![]() In fact, it’s similar to Crisis Core, which is no bad thing, and sees you flitting between characters at will. Random encounters can occur, but when they do the combat is free-form, not turn-based. Jumping on your chocobo to sprint around the scaled-down world is idling, even if the oddly barren landscapes are a little unfriendly. Stepping outside onto the world map can be dangerous, but it’s where the adventure lies. Talking to NPCs yields story tidbits and amusing distractions, but it’s not exactly thrill-a-minute. The pace is slow, however, and any time you’re not on a mission you’ll need to constantly run around looking for interesting ways to pass the time, which, in Akadaemia, are slim on the ground. During the early part of the game this formula will serve you well, as will using the teleporter to hop around the various areas of the academy like the armory, where you can buy and equip gear, and the Chocobo Ranch, where you can breed your own feathery mounts. Once you reach mission day, you report to Kurasame and head off on the mission. Every mini-objective you complete (by approaching NPCs with green exclamation marks above their heads) uses up two hours of time, going outside the academy will drain six hours and attempting elite special tasks will take up an entire twelve. Missions are separated by set periods of time. Arecia – who they refer to as “Mother” – Class Zero are sent on regular missions into dangerous war-zones to help turn the tide of battle, but in the meantime are free to embark on side-quests or run around solving everyone else’s problems. Under the tutelage of the icy Kurasame and the decidedly sinister Dr. As Class Zero (all of them), you’ll spend lots of your time in Akadaemia, a huge academy that teaches its pupils to fight and wield magic. With a story that rewards your investment but seems hell-bent on preventing it, Type-O is fortunate to have a framework of such great gameplay. ![]() The main four are card-slinging Ace, sword-wielding Queen, and the two new recruits Machina and Rem, whose entwined destinies drive the main plot and ultimately lead to the storming climax. The beauty is in their diversity they might be clichéd characters for the most part, but at least they’re not totally interchangeable. Class Zero are revealed as the badasses they are, before you’re handed the reins of fourteen characters right from the beginning. Opening with a surprisingly brutal FMV, Type-0 takes aim at that M-rating and blows its goddamn head off in the first few minutes with a powerful, thrilling gambit. It’s the same black and white personality that always undermines the otherwise stellar plotting in any Final Fantasy game, but at least here it’s off-set by a genuinely interesting story. They have characters that talk weird, because that’s how they believe personality should be defined, like the guy who says “yo” at the end of every other sentence, or Rem, who talks like she’s been translated by a drunk. It’s the usual Final Fantasy madness that drives the narrative, as the protagonists are essentially highly-trained teenagers with all the whiny, adolescent angst that Japanese developers believe all teenagers exhibit at all times. At the centre of it all is Class Zero, an elite group of fighters trained in the fortress-like academy of Akadaemia (seriously), who find themselves caught between the four factions and the powerful l’Cie who protect the Crystals. At first it’s difficult to get your head around the good guys and bad guys, as the evil Militesi Empire wages war on Rubrum, Lorica, and Concordia for control of their Crystals. ![]() Taking place in the same canon as Final Fantasy XIII, Type-0’s story is equally as deep and contrived as Lightning’s. It throws a torrent of nonsensical nouns at you in the first few minutes, bombarding you with heavy-handed exposition about a war between the four “Crystal States” of Orience. Type-0 (originally released on the PSP in 2011) is no less confusing. Muddied by endless exposition, middle-of-the-road anti-heroes, and characterisation that’s so blatantly, painfully full of cliché that it goes out the other end of annoying and becomes somehow endearing, Final Fantasy is notoriously hard to understand for newcomers. It’s a deceptive complexity, though, and one that distracts from the fact that once you get down to it, most Final Fantasy games are simple tales of good versus evil. The histories, religions and cultures of the various worlds within its over-arching, often disparate universe are deep, complex, interlinked and sprawling, sharing some elements and bastardising others, while ignoring some established rules altogether. As a series, Final Fantasy has never been one for simple, uncluttered storytelling. ![]()
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