Type-0 HD is an HD port of what was originally known Final Fantasy Agito XIII, part of the Fabula Nova Crystallis project (which is latin for the new tale of the crystal). The game originally released on the PSP in Japan. Square Enix heard their fans begging to localize it and finally brought it over to us. But was it worth the wait?
GAMEPLAY
It’s not your typical Final Fantasy game. However, anyone who has played Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII for the PSP would recognize the play style almost immediately. Unlike Crisis Core, this game is party based, allowing you to play as multiple characters through the whole story. A hack ’n slash RPG of sorts, this game requires a little more than just button mashing. You have to dodge and roll out of the way, learn enemy attacks and wait for the perfect opportunity to strike them critically if you want to do major damage. These are known as break sights. Along with that, you have kill sights, which when pulled off allow you to deal an instant death blow.
With 14 playable characters, you will be level grinding, replaying missions, spending time in the battle simulator and doing quests just to level everyone up. Nothing is worse than hitting a sudden difficulty spike (which does happen frequently) and wiping all of your high level characters when nearly finished, to be left with nothing but the one you neglected to level up. Fortunately, random encounters will sometimes ask if you want to keep fighting, which will help speed up the leveling process.
Each character is named after the japanese pronunciation of playing cards with the exception of 2 characters, named Machina and Rem. Each character wields their own unique weapon and play style, and you will definitely end up playing some of your favorites more than others. From Ace, who wields tarot cards like the X-men Gambit, Trey’s bow, Sice’s sythe, all the way up to Sword’s and Hand guns from Queen and King respectively. You are sure to find a character you really enjoy playing as most.
Outside of weapons you have magic and Eidolons (or summons) that you can level up in one fashion or another. This game focuses on war so it makes sense most of it will take place in a battle screen.
Occasionally, there will be real time strategy events taking place on the over world. Yes, that’s right. An overworld. I was happy and surprised when suddenly I found myself in the overworld. There hasn’t been one since Final Fantasy IX. While I was not a fan of the RTS style battles, those are so few and far between that I am ok with their part in the game.
STORY
As I mentioned before, there are multiple characters you can switch to while playing. This made it really difficult to grow attached to characters based on character development as everything was far too stretched out between everyone. But, if this game did have main characters, it would be Machina and Rem. The story seems to fixate on these two.
The plot of the story is familiar yet fresh. There are 4 crystals, each being guarded and protected by 4 kingdoms. When the Emperor of the kingdom of the Militese Empire goes missing, the Imperial Marshal Cid takes up the command of the kingdom and declares war on the other 3 nations.
All looks grim for the nation of the fire crystal, when suddenly an elite group of cadets known as Class 0 rise up seemingly out of the flames of war and push back the empire.
The 14 playable characters make up Class 0, an elite class of High School aged students at their school Akademeia.
Without spoiling the story, Class 0 rises up against the invading Militesi empire. The story that unfolds in the process is rich and full of unexpected events, death, plot twists and surprises. That is,If you are willing to read, and read some more, and watch a cutscene that doesn’t exactly make sense to you, find some obscure side quest that fills some holes.… Oh and to really get the whole story, you have to play through it a second time on a New Game+ mode. But this is what Japanese RPGs used to be like. Lot’s of reading, talking to NPCs and replaying it just to see if you may have missed some great nugget of information.
The story itself is amazing. It plays on the theme of war, and how we send our young to fight our battles. In fact, the game is so focused around death that you will learn really early into the story that when someone dies, memories of them cease to exist.
The crystals wipe those memories from everyone to prevent them from grieving and hurting from the pain of loss. Anyone who goes off to battle leave behind a knowing tag, which is essentially a dog tag. If they have someone’s dog tag and don’t recall who they are, that means someone close to them died and their memories have been erased.
It’s a sad thought, and the story will weaken you with that fact, right before delivering a shocking blow, like seeing a young girl get shot. It really helps drive home how devastating war is.
And with war comes spilled blood. This game has lots of it. When it comes to Final Fantasy and blood, it’s extremely rare. And when I say extremely, the only time I can recall blood in Final Fantasy is the blood trail in the Shrina Building of Final Fantasy VII, or the opening cut scene to Final Fantasy VIII. Type-0 takes it to a whole new level. After all, it is about war and those sacrificed to fight it.
By the end of even your first play through, the final bit of story with have you in awe.
Sound
The audio for this game has been overhauled as well. The music is phenomenal. Remixes of Final Fantasy staples, with a Crisis Core feel lend just the right tone of war to the soundtrack. The voice acting however is hit or miss. Some voice actors either over acted or under acted. I was sure until this game nothing was more annoying than hearing a Moogle talk and end each sentence with Kupo. But here I stand corrected. The character Nine ended nearly every sentence with Yo.
There are points where the voice acting is spot on. Thankfully most of these are during really important plot points. If you can look passed the fact that it looks like you are watching an English Dubbed Japanese movie, where the mouths keep moving long after the audio stops, you will enjoy the vocal narration, for the most part.
Controls
The controls felt good for the most part. The camera looked like a fast action movie camera pan even when turning just a little bit. While many people found this annoying, I think from a design stand point it was intentional and added in to make the player feel like they were right in the middle of a frantic warzone. It added a fast paced, frenzied tone.
Occasionally the camera would be obstinate, or my targeting cursor wouldn’t focus on the enemy I wanted, but I got used to working around it.
Graphics
While the game is an HD port, I wouldn’t quite say everything made the HD cut. It’s obvious within the first few hours of the game, those important to the story look better than those who don’t. Unimportant characters seemed to be edgy, had blurry faces, or the textures didn’t scale well and didn’t receive the same attention as Class-0’s cadets.
The best graphics overhaul in my personal opinion came to the environment. Marble floors and glass surfaces had a nice shine and reflection. Lighting effects from energy, crystals and even the sunlight were pretty good. The jump to cutscenes felt disconnected because they felt like they were from a different palette but even they looked amazing. All in all though, I felt Square Enix had given last year’s HD Remaster of Final Fantasy X more attention. It’s looks great, but it barely pushes next gen. I’d go as far as saying it looks last gen.
Content
This games offers lots to do. But sometimes at a cost. In between missions, you have a set amount of “hours” before Mission Day that you can fill however you like. If you were to go up and talk to someone with an exclamation above their head, you can easily use up 2 hours from you free time just talking to that NPC, but sometimes you may get an item, backstory or even a quest out of it. If you pick up a quest that requires you to leave Akademia, you will loose 6 hours just leaving. Don’t accidentally step back in as you will need to spend more time to leave. Always have a plan and explore your options first.
As mentioned before, there is a second play thru. This will allow you to really get everything you may have run out of time for. Some of the content is only achievable on the second playthrough.
The extensive amount of content in this game just comes in the form of replayability. Whether or not this is your thing will determine just how much you get out of this game.
If you are the type of person who likes to power through the main mission and don’t care about the side lines much, you won’t find a whole lot of content to appreciate. If you play a game and power through, disregarding much of the story and simply play for the mechanics, you may grow tired of this game halfway through. This game is really set on telling a story, and requires the player to care enough to learn about the world created for it.
Personally, I play games for the story line, which is why I have always been so fond of JRPGs. I love escaping to a games world and learning as much as I can. Much like a good book. I enjoyed this game, as confusing as it may have been at times. But when I got confused, I looked for the answer and pieced it together.
This game was solid if you keep in mind that it was originally a PSP game, and that it’s part of the Fabula Nova Crystalis project. If you hadn’t figured it out already, that means Final Fantasy XIII and the sequels were also born from that.
Overall, I give this game an 8 / 10. A few things could’ve made this game better. A better presentation of the story without the information overload, more care to the graphics, and removing the linear feeling of the game play. But it’s still a solid title and I would recommend checking it out.
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