Progress
- 15 hours
- 3 main chapters
- All sorts of side things
- Handful of mission replays
What I Like
First things first, the battle system is fantastic. It still feels distinctly Final Fantasy while being real-time. There’s nice timing touches to allow massive damage or instant kills that encourage avoiding button spamming all the time. Dodging also feels extremely good. While I don’t necessarily like all of the characters fighting styles, there’s enough variety that I can pretty much guarantee that one of my three active members is someone I enjoy controlling in a fight.
Somewhat related, the customization of ability sets on characters is also a nice touch. It avoids some of the general issues of having pages of abilities being unused, and forces some strategy in how your party is setup in terms of who has healing magic, who is focused on damage, etc. As an extension, having the magic abilities be upgradeable through items acquired during battles is a nice way to allow for some amount of micromanagement in your team.
Being able to replay story missions from the title menu is also a nice touch. Experience and items gained also apply to the story progress, so this is both a good completionist/leaderboardy feature, as well as a convenient way to gain some levels.
Also, as is common for Final Fantasy games, the soundtrack is particularly enjoyable.
What I’m Indifferent To
The story is fairly normal Final Fantasy material, but it’s not what I would consider a good or bad story. It just kind of exists, and so far hasn’t been more than adequate. It’s not the worst FF story ever, but I wouldn’t put it up there with the best of them. It is extremely clear that this was originally within the FF XIII universe though with all the l’Cie bits in the core of the story.
I’m also fairly indifferent to the side questing. A large portion of the side quests are basically retrieval quests, and I’ve mostly ended up using them as ways to level up underleveled characters.
What I Don’t Like
The interaction of the side questing and a time limiting mechanic is…slightly annoying. The main issue here is that I can’t queue multiple side quests. I can queue one, complete, queue another, etc. While ones that are purely collection can be done effectively at the same time, there are some that require multiple trips out of the main city (Ex: Quest: Kill 15 troops, Quest: Capture 3 troops) that are only tracked while active and require me to leave the main city twice. Under normal circumstances this would only be slow, but the game requires 6 hours of in-world time to leave the city, and there’s a cap before being forced into the next story mission, which wipes out any remaining side quests in that chapter. For me this is solvable with either multiple quest queuing or removal of the time limit, both of which feel like largely unnecessary features.
We’ll see how this ends up, but so far Type-0 feels like a game worth recommending. It’s still very distinctly a Final Fantasy game, but has some interesting ideas with the battle system to feel like its own thing.