I’ve played 3 hours and 54 hours of Final Fantasy Type-0
I like to think I’ve come a long way in my attitude towards action RPGs, from “Ugh, get it out of here!” to “Hmm, I’ll give it a try.” Unfortunately I’m still not good at them yet. In DC2, X is Yes/Attack. In FF Type-0, X is No/Defend/Cure. I can’t play both at the same time, so I’m dropping one temporarily. DC2 wins because 1) I’ve been meaning to play it since September 2) I don’t know how long my PS2 will keep trucking along, 3) I actually like it, and 4) It’s much easier.
Now for the reasons why I’m not so excited about FF Type-0. It’s early days yet, which is why I’m putting it on hiatus instead of quitting outright, but if I haven’t seen much change by the 10-hour mark, it’s over.
Reason 1 (of 3): The battle system is a mess. It would take too long to explain all the features, so here’s a page that does it if you’re interested. The tl;dr is that you press O to do a special attack, Triangle to attack, X to defend or cure, Square to use magic, R to lock-on to a target, R+any button to absorb Phantoma, L+a certain button to switch members, L+R to put your weapons away, and there’s at least 5 or 6 other button combinations to memorize. I’m sure you found it easy to keep track of all that, since you’re such an ARPG guru. Yay, you. Boo, me.
It’s bad enough that I have to master all these combinations, but I also have to do it under pressure, with hard-hitting, hard-to-see enemies rushing me from all directions, firing on me from all corners, sneaking up when I’m not looking, and generally making a nuisance of themselves. And my troops are so weak! Two hits from a boss or a leader enemy and they’re out for the count. So then I switch in another one, but I’ve got so many characters I’ve never used before so I have no clue what I’m doing! Press START to abort mission while keeping EXP, but now you have to do the whole mission all over again!
It just gets worse and worse. I thought The Last Story was the lowest one could go in terms of confusing battle systems, but I’ve gotta hand it Square: when they go all out, they go all out, whether it’s in a positive or negative direction.
At the same time, however, The Last Story gives me hope. It took me a while to find my way around that game, but by the last 4 or 5 hours, I was actually enjoying fighting. Not enough to ever play the game again, but definitely having a good time. That said, I don’t know if I’ll have to patience to stick to Final Fantasy Type-0 for 20 hours in the hopes that it improves- or that I’ll even make it that far when it’s so frustrating.
Reason 2 (of 3): I don’t like violent, gory, grim-dark games. Never have, never will. Bombs, gunshots, dead civilians, soldiers stabbing each other in the gut, blood splattered everywhere, and the only colors the designers know are brown, red and yellow. I seriously want to puke. The intro, especially, is just nasty. Some injured guy stumbles from gory disaster to gory disaster until the enemies finally, bloodily put him out of his misery. Even then it takes him like 5 minutes to die, bawling the whole time about how he doesn’t want to die. I was wrinkling my nose in disgust and cringing at the cheesiness the whole time.
The writers try to play down the doom-and-gloom mood by saying the Suzaku Crystal wipes out people’s memories of dead people. Good for them, but who’s going to wipe my memory when I’m done playing this?
Reason 3 (of 3): Not enough story, and yet too much story. I should probably shut up about this, since I haven’t reached anywhere yet, but I won’t. I’m okay with low-story mission-based ARPGs like Phantasy Star Portable. I’m also fine with story-based games like Star Ocean or Rune Factory which are just regular RPGs that happen to have ARPG combat. What I have yet to get used to is games like this one, where there’s clearly a huge story waiting in the wings, but it’s being released in drips and drabs to prolong the game. The pacing is too slow, especially since according to the story we’re supposedly in the middle of a major world crisis. If you don’t have a story, fine. Just give me missions. If you do have a story, great. Tell it already! This obvious slowdown is killing me! GET ON WITH IT!
And I suppose I should get on with it as well. First things first: stop taking photos of everything in sight and progress the story in Dark Cloud 2. Then, once that’s finished, come back to FF Type-0 and give it a proper chance. Maybe the break will do me some good.
Hey, just wanted to tell you, that I think the same about Type-0. Especially that there is too much violence. It is just too dark for a Final Fantasy. I wanted to tell you that Sqare Enix is doing a survey at the moment. It is about some random stuff like which games you have played and which game you wish for, etc. But there is also a section called “Anything else you want us to tell”. I used this to tell them exactly what you said about Type-0 so they do not make such mistakes again. Would be really nice if you could do the same (the more people telling them about it, the more chance that they listen to it). The link is this one: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/8L8WHJR I think this is a good chance to have some influence on Square Enix and after I read your review I really wished that Square Enix would, too…
The early parts of FFType-0 were pretty nasty (it gets better later) so I guess I’ll mention that, but what I really want from Squeenix is a localization of DQVII 3DS. Thanks for the link, I just hope they actually listen.
Thank you very much for you support. And yes, I would like a localization of DQVII 3DS, too ^^ But the one game I would wish for from Square Enix still is a sequel to Chrono Trigger / Chrono Cross.
Aaaah, I missed my chance to tell Squeenix how much I hated Chrono Cross for what it did to Chrono Trigger! Definitely don’t want to see anything from that series ever again. I should have asked for Saga Frontier III too!