Final Fantasy Type-0

Let me start this by saying that Final Fantasy is my favorite series of all-time. From playing the first when I was a kid, it was one of my pivotal keypoints where I became an RPG Gamer. Then came the SNES games, and those are still some games that I consider the peak of the genre. So I might have a certain bias when it comes to the series, a mixture of nostalgia and just pain fandom.

The last Final Fantasy I played prior to this was Final Fantasy X and X-2 (well ignoring Final Fantasy Record Keeper), so I'm a little bit behind on things on what direction the series was going, but I know there was a transition to more Action RPG with Final Fantasy XII. Still it took me by surprise when starting this game up that it did not have my dear turn based battles, but rather replaced by an action/shooter type battle where you dodge and hit. Not quite the mental calculations that I normally associate with JRPG, but it's not too bad since I've been playing more and more WRPG's in the past few years and this draws a lot of elements from it. The battles are fast paced and are pretty much based on how well you can dodge the enemy shots, either close or long range.

Now I liked this game. But there's generally one word I associate Final Fantasy with and that's Flawless. This game is not. Not that it's broken, but there's many things that I don't feel are right. The voice acting is good in itself, but the animations simply don't follow the words... I suspect this might be due to being an English dub, but it seems like they didn't have try to make it match a little, so it loses a little bit of soul in the cutscenes, where it just looks awkward. There is 14 characters on your team and I feel that some of them are rather unbalanced. Well pretty much all of those that only have close range attacks, when in most missions you have to hit unreachable enemies, so the ones that don't have a long-range basic attack are pretty much screwed. And which is related to the lack of ways to revive your team members mid-mission, which is a pain in the ass especially when your long-range characters are all dead. That doesn't feel Final Fantasy-ish where you usually have a white mage to take care of the reviving. There is just one main city with a rather limited area in it, and in between each mission you have some free time to kill where you can talk to people with exclamation points on their heads to kill 2 hours and they give you an item, or you have certain tasks to go do out in the world (like collect X Phantoma or kill 15 or a certain type of enemies). These tasks are pretty much like side quests but I didn't really enjoy that part because the details are so little about the areas to find those things, that whenever I tried one I had to google out more information to figure what the hell I was supposed to do anyway. The free time part gets a little repetitive after a few chapters, and I wish there was just more thought into it. Doesn't feel like the richness of exploring various unique towns that I would expect in a game like this.

Now on the good parts. The HD remaster of the game is pretty great, the graphics are of high quality when you think that it was originally a PSP game, and it's almost on par with AAA PS4 games. The story I quite enjoyed, right from the beginning it made me feel right into the Final Fantasy lore with big wars and crystal talk. The combat is fun and dexterity based most of the time, it's perhaps a little repetitive when you reach the half-way point of the game but then again that's what happens in most games.

I guess I have much more negative things to say about the game than positive, but I still enjoyed it without any major complaints. The best thing is to not come into this game expecting a deep rich epic RPG, but rather a little fun shooter RPG game with a pretty nice story. It took me 22 hours to complete the game on the easiest level (cadet), which I thought wasn't easy at all. The game has quite a reputation for it's high challenge, and I quite believe if I struggled at the lowest level of challenge. I'm a little bit too behing in my backlog to give it a 2nd run on higher difficulty, but I can expect some people would get kicks out of doing that. I'll be interested to see how they continue this world in the upcoming Online version.