As a Final Fantasy game, Type-0 HD, is well… different. If you’re expecting something akin to other main line Final Fantasy games you will be sorely disappointed. Type-0 HD, is first and foremost an action RPG. If you were hoping for turn based combat and a ponderous 100+ hour campaign you will be shit out of luck.
Starting as it means to go on, Type-0 opens with a lone soldier battered and broken in the midst of a city on fire, crushed by his Chocobo mount which is also mortally wounded. After an agonisingly long monologue the pair pass away just before the game’s group of protagonists arrive. When they finally do, they don’t attempt to comfort the dying man. Merely stand by and wait for the inevitable, before moving on. In the world of Type -0 no one remembers you when you die, and even fewer seem to care about you just before you do.
The Cadets of Class Zero, make for an interesting band of brothers. Throughout the game you’re tasked with playing as all 14 of them at one point or another, as the elite group are sent to confront the might of a foreign aggressor that has invaded their peaceful homeland and broken a centuries old pact in the process, in a thinly veiled allegory of World War II.
On the whole it’s a heavy handed but surprisingly touching polemic that explores the tragedy of war, namely that the young always suffer and they’re always the first to be forgotten.
Though the game the tone isn’t as bleak as its opening would make out, mostly thanks to the lighter moments doled out during the quiet time between the games action packed missions. In that way that the narrative seems somewhat schizophrenic at times, as time is split between battling the forces of The Milites Empire and navigating the perils and pitfalls of cadet life. One minute you’re stabbing a soldier in the throat with a pair of daggers and the next you’re being asked by some guy on campus if you could tell that girl in your class that he likes her. As one fellow cadet muses ‘just because there’s a war on doesn’t mean you don’t can’t fall in love.’
The only thing that holds the story back is its links to the Fabula Nova Crystallis, as originally it was envisioned as a spin off to Final Fantasy XIII, therefore there’s talk of L’Cie and other elements and entities introduced in Lightning and co.’s adventure that will mean bugger all to anyone who had the good sense to avoid it. Though you can to do some serious amounts of reading around the setting and history of Oriance within the Academy’s library if you want to. It seems a bit bloody rich to expect your audience to walk in with an entire game’s worth of prior knowledge and then some. I played FFXIII, and even I had trouble following what the characters were prattling on about at times.
The bulk of the action is split between going out on combat missions and preparing for your next excursion back at the academy. Combat missions are short but generally enjoyable as you lead a party of three cadets into battle to liberate the nation of Rebrum by liberating towns and destroying enemy factories; generally causing as much grief for the invading forces as you can.
I say Combat mission and I really do mean it, each excursion is basically one big battle sequence. Using three cadets at a time that can be switched between on the fly, with surprisingly good AI that do a good job of covering your back by using support magic and generally not sucking.
Combat itself is similar to Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core with attacks performed by basically building simple combos with the attack button, these can either be spammed for minimal damage or you can focus in on an enemy by pressing R1/ RB and waiting for an ‘emeries tell’ enabling you to perform critical hits when the reticule turns yellow or killshots when it turns red that, as the name suggests enables you to outright kill a foe with one well timed blow.
You can also dodge, which is something you’ll be doing a lot of especially against bosses and some of the bigger foes, as each squad member is pretty good at dishing out damage but can’t take a hit, usually ending up on their arses and susceptible to more punishment or taken out in a single blow. Thankfully downed members can be replaced with other members of the class until all fourteen are dead.
Magic and other special attacks are assigned to face buttons, but require the caster to be standing still in order to be activated. More powerful spells and abilities require more charging time before they can be unleashed. In theory this should create an interesting risk vs reward mechanic, forcing players to take cover in order to prepare themselves before releasing bigger attacks, but in practice it usually just ends with your specials getting interrupted before you can use them, which in turn leads to some frustrating moments. Likewise the ability for party members to regenerate health by standing still is great in theory, but simply doesn’t work in the heat of battle because you’re too busy ducking and diving or cover is all but non-existent, so most of the time you simply don’t bother.
The most fun you can have within combat though is to sacrifice a party member in order to summon an Eidolon; the Nova Crystallis versions of the summoning monsters from other Final Fantasy games. For the sake of not being able to use a whiny school kid with playing cards for a weapons you can replace the sap with the likes of Ifrit, Shiva, Bahamut and more besides, albeit for a brief period. But that’s a deal worth making every time. The Eidolons take the place of the whole squad for a brief period of time and basically wreck the joint; unleashing devastating attacks whilst able to soak up a godly amount of damage. Basically they’re the treat for putting in the effort to get through the earlier sections of the game. Though Odin does make a characteristically badass appearance during the game’s opening mission.
On the whole the game’s battles are rather frantic, and thanks mainly to an occasionally jittery camera takes a little getting used to, but once you get into the swing of things the system really comes into it is own and there’s a great sense of achievement from successfully avoiding an enemy’s attacks before countering with a killblow and watching them explode.
With 14 characters to choose from there’s also plenty of room for experimentation as each member of class zero handles differently and finding the right balance of support, offence and ranged fighters is key to success. Some are more interesting than others. My personal favourites (during fights anyway) were the scythe wielding Sice, with her incredibly wide range and flurries of strikes. King with his Dual Pistols that could just sit back and demolish most monsters from afar and Jack, that though slow and unable to dodge, took out most enemies with a single swing of his bloody great katana.
During your downtime between missions you’ll be given a certain period in order to train, upgrade your equipment, carry out side quests for various NPCs and get to know your fellow classmates. Each action takes a set amount of time and slowly ebs away until you are forced to go out to battle again.
Do you leave the academy for six hours to grind a few levels against monsters in the world map? Maybe spend some time taking in a lecture for a couple of hours to improve your magic abilities, or catch up with your classmates to improve your synergy ranking to give you buffs by forming a team with certain characters. Or you could always spend some time doing a spot of Chocbo breeding down at the ranch in order to make jaunts out into the wilderness easier and even use them in battle (I know, awesome or what).
This school yard element was no doubt conceived to make you feel more attached to Class Zero, but sadly, mostly thanks to the game’s god awful English voice acting it made me happier to send the little brats off to their demise, Especially Jack. He’s so useful in the missions but god is he an obnoxious prick. A ‘Class Clown’ with an annoying habit of ending every sentence with either ‘Yo’, or ‘Word’ or some other lame maxim that made marching him into battle and sacrificing him to summon an Eidolon at the earliest opportunity all the easier.
Aside from the shonky voice acting, Type-0’s presentation is generally pretty good, especially if you consider that it was originally released on the PSP back in 2011. In particular the reworked character models and greatly enhanced lighting make the game look noticeably better than the original, though this is countered somewhat by the environments which despite their upgraded textures still feel flat. Then again I guess there’s only so much you can do to spruce up a game from four years ago, originally developed for hardware that was antiquated at the time of its original release let alone four years later.
Speaking of antiquated, Type-0’s approach to character advancement and side quests is awkward, outdated and unintuitive, and should really have been revamped for the HD port. New weapons and accessories in the in the armoury don’t display whether they are more powerful than your current equipment. You can only go one side quest at a time and there’s no means of tracking them either.
The thing that narked me off the most though was the save system, specifically the lack of auto save. If you die in combat, there’s no option to simply restart from the last area entered or even the beginning of a mission. Just load your last tossing save, which if you haven’t for a while seeing as this is 2015 and not 1995 and you usually don’t have to bother at all, as most games these days save for you when you reach a new milestone, means you lose all your sodding progress up to that point. There is no logical reason for this bollocks, especially in games of this scale. For all its faults even Final Fantasy XIII had this most basic of features.
Still, the minor annoyances and occasional awkward moment, even having to replay several hours all over again, don’t detract from the game’s high; sacrificing school children to summon Dragons in the midst of a heated battle against giant war machines, the political intrigue the macro narrative is draped in and some genuinely poignant moments more than make Type-0 HD worth a punt.
Just don’t go in expecting it to reach heady heights of its SNES/PSX era forbearers or you’ll be sorely disappointed.
