Before playing, a lot appealed to me about Type-0. After playing, not even chocobo mating appealed to me. And for a FFVII fan there can be no greater insult than that.
'A Final Fantasy like no other, with gore!', people said. What is more, the trailers showed off the long-awaited return of the JRPG world map, complete with chocobo riding and even an airship. This was - supposedly -Before playing, a lot appealed to me about Type-0. After playing, not even chocobo mating appealed to me. And for a FFVII fan there can be no greater insult than that.
'A Final Fantasy like no other, with gore!', people said. What is more, the trailers showed off the long-awaited return of the JRPG world map, complete with chocobo riding and even an airship. This was - supposedly - Final Fantasy as it should be: for a new generation of gamers, with throwbacks to the classics. Fourteen playable characters, each with their own style, to top it all off. How could it possibly go wrong?...
...In reality? It is nothing more than a low budget, hollow mess that somehow manages to merge Japanese school setting silliness (Persona this ain't, folks) and mini-skirts with... FFXIII's stellar writing. And for anyone that has heard 'L'cie' said countless times without context already, they will know full well what this means: how NOT to tell a story. There are no characters to care for, or even like as people: just poorly dubbed, terribly written caricatures that each have their own distinctive quirk, such as the guy that says "yo!" and struggles to form sentences, or the four-eyed uptight class president type that pushes up her glasses as she speaks, all smart-like. Only a handful get more than a few lines of voiced dialogue, and the characterisation of the one that does say a lot consists of the following: "You killed my brother by existing, MNEH, so I am going to sulk and be emo over in my corner. MNEH!"
Graphically, it is awful for a PS4 game, as expected... yet somehow still worse than expected. It looks strangely enough like a PSP game; one poorly disguised as a PS4 game, rather than a true remaster. The main character models were edited, the school... and little else. However, the flat faces and horrid textures are only noticeable after experiencing the motion blur added to try to mask the graphical inadequacies. When locked-on and dodge rolling, the game went to great lengths to convince me it was not a game created with camera control in mind. Combat literally becomes a chaotic blur of invincibility frame rolling. And aside from a FEW scenes not running off the in-game graphics engine, such as the almost Advent Children-esque ending where the cast assembled to cry together like I very much wanted to whilst playing, every scene consisted entirely of characters repeating THE SAME exact basic mannerisms over and over as they remained standing/static. It is no prettier to watch than it is to play. By the time the game looks almost impressive, the credits start playing. Seriously.
But no-one got this for the graphics... or for Type-0 even, in truth. Most knew it was a remaster of a PSP game that, more importantly, came with a FFXV demo. In an attempt to validate my PS4 purchase as a JRPGer of old, I got it anyway... only to later lament my idiocy. What really matters is the game itself. The best way to describe it is as FFXIII gone wrong - if you do not think it did already, that is - with a school setting. It is on the grimdark side of grim where the main characters refuse to die even when they are killed in battle (unlike in, say, Valkyria Chronicles) but do have some blood splattered on their faces from time to time; just to show how dark and gritty the world is. The boy / girl band character posing at the start was a warning sign from the Gods I should have been more receptive of, honestly. The game starts with a typically long-winded Japanese 'JUST DIE ALREADY!' random death that drained all of the impact from it without it just... happening. It went on for so damned long that the lead (?), Ace, went back to the guy to see if he was dead yet / say goodbye after having only just said hello. But, hey: a chocobo died. All people seemed to talk about before the release is how *A* giant chicken died. Right at the start. I mean, that is as dark as you can get for a Final Fantasy game, right?... It is just a pity no other chocobos died for forced tragic effect at all throughout the story. I guess one was enough to set the tone, ready for the player to jump happily into school life.
In this dark world of Japanese 'THE HORROR' dread, you spend most of your time at school--interacting with blocky-faced teenage NPCs. Because, OF COURSE, the main characters are a diverse cast of elites in 'Class Zero'; fit for any anime. A moggle says "Kupo~!" one of two ways over and over as it teaches you how to get experience points without doing anything (which actually works better than killing things, when offered) in mentally stimulating SAME EXACT SCREEN panning lessons. Even more exciting, one can pursue their innermost desire of spying on a flirty instructor with big boobs by planting a camera on her gifts and and casting 'sheer' to remove her clothes, before proceeding to admire her thong and bra combo. It truly is a realistic Final Fantasy, in that sense. Every school day is spent in non-lesson bliss; running around the same select few areas after every mission hoping to see new characters with exclamation marks above their heads to ironically waste the limited time given before missions in order to not waste time. By the end of the game, after 40+hrs of doing this, you will either be left desperately trudging on every 2-6hrs in a attempt to spy on a woman, like me, or just fast-forwarding to missions to end your suffering. In many ways, the school aspect of the game is a subtle metaphor representing the life cycle of the average human male.
But what about life outside school--THE WORLD MAP? Well, the only monsters visible on the world map are generic lev99 ones designed with the sole intent of ruining the day of the unwitting. There are also chocobos running about for you to run into and presumably lasso into submission; keeping later to force to breed in the quest for 100 chicobos. And that is your lot. The towns are the exact same in each region, with the only differences being some being corridors and some having side-streets. Some have quests but few to none are worthwhile. FFXIII's towns had more life, and that had no towns. There is a 'RTS' mini-game where you get to kick robots with chocobos until your troops take over bases (unfortunately not as fun as it reads), but describing it as strategic is a stretch. Tacked-on is much more fitting. There *IS* an airship, and shooting other ships down as they make the exact same death cry is as close to fun as Type-0 ever gets. But here is the thing: it is optional and so well hidden the trophies relating to it have the lowest percentages in the game. You need to kill level 44 enemies to get it, even if you find it, which requires either easy difficulty and/or abusing secret training (gain exp when not playing) to over-level. It is NG+ content. So, basically, 95% of players will never know of or use an airship, when the main selling point of this game for fans in the know is the world map. Just think about that for a moment, for the sake of my sanity. Not that there is anything to see or do when you have an airship: it just avoids the many joys of riding on a chocobo for five consecutive minutes and allows you to shoot things. There is a level 99 tower you can fly to, but that can go take a running jump. No. Just no.
And now we get to the combat. A good real-time battle system with depth it most certainly is not. I have already detailed how the camera goes crazy when locked-on, and the lock-on system requiring you to hold the R1 button was a source of early annoyance until the discovery of a setting that enabled me to not have to hold it to lock-on. WHY NOT JUST HAVE THAT SETTING ON TO BEGIN WITH!? The combat comes down to this: you either use a melee, mid-range or long-range character. Two AI party members join you; happy to suicide against any and every high-level enemy. Each character has four attacks, with every character having their own unique skills and style; ranging from a samurai to an archer. But what it basically comes down to is these three types and magic, which you will most likely never use since it costs so much MP to cast and it is easier / faster just to beat everything silly with your weapons, before draining their souls (no, really!). After set attacks, enemies have a red target appear - signifying a 'killsight' chance - and you can then one-shot them during a very short window of opportunity. Or, an orange 'breaksight' for massive damage. The end. That is all the depth the battle system has to offer, aside from summoning summons to control for 1-2min periods, at the cost of a character's life. You will be blindly rolling as the screen blurs to avoid damage whilst staying locked-on (you can only get killsights when locked-on) or just mashing / holding your way to victory. And, by the way: the game does not tell you how much experience you get (a tiny amount, no doubt; not even worth displaying and better just to let the moggle boost you), nor can you check what skills do or change anything on the fly--only at save points. I eventually worked out that holding attack auto-attacks and is often better than just pressing the button for certain characters. A total guesswork micromanagement cluster is an apt summary. Rarely fun but never rewarding.
Also: you are meant to die against nearly all of the bosses towards the end. They are level 50, 65, 99, etc. NG+ victories only. So, no skill is required: you die and you win. It begs the philosophical question: can a loss truly be a win?.... The second battle against the flying Macross transforming mecha boss is a different matter altogether, though. For that, my eye candy summon saviour Shiva came to the rescue. She always came with a nice view of her most tasteful rear-end and was the cause of my victory in a few of the expert trials.
ALL of this typing and I have yet to get to the worst part of the game: the final chapter. An endless platinum trophy 'WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON!?' endurance marathon. I am not kidding here when I say that, in-between the penultimate and final chapter, a BRIEF still-image montage plays that helpfully informed me the apocalypse had occurred and the end was nigh. The world was in chaos, Steve Blum had put on his EVIL "muhahahaha" voice, complete with choice 1D villain narration, and off I went to some sort of anime gone wrong quasi-physical temple of tedious trials that refused to end. Now, the game was an unfinished type of bad before that point where wars ended off-screen, scenes seemed missing and I never had a reason to care or understand 'L'cie' and 'Agito' (I understood 'L'cie' only due to FFXIII), or give a toss about any characters other than the **** anti-social whip and scythe girls that excited me greatly. There was a war, summons of mass destruction, and many robots/dragons died. It was uninspiring and consisted of terrible story-telling / no actual story, but at least it was semi-comprehensible: war; people die; school girls; rolling pantsu. But there are no words to describe the abrupt charge into nonsensical lala land it ended with. I can not even describe it. It was a form of mental torture equivalent to my balls being placed in a vice and it getting tighter and tighter. By the point I reached the final level 99 boss and he one-shot my characters, before they revived, became invincible and won via the power of love, my mouth was open in a awe. Yakuza 4's 40-minute "keyodai" scenes had a similar effect on me, for sure, but never before have I seen story-telling so hopelessly borked before. It is almost like the writers were trying to be unconventional and create a new form of art that makes sense the less of a grasp on reality one has.
In summary, this is one of the worst games I have completed. Ever. When I was busy using a turret on an airship to kill dragons, only then did it hit me what the series has become: everything and nothing. Only platinum trophy obsession kept me playing it as I attempted to grow to like it. Instead, I just frowned more. Holding the attack button as the screen becomes a blurry haze has a certain chaotic charm to it, as does timing attacks to one-shot kill. The music is mostly very good, also... although over-the-top / out of place on mission days at school and distracting. But the world is so lifeless and the story / characters so painfully inept that it undermines even the primitive fun of fighting palette swaps of the same enemies... or just outright the same enemies, over and over. The missions can last for 40+ minutes each, and all but chapter 5 (and the hell that was ch8) were so uninspired they had you just run through the same corridors and fight the same enemies. And when you are not experiencing the joys of battle tedium, you are running around a grand total of ten or so screens at school in an attempt to waste both in-game and real-time. Even if the story made SLIGHTY more sense in NG+, who in their right mind would go through something like this again!? NO to the NG+ expert trials, NO to the game and NO to Square Enix. They just CAN NOT create a decent story anymore. Or even a single relatable character. I am done with them. No more. Rather than sell FFXV's button holding fujoshi bait to me, it has made me even more wary of the series.
A core theme Type-0 beat me over the head with repeatedly was how its characters had the memories of those that died automatically erased. It is a pity breaking my disc would not result in removal of Type-0's existence from my brain. Instead, I will be trading it in to Amazon as soon as possible. And I wager many others will be doing the same in the coming weeks.
Note to self: when you hear a man that has put on comical Japanese, Russian, Spanish AND Australian accents using his evil voice in the trailer, STAY AWAY. Lesson learned.
Note #2: My equally pleased Type-0 co-playing comrade, Fabio, inspired my title choice. My inspiration for the review itself, however, was purely an affection for walls of text.… Expand
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