay. The game will reward you for finding memory tags, which soldiers carry to battle to make sure that people will not forget them if they die.
The game does account for this with little details that flesh it out. Characters will describe, for example, writing the names of everyone in their unit before a mission. If when they return there is a name the do not recognize, then they know that person did not make it back. The game is filled with small details like that. It goes a long way towards making the world feel cohesive and alive and getting the player involved in the plot. Type-0 seems to have the daring to go where other JRPG’s do not necessarily thread. For example, fairly early in the game you will see a cut-scene where the ruling council of Rubrum is choosing whether to build the strategy around children. Teenage protagonists are very common in JRPG’s and in Japanese media in general and it is usually taken at face value. It was interesting to see old men making the decision to send kids to war with no small amount of trepidation.
The story centers around a group of Agito cadets called Class Zero. Unfortunately, there are fourteen cadets in total, making some more important and well-developed than others. The game does try to get you to use most of them by allowing you to switch them before and during combat but unfortunately characters only level up when you use them which makes it very difficult to balance a team of fourteen of them. The large roster also means you probably won’t get to spend time with the characters that you find most interesting, since the narrative mainly revolves around three students: Ace, Machina, and Rem. I didn’t really feel like I got to spend a lot of time with the more interesting party members and as is often the case with these things, the main characters tended to be the least interesting in the group.
Progression in the game is strange. The way upgrades are doled out seems inconsistent, and it is often complicated to have to track the progress of your whole group. To make matters worse, the game has a specialty shop that has rare and unique items that you need to purchase using SSP. SSP is extremely rare, and the game is designed for you to grind your missions for it. In fact a lot of the game is built around the concept of grinding. The game will allow you to re-play missions you have completed, and will expect you to do so, as the difficulty ramps up considerably from mission to mission. Your characters also die when they use summons, which will mean replacing that character with another one, making it crucial to have everyone at high level. This seems to be encouraged further by the fact that while the game does limit your time roaming the grounds of the compound where the characters live and study in their down time. For example you will have 8 hours of down time, and speaking to character that gives you a potion costs you two hours. Going off grounds for an unlimited amount of time to grind only costs 6 hours. Replaying old missions has no cost at all.
The combat in Type-0 can be fun, but it is very hectic. In the vein as FFXV and other recent Final Fantasy entries, the game attempts to implement an action based RPG system with varied success. You are free to switch between your party members and to sub them in and out. The AI of the party is good enough to handle weak enemies, but it doesn’t seem to be able to account for bosses. This means that in high stakes battles you will likely have to just control a healer and run around healing your party as they deal damage. Because it was a game initially made for the PSP, it is common for enemies to spawn mid encounter. Clearly a way for the devs to handle large parties on the PSP’s limited hardware capabilities, so you are never quite sure how far do you have to go to finish an encounter. This can make your healing duties difficult.
The PSP origins of the game is also shown in the game’s explorable zones. These areas are divided into smaller sections and while the updated models of the characters look great in HD, looking at the environments in the full glory of an HD-TV you notice just how repetitive and empty they are. The same is true of the world map, which seems vast but is also largely empty. Except for random encounters that is. In an interesting move, Final Fantasy Type 0 features the option of fighting another wave in certain battles to make the grinding easy, but there are still so many random encounters in the map, regardless of how many waves you take out, that the only real reason to use it is convenience.
The camera has only 4 positions meaning that you can only turn it 90 degrees. It is often not enough, to suit your needs as the characters can move in eight directions. On a separate note, there seems to be an added blur motion to the camera when it rotates, which gave me motion sickness. I am not a someone who suffers from motion sickness often, and I have read of others who also experienced this, so keep it in mind if you feel like picking this up.
Final Fantasy Type-0 is a Final Fantasy game with good ideas. It takes some of the concepts from the core franchise, and from the Fabula Nova Crystallis theme and uses them to craft something that feels new and unique, while still feeling like a Final Fantasy game. It is also a game that has a refreshing, if grim, take on the propensity of media in general to use teenage protagonists in a war context. Unfortunately, its PSP origins hold it back. Even more importantly, the grinding that is built into the game’s system makes it incredibly tedious to play. While one could give Type-0 a pass for the growing pains of going for the PSP to the PS4, the grinding is a design element that is impossible to ignore. I’d recommend skipping this one, especially for the $60 price tag. Wait until is on sale. If you didn’t pre-order it, you will also not get the Final Fantasy XV demo, so you might as well wait until it is on sale or buy it used.
