This is the post I started out writing:
I can’t finish the game, so I quit. -_- I’m a little sorry to drop out after 38 hours of hard work, but this is as far as I go. Final Fantasy Type-0 has just become the latest in a long line of Square-Enix games that I’ve dropped in the final dungeon. Other alumni include FF3, FF4, FF5, FF6, FF7, DQVI and DQIX, so rest assured that it is in very good company.
As for why I dropped it, it’s for petty endgame-related reasons. On the first playthrough, you have access to the human ending and the l’Cie ending. The l’Cie ending turns all of Class Zero into l’Cies so they can fight endless waves of those Lulusath enemies that appeared out of nowhere. I made it to fifth or sixth wave before my party members all dropped like flies, leaving me alone. The problem is that apart from King and Cater, everyone else is like 15 levels behind, so they can’t even take a single hit from a level 52 Lulusath, much less three of them. After all, the game just tells you you’re l’Cies, but it doesn’t actually give you any new powers. A possible solution would be to redo earlier, beefed up missions until at least half my players are strong enough to do the deed, but who has time for that?
The second ending route is the human ending, and that’s the one the game seems to favor seeing how long the post-choice dungeon is. You get to stay human and confront Cid half-dead, then the l’Cie-fied Rem and Machina lend you their strength and you fight him. One on one, with new members taking the place of anyone who dies. Every time you get in a good critical hit, your party member dies and has to be replaced.
It should be an easy ending to get for anyone who has mastered the use of all 12 Class Zero members. For me though, it was simple enough to hit him with King, Ace, Trey and Cater, but then I switched to Deuce. How the deuce am I supposed to use her to critical him? I have no idea how to use her standard attack, and for magic I gave her is Firaga Missile 2, which is so slow that the kill site disappears long before the magic can get there. And even if I do get in a hit with Deuce, I’ll still have to figure out how to use Nine, Eight, Jack, Sice, etc, all characters I’ve never bothered to use before. Here, a possible solution would be to load up a much earlier save, take everyone to the arena and learn to use them all, but who has time for that?
Wait, wait, or I could just reload from the save right before the final battle and give them all long-distance magic? It’s a long shot, but it just might work. It would really suck to quit so close to the end. BRB.
And so, long story short, it worked a treat. Cid went down easy, and I got to see the ending, which I will now proceed to spoil for you: Everyone in Class Zero dies. Rem and Machina come back to life somehow. The crystals are destroyed. Everyone lives happily ever after, the end. Sorry I couldn’t take any screenshots, but I was scared the game would freeze on me and I would have to do the final battle all over again. By the way, this makes Final Fantasy Type-0 only the second game I’ve ever played where the final bad guy was the same bad guy all the way through. Square-Enix really went all out with the CG in the ending sequence. So much so that I don’t think any Youtube video could ever do it justice, so I’m glad I got to see it with my own eyes. Class Zero’s final moments were incredibly cheesy though, cringefully so. I had to mute the video just to get through it. Other than that it was great.
The story, though, was a huge disappointment. Maybe it makes more sense on a New Game+ (update: no, not really), or if you’ve played the other Nova Fabulous Peristalsis thingy games, or if you read supplementary materials. All I know is, the first 35 hours of the game is a standard SRPG storyline: the evil empire invades your homeland and you take back the world one city at a time. Then in the last 3 hours, suddenly! Necron! Lulusath! Great hulking monsters destroying the world you worked so hard to save! Then you have to fly up into the sky to face some Arbiter of worlds or another, who will determine whether an Agito (savior? I think?) has appeared or not. If not, bye-bye world. Anyway, somehow or the other, Cid becomes the Arbiter, and we kill him and he leaves the world alone. If this paragraph made no sense, don’t worry, you’re not alone. Anyone who ever played FF Type-0 is confused right along with you.
Who is Mother and what is she after? How come Class Zero could operate independently of the crystals? What was up with Deuce and the dragon? What exactly brought the end of the world about? Why do the crystals erase memories about death? How come beating Cid led to the destruction of the crystals? If the world can continue so readily without crystals, what was the point of having them in the first place? Why are Rem and Machina suddenly alive at the end? I made it all the way to the end and not only did the game not answer the questions it had raised but rather it added to them and left me high and dry. It’s a shame, really. Since the ending was more than decent, with a little more closure, I would have given the story full pass marks. It’s not like I have super-high story expectations of an action RPG anyway, even one from Square-Enix.
While I’m at it, I should also mention that characterization was weak as well. It’s Squeenix’s fault for trying to squeeze a 14-member party into a non-SRPG. On one hand it does give you a lot of options in battle, but on other hand, everything else about such a big party is crap. Equipping them costs money. Leveling them up is a royal pain. And since there are so many of them, there’s no chance to really get under their skin. I’ll give the writers credit for trying really, really hard, but it just doesn’t work. Even short cutscenes will have 8 or 9 people chipping in one after the other, just so everyone can get their time in the spotlight. And since they have so little to work with, they really have to play up the ‘quirks’ of individual characters, so people like Jack, Cinque and Nine are reduced to one-note caricatures. It really doesn’t work out very well.
By the way, public service announcement: you can’t use Rem and Machina in the final dungeon. Machina I was never interested in, even before he became a treacherous louse, but Rem I had very high hopes for. I spent some serious time leveling her up too, at the expense of other members. I pity da foos who main Rem and Machina and never level anyone else up. They’re in for a rude surprise. Or they were, until I spoiled it. Whoops.
I suppose I should say a few things about the battles as well. While I did get the hang of the system by the 20-hour mark, that still means it took over half the game for me to find my way around. This probably isn’t an issue for gamers with ARPG experience, but a lot of other people will be turned off before they ever get anywhere. In addition to the confusing number of button combinations, there are several other problems with the system as well.
First, the camera work was generally good, but it can be hard to find your way through boxes and mazes in several stages. Especially when you’re working against the clock and the cursor only points you in a very general direction. Secondly, you can’t switch characters unless you’re at a savepoint or someone is dead. Worse than that, you can’t change equipment or magic or skills on the fly either. Thirdly, it’s hard to use items in battle. You can map one item to the Select button. For everything else, you have to press Start, go into the menu, search for the item and use it. And the game doesn’t pause while you do it either, so you will usually die in the process. Which leads to the fourth, and most annoying problem: you can’t raise dead characters. Phoenix Downs exist, but they only cast Reraise on a character. If they die without Reraise, say bye-bye for the rest of the mission. Put all these together and you get a very newbie-unfriendly game. One that can be tremendously fun once you’re in the groove, if you can trudge through half the game to get there.
Everything else about the game, I more or less liked. Yeah, there are a few niggling issues like having to walk all over the campus seeking quests between missions. That sucked. The quests themselves were really inconvenient, and I say that as a sidequest fan. It’s obvious they only let you do one at a time so they could save some for New Game+. Also those level 99 FOEs wandering the map just need to go. And is it just me or is the world kind of sparse? There are like 3 cities (two of which you can’t explore) and a few isolated hamlets per country and that’s it. There aren’t even any roads! I could go on in this vein for a little longer, but my heart isn’t in it. Apart from the lv.99 enemies, nothing else really bothered me.
As for stuff that was good, well, this is Square-Enix. Visually, it was an excellent game. The CG cutscenes in particular were fluid and very, very well done. That made the gruesome scenes all the nastier, but for most of the game such scenes are few and far between. The regular character models and animations were all excellent. If I had to nitpick, I’d say the enemy and character design variety was a little low. And, there’s the little issue of many overworld and outdoors environments looking like this:
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But after all the money they must have spent on other visual aspects, I’m going to cut them some slack. In fact, I feel sorry for Square sometimes. They’ve spoiled the fans so much that we often don’t appreciate just how good their games look. It’s like we take it for granted that they’re going to look great because, duh, it’s Square. Maybe they should dial back a bit more on the admittedly wonderful graphics so they can stop writing annual reports full of “waah, console development costs too much” statements. But that’s a discussion for another day. Misty overworlds and overuse of red, yellow and brown aside, FF Type-0 is still one of the most visually-impressive handheld games I have ever played.
It’s also one of the best-sounding, because the soundtrack is amazing as well. I’m not talking about the crappy pop “theme” by Bump of Chicken. I’m talking about the orchestrated score by Ishimoto Takeharu, who I had never heard about before this, but who does incredible work if this is anything to go by. The last soundtrack I was so impressed by was the one for Zill O’ll Infinite. The difference is, Zill O’ll was trying really hard to be good. You could feel the composer’s effort in behind every note. Type-0 isn’t trying to be good, it just is. I don’t have the necessary know-how and vocabulary to talk about instruments and melodies and cadences, so can I just say it’s fantastic and have you take my word for it? It’s very, very, very good.
Finally, to round things up, who should play this game? Yes, I know it never came to the West and the PSP is long-dead. But never say never, what with the Vita and PSN and all. The real hurdle is probably the heavy online component. A lot of in-game features and facilities revolve around being able to play online or with friends, and setting up and maintaining servers costs time and money. There’s still hope, though. And I hope for your sake that you forget all the spoilers you read here by the time it comes out ^^;;.
So, who should play this? People who like action RPGs, ones with fairly steep learning curves too. People looking for a standard turn-based JRPG experience need not apply. This game is like Phantasy Star Online/Universe to the standard Phantasy Star games, or the new Shining games to the Shining Force series: very different but still very enjoyable. Story and characterization have traditionally been FF’s standout points, but this time they’re by far the weakest elements. There are still moogles and chocobos, there’s still a Cid, there’s still -ra and -ga magic and many familiar enemies, but this really isn’t the Final Fantasy you know and love. But if you like mission-based action RPGs, have confidence in your skills and don’t care about story too much, it’s definitely worth a play
And so I’m going to put my money (time) where my mouth is and finish off… by playing Type-0 again! No, I’m not kidding. I just started New Game+ just to see what it has to offer. Levels, items, glossary, finished quests, all check. I don’t know if I’ll finish it again, what with the last dungeon being so crappy and all, but this is the only thing I feel like playing right now, so I’m going to be doing it for a little while longer. See you later!
The translation patch for the psp version was finished not long ago, and I must say i agree with you in some points but there are some things i think you must know, when you finish the game a new cutscene is unlocked, called True End or something like that, which does explain how Machina and Rem came out of the Crystal Stasis(and why they remember and do cry for Class 0) and does sorta explain who Mother is (though still living space open for theories), and I do agree with you about the main characters not being that good and sometimes kinda cheesy, but if you talk to all the characters in the academy during free time, there are a LOT of side stories you get to see (all of them pretty sad, with the nature of death in the game) which to me were worth watching and kind of touching (they even explain what happened with Aria while she was kidnapped and how it all ended), and yep, they were better stories and had better character relationships than the main characters, but yeah, in my opinion the best aspects of the game are the aspects aside from the main storyline it’s best things are the gameplay and sidequests/side stories (sadly, a lot of these and some extra content [like Gilgamesh in the world map or the Darkness of Suzaku they kept mentioning] are not unlocked until the 2nd and 3rd playthrough, which are more fun if you have friends to play with). P.d. Yes, i found this blog just today and i’ve been reading a lot of the posts for some japanese games i was thinking of trying (mostly for psp), and i’ve liked what i’ve seen so far.
Hello Pedro, I didn’t get the True End, so I guess I missed some things about the story. I got some of the Class 0 stories through the sidequests and talking to NPCs and stuff (I saw the Aria story through the book in the library, for example).
On the other hand I never beat Gilgamesh or the Darkness of Suzaku, so there’s still a lot I didn’t do. I did 90% of a second playthrough, but a 3rd and a 4th? @_@ I envy those with such stamina.
I wish the cast had been a little smaller and there had been more story focus, but I enjoyed the game so I’m glad you did too. Thanks for reading my blog!
Ok, after looking around for a bit I was able to find a video that has a part of the cutscene, but it’s missing the last parts about Machina and Rem and they Crystal Stasis and why they were freed from it, and Arecia’s “conversation” with them, here’s the link.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S83BCxRq3j0
Found the complete translated dialogue for the cutscene here with some screenshots http://aestalitz.tumblr.com/post/20728957031 (And yeah, when Arecia talks to Rem and Machina they do not respond, there is something like crystal dust and the sound of crystals around Arecia, so I guess she can listen to the crystals, and after Arecia says the last line, they come out of their crystal holding hands and float away to the Class 0 classroom, where the scene of them crying over their classmates’ bodies takes place).
P.d. I was roaming around the wiki for type-0 and found out a lot of the answers (further answers about Arecia, Tiz and Joker), not sure if you can find that information in-game (some I know you can, others i’m not sure), but i know there is a Light novel version of FF Type-0 in which some stuff that isn’t in the game is shown (for example, there are other Grand Eidolons mentioned besides Alexander), so I guess some of the info might come from the light novels or from hidden cutscenes/glossary info from the game, you could check it out to learn more about the universe (I also learned thanks to the wiki why some people consider Type-0 to be a prequel to FF XIII, they don’t take place in the same universe but the crystal myths are pretty much similar, kind of like FF, FFIII, FF IV and V).
And I apologize for writing this much, reading the review and then the conversation without that much time having passed since i played the game kinda awoke my hunger for knowledge, and i thought you might want to know about the answers to some details you (and I) were wondering about.
Thanks a lot! I suspected a lot of the stuff I was missing was because I wasn’t familiar with the FFXIII ‘Fabula Nova Crystalis’ world (I didn’t know what l’Cie was till I googled it, for example) so I didn’t stress myself out too much over it. Thank you for all the links and answers. I’ll definitely check them all out. I think I’m done with Type-0, but I might check out the mobile phone game (Agito) once I buy a better phone with more memory.
Haha yeah, and no problem. I’m also thinking about playing Agito, since i want to know what happens after the events of the game, I’ll wait to see if they will release it on the west (it’s possible, since they are planning to bring Type-0’s remake to the west, whether for vita or ps4/xbox one).
I think I read somewhere that it was coming to the west this year. Hold on… Ah, found it: http://www.siliconera.com/2014/06/10/final-fantasy-agito-coming-west/
I guess I kinda triggered some stuff to get it then, I thought it was naturally unlocked by just beating the game actually haha xD and i kinda still enjoyed the 2nd playthrough thanks to the Crimsom Code Mission (definitely wouldn’t bear playing the same missions again with no difficulty increase, sothe Crimsom Code made up for that and added new cutscenes and stuff) and I feel the same about the cast being too large, i started using like 8 characters and got them to lvl 20 and something, then when i saw i wasn’t catching up with the mission levels i started arena training and only really trained 5 or 6 characters because it was such a pain, specially with some characters (like deuce, which cannot really dodge while attacking).
By the way, i did suffer the same thing about the final dungeon and Rem, I was like… Damn you Square Enix, i already had this happen once back when i was playing FF VII with Aerith.
After doing some research now I remember it was called True Chapter, it isn’t an in-game cutscene but instead it is a scene that gets unlocked in the Crimson Codex, couldn’t find any special requirements for it though. Try looking for it in the Codex’s Historical records where all the cutscenes are.
Ah, one thing I also forgot to mention, the ending song, I also loved it, specially after i realized it was the song Ace was always singing and now i can’t stop listening to it, Square does a pretty good job when it comes to soundtracks. And no need to thank me, i’ve been reading your reviews for a lot of games that I didn’t know of because they weren’t localized that seem pretty interesting(like Ore no Shikabane wo Koete yuke), and the reviews are a good read, I think i’m gonna pick up some of those and try to play them in Jap by finding out what everything does by trial and error (I don’t know much japanese at moment, but i don’t think it will be long before i start taking classes).
I’m the one who needs to thank you for letting me know about these games (and also the visual novels, like Pri Saga, but those ones i can’t really pick them up until I learn japanese). I also got an idea about Growlanser’s gameplay (I was thinking of playing it soon) so I know what i’ll be dealing with when I play it and how much time I might need.
You’re welcome! If you have a Vita, the Ore no Shikabane sequel is most likely coming to the west. That’s one game I really enjoyed and definitely recommend to anyone who can play it. Also this is just me, but I think visual novels can be a good way to learn Japanese, just because there’s no pressure to move on so you can take as long as you like on each screen. Most of them are also fully-voiced and some of them have a voiced log, so you can make the characters read the same line to you over and over again till you get it. If you like visual novels and know a little Japanese, it’s worth a try.
Ohhhhh I didn’t know that, then that’s another game to get a vita for (so far I have like 4 games I’d get it for, i’ll investigate more to see if i can find more and then get it). And hmmm that’s a pretty good idea actually, and I’m a sucker for VNs so it’s useful for me, i actually learned some words from the translation of VNs like fate or Rewrite, since they are voiced and had a translation, so when i heard some words over and over again i kind of found out what word they were and then googled to make sure, so I do know a few words and some of the basic stuff (like greetings or ways to introduce yourself). I’m gonna try your advice, even if i don’t learn perfect Japanese i think it might work for the time being to play a lot of games i’ve been itching to play, thank you for the advice! I’ll also keep checking your blog to find more interesting games.
It is hard to find another person who still tries out games on the psp, when i found your blog and started looking i saw a lot of psp titles (as well as ds and wii ones), so I started reading it and liked the reviews and I also was interested in the games i’ve never heard of before and it also helped me have a clear view of the games i still want to play (like Growlanser and Arc Rise Fantasia).
Actually the real reason I play so many PSP and DS games is that I’m too cheap to spring for anything more recent ^.^;; Now you know my awful secret. If you like visual novels then you should definitely work on your Japanese. I estimate it’ll take about 3-5 years of focused study to get to the stage where you can play them without a dictionary, but then think of all the hundreds of games you’ll be able to play from then onwards. Good luck with your studies!
Don’t worry haha, we’re in the same boat xD besides, where i live technology is more expensive than in other countries, so i’ve been lving with DS, psp and Wii, don’t have a 3ds yet, but might get it… probably next year, same would go for vita haha, and ohhhhh alright, and yeaaaaaah, just thinking about all the text based japanese games i’ve wanted to play for a long time that i’ll be able to play makes it worth it, thank you! And about the Agito coming to the west, ok, I was excited just knowing I was gonna be able to play the game, but then i read “Character Customization” and “cooperative battles”, I’m definitely a sucker for those 2.
I’m a sucker for running around shooting stuff with King and Cater. As long as I get to do more of that I’ll be cool.
I loved playing with Cater, Sice and Rem xd those 3 were the 3 i found more mobile from the rest of the class (I like mobility when playing action rpgs xD), and I loved playing Cater even more when i unlocked her Snipe Mode Ability, it was fun in multiplayer, but in single player it’s almost of no use since the enemies lock onto the character you’re using most of the time
I never tried multiplayer, but it sounds like fun.
It is fun, specially if you play the missions in hard mode and then in impossible mode (some missions are really hard xD), i also think you can play the side dungeons in the world map in multiplayer, not so sure about that though, haven’t tried it yet (i wanna try the Tower of Agito in multiplayer, but I’d need to hit 99 with my friends first, since I think that’s the recommended level haha)
after playing 3rd walktrhoug what else i can do can i still roam?
You can play it as many times as you want, until you run out of things to do. Once you’ve beaten all the bonus dungeons like the Tower of Agito (level 99) there isn’t anything left to achieve so that would be a good time to say goodbye to the game.
i’m playing ff type-0 for a 4rd time and still cant complete the crimson codex. what the last end of codex anyway.? im wanna know badly
The Crimson Codex sounds like a completionist’s nightmare. If I were you I would just wait a few months until a 100% FAQ or Walkthrough came out. Or you can keep checking the Wiki (http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Rubicus) until someone fills out the missing bits.