Final Fantasy Type-0 HD is the most fun I’ve had with a JRPG in years. I feel it’s important to start with that statement as talking about its flaws, which there are quite a few, may make you think it’s not worth your time. After spending over 35 hours with the game and getting a fair bit through the New Game+, I finally felt like I was ready to talk about the game, and convince you as to why it’s more than just the game that came bundled with the Final Fantasy XV demo.

The narrative of the game is interesting and, in typical JRPG fashion, a bit of a head scratcher at times. Taking control of 12 members of the Elite Class in a militarised school means that there are a lot of characters to get acquainted with before you even get to the NPC supporting cast. The game should be applauded in making a large part of the party relevant and interesting, however, there are a few that seem to just be there to make up numbers in terms of carrying on the narrative. Luckily what they offer in combat more than makes up for that.

One of the most intriguing parts of the story is how the game handles death. In Orience, where the game is set, the death of someone wipes all memory of them from the consciousness of others. As the player you are fully aware of when a character dies. To hear the rest of the world act without truly caring for the dead makes you feel even sorrier for them.

How sorry you feel for them will probably depend on which language you pick in the audio options. The English dub is hilariously awful, so much so it ruins a fairly dramatic opening. Luckily the Japanese dub emotes well and the subtitles do a good enough job to keep track with what is happening.

The story can be explored as much or as little as you like. The game offers up notes about the world and characters that can be reviewed in the library. It even allows you to look back at old cutscenes and keep a track on the quests you have completed. There are also hidden cutscenes that can be viewed as well, which explore some parts of the narrative a bit more.

The clumsy implementation of mechanics and options in the game can be forgiven. It would be nice to be able to do more than one quest at a time, but it’s not the end of the world that you can’t. The Support Personnel System takes over from the multiplayer mode in the original game and although the A.I acts a bit bizarrely, in the harder missions they can still prove useful in prolonging the length of time your team can keep fighting.

Levelling your whole team is a chore, as there are a lot of you, so it is advisable to pick your core team to level and work with that. Luckily the game offers various ways to help ease the burden of levelling, with lectures that can be taken in school that help you level your whole team in various ways. There’s also an arena for training, which helps you level one character whilst you’re away from the game. This is handy if you’re the type of person that doesn’t get a lot of time to play games every week.

Final Fantasy Type-0 HD is ideal for gamers that lack the free time for massive gaming sessions, one of the positive hangovers from it originally being a handheld game. Allowing players to jump back into old missions and try to better their score without having to boot up an old save is good. Making it so the points you receive from using the Support Personnel System and the EXP you receive is great. By doing it like this the mundane task of grinding to raise your level is decreased. It is a shame however that the world map is broken up by load screens. Even the PlayStation One Final Fantasy games had the world map explorable without having to load each section.

The main thing that makes Final Fantasy Type-0 HD such a good game though is the gameplay. It controls wonderfully and with 12 different playable characters, all with unique styles, and a huge selection of moves and spells to choose from, it will take a while to get old. Fed up of using a sword? Use one of the characters with projectiles. Want a magic focused squad? You can do that too. The level of customisation is huge and because of this it will take a while for you to get bored of fighting.

You can harvest Phantoma from enemies, which can be used to make your magic more effective. You can even, in certain battles, carry on a fight against the same line-up of enemies, but at a higher level. This makes patrolling the lower level areas less of a chore if you are out of Chocobos to speed up the journey. Some missions are a strategy based, where you direct troops towards the towns of the opposing military forces. On top of that there are caves to explore and plenty of areas and enemies that will leave you wanting to play through the game again and again.

As I said at the start of the review this is the most fun I’ve had with a JRPG in years. The combat is something that feels different whilst still remaining familiar enough to not completely alienate the audience. The storytelling may not be the strongest and it is fairly outdated (for obvious reasons) graphically, but that doesn’t matter when the core game is so strong. Not only is Final Fantasy Type-0 HD currently the best JRPG of this generation, it’s one of the best of the last few years. It’s just a shame that the port feels a bit half-hearted at times.

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