Final Fantasy Type-0 HD - Maxi-Geek Review

I will be honest, when Square Enix made the announcement that Type-0 was coming westward, I had no idea it even existed prior to that, let alone as a PSP title, so when I read that it was a HD remastering of the game, my mind went to their recent Kingdom Hearts remasters and I was excited.

Type-0 tells the tale of four nations, one of which decides to invade the others. Each nation is represented by a crystal or a L’cie and grants its citizens different abilities, for those of Orencia, specifically those within the Vermillion Peristylium, they are granted the ability to use magic. When the Miltesi Empire invades, Class Zero is called into action. Class Zero, a body of students from Akademia has the unique ability to absorb or harvest energy from defeated enemies and also are immune to magic jammers that are used by the Militesi Empire.

The story is told over a series of chapters, with each taking on the feel of a war documentary, explaining larger scale events and consequences, leaving you to experience the smaller ones. The problem with the small scale events, even those within the school is that it is hard to connect to the characters you deal with. Class Zero is large and you can bring most if not all of them into combat with you, even if you only have 3 active at a time, so getting to know that many class mates and then all the supporting characters can be a daunting challenge.

When you are interacting with the members of your class, the game will show it to you in a variety of ways, usually with a series of text boxes, sometimes though, you will get a cutscene and these are not fun. The way in which they are shown is ok, but it’s the dialogue the characters speak that hurts and it even feels different to the written dialogue. While not a deal breaker it does hurt that after so many amazing localised games, we have gone backwards here.

Thankfully, the gameplay fares a lot better, which as I said before is because it is not turn based. When you enter a battle, you can lock onto an enemy and commence your attacks, while also being able to move around them swiftly as needed. The combat is the same for all of the members of Class Zero, the only real variation there is what attacks they do, while Ace uses cards that can deal damage from a distance, Deuce uses a flute in combat, which is more helpful to the other members of the party and someone like Cinque who uses a mace is more face to face in terms of combat.

The variation of the members means that you will most likely build a party that you feel comfortable with at the start of the battles, which will result in you getting used to only a selected few. The problem with this system, is in that when you die, your character can be swapped out for someone else and should you not be used to their skills, it can make completing a battle a lot harder. The most frustrating part of the combat through is the lock on system, while it is great to be able to target a specific enemy, it has a habit of sticking to a defeated foe, while you are being attacked by another, we can result in some painful results.

Once you defeat the enemies around you though, you can harvest Phantoma, a magical resource that only Class Zero can acquire. This will restore some health and magic as you collect it, but it can also be used to upgrade your characters back at the school. While it is something you will want to do from time to time, there is no need to rush back after every mission to upgrade. Speaking of the school, between missions you are given free time, in which you can explore the school and pick up side quests. You can only have one side quest active at a time, so you need to be careful about that, but where some of them will have you running from one side of the school to the other, some will take you out of the school entirely and let you roam the world.

As the game was rebuilt from the PSP original, it does suffer from some of the limitations that were in place back then, it is a little strange to enter into the open world and see almost nothing around you. The towns all look the same from the outside and the lack of smaller enemies shown on the over world is a letdown, but those issues pale in comparison to the overall visual presentation of the game. The character themselves look good, at least Class Zero does, most of the secondary characters look lower in quality and when they in the same frame it stands out. What hurts it even worse is that, almost all of the backgrounds look washed out and faded, which is bad.

Even worse than that is the sense of nausea that you will get whenever you attempt to move the camera indoors, everything but the player character becomes blurry, I mean add in some faded textures and it is a painful mess to look upon. When you are in the over world, it is not so bad, but trying to use that camera in combat becomes a battle of its own. The voice work is also not great, but I put this down to the localised script, it just does not feel right, some of the voices suit the characters really well, but even so, listening to what they have to say destroys that.

Thankfully the music and other sounds are pretty great, you will get sick and tired of that same track when you are at the school, but the range of music is pretty nice, getting on a chocobo out in the world, results in a nice catchy tune playing.

When Square Enix where thinking of what they could do for their first next gen final fantasy title, they should have taken more of a look before deciding to port Type-0 across. The areas where they focused on a lot show, but sadly that feels like only a small portion of the game. Final Fantasy fans may find enough here to finish the 30 hour campaign, a second run through might be a struggle though, for everyone else, the combat is fast and fluid and while the story is odd, it is still interesting.

Thanks to Square Enix for supplying the game for review