There was once a time when Square Enix was the king of RPG’s. You name a beloved classic RPG from the SNES era and chances are it’s a Square RPG. However in recent years the quality of their games has gone down immensely. One could blame the advent of voice acting which highlighted the clunkiness of their writing. Others could blame them placing too high a focus on storytelling as gameplay becomes more basic while cut scenes grow ever more flashy. I personally place blame on Square trying to move away from turn based systems and focus on an action RPG approach. But what is truly an amalgamation of everything that is wrong with current Square is right here, in this game. And boy is it bad. I knew walking into this game that I would not be experiencing a standard final fantasy title but even with that mindset I wasn’t truly prepared for what I got. At this point it’s safe to assume that I am a Final Fantasy fan. I have played FFs 1 to 13(omitting 11) and I always thirst for a new Square title. Though no matter how much I love the series, there is no possible way I can love what it’s become.
On to the story and boy, it sure is a story alright. So this is a world with four kingdoms based around the four gods from China. Dragon, Bird, Tiger Tortoise each with a crystal of water, earth, fire and air. No real reason to throw the four gods of China in there but well cool points I suppose. Long ago, the four nations lived together in Harmony. Then, everything changed when the fire nation attacked. Well actually it was the tiger nation but this is pretty much sums it up. The tiger nation of Milites just decides to start conquering other nations. When they attack the bird kingdom things look dire when they jam the crystal and cut off the nation from its powerful magic. But along comes class zero, a group of twelve people created as a secret weapon that can fight without crystal power. So the nation must depend on class zero to reclaim their land and defeat Milities. Now let me make one thing absolutely clear. The writing of this story is completely, utterly, without question, horrible. I thought Valkyria has bad writing but it truly doesn’t even compare to the level of terrible of this. This is some of the most hackneyed amateur storytelling I have ever seen. Why is that? Well for starters the plot holes are abundant. The most glaring example has to do with the nature that when people die in this world then all memory of that person is wiped from everyone’s memories. An interesting concept I admit but it just opens the way of an abundance of logical failings. For example a big part of one of the characters arcs is that in the beginning his brother died because he delivered a message to class zero in the middle of a battle. Why was this message so important? Why did class zero ask for this person specifically to deliver it? Nope not important, what is important is that right in the middle of enemy territory one of their commanders decides that now is the perfect time to call this kid called Machina out and specifically let him know that class zero got his brother killed. He even outright says it “You could say they are the ones who killed your brother” This guy isn’t working for the bad guys and looks to be doing it just to spite the doctor who created them. When class zero is your main line of defense against a total destruction of a nation one would think self preservation would win out over personal vendetta. He straight up says this to another leader and she just says she doesn’t care as long as he keeps her out of it. This causes Machina to hate class zero and act antagonistic towards them. This is all undermined by the fact that he shouldn’t even remember his brother at all so he’s getting all angsty over someone he doesn’t even remember. it seems the details on this memory erasing is vague as a queen of the dragon nation dies later on and yet people still remember their was a queen and someone even tries to get revenge for her. This whole memory thing just doesn’t make sense in general. Speaking of the queen, class zero are accused of killing her and laughably nobody, not even their own advisors, think they didn’t do it. Made all the more ridiculous when because of the queen’s death Milites forms a convenient treaty that means they have control over the dragon nation crystal and the dragon armies support to help take over the bird nation. I mean does no one leading bird country have a brain? Well there is the one person that created class that looks to know whats up but she seems satisfied to just sit back and do nothing. What follows is a big battle that has bird country somehow come out on top and win the war but straight out of nowhere demons appear and start ending the world. Everyone blames class zero for this because…um…because. Class zero decides to save the world and defeat the endboss to start so new world order or something. I had long lost interest at this point.
I am cutting down the story a bit but that’s what it boils down to and I feel like I just witnessed a teenagers first attempt at writing a story. It’s hard to truly pinpoint every example but the dialogue in this game never sounds natural and certainly is made all the more unnatural when read out by voice actors. No disrespect to them, they did all they could with this script. It keeps throwing out terminology without putting meaning to it. Expecting you to be interested enough to study up on lore just to explain why a Queen from another country can up and decide to call an end to a war between two other nations without question. l’Cies also make a return from FF13 and the game expects you to have played that to understand what they are all about. The game’s cinematic are littered with utterly useless voice over with black screens of text telling you exactly what you just saw. You see Bahamut unleash an attack on the enemy army, suddenly the screen goes black showing text which is read out by voiceover. “Bahamut attacked the enemy army” Yes, I know. I saw it and there is no reason to spell it out. I have heard if “Show, don’t tell” but this may be a case of Show and tell. Worst of all is the characterization. One or two characters get what could be considered an arc but in a cast of 14 playable characters they are all one dimensional caricatures. They are named after playing cards (except Rem and Machina because they ran out of cards) and there personalities are all defined by one single trait. With the leader being the blandest and most forgettable of all. The characterization of the villains is just as bad. You learn nothing about the main villain, just that he loves to talk in that old mastermind talk which assumes everything is going to plan. The other villain to get any screentime is a guy with an eye patch who you fight twice in the whole game. Theirs this cringe worthy moment of him talking to a subordinate whose gimmick is saying the word “fricking” a lot and it’s clear she’s meant to be saying the other F word. This character is introduced in this one scene and this one scene is her only real appearence. Her sole role is to humanize the captain before he has a heroic death scene but it’s just so forced. The death scene itself is equally stupid as it all happens because some random crazy soldier(He’s not even a mechanic) installed the base equivalent if a nuke to the captain’s mech on his own and…no one noticed. Isn’t there like whole teams of people checking this thing? I mean this bomb wasn’t some small device, it was like this big metal ball the size of a car door. And not one person noticed it being installed on the mech? Just ridiculous.
So the stories a bust but what about the gameplay? Well as stated before this does not play like a typical final fantasy game. There are no turn based battles while random encounters are still here on the world map. Instead what we have is a kind of inferior kingdom hearts system. Battles are fought in real time with four buttons assigned to certain actions. You have a standard attack, one for a special attack, one for offensive magic and one for recovery/buff magic. It’s interesting that they gave each character a different moveset and you are encouraged to use them all as in this game you have no way of reviving characters if they fall in battle. You only get characters back if you finish the mission or go to a town. But here’s my problem with it. There are nine melee focused characters and five projectile focused characters. Against flying enemies a melee focused character is useless as they fly out of your attack range. Now guess how many of the bosses are flying types? Here’s the answer, all of them. More or less all the bosses stay out of a melee attack range so if you lose all your characters who can attack from a distance then you might as well start the mission over. Any boss that isn’t a flying type is an unwinnable battle and there are a lot of those. A number of chapters end with you facing an impossible to defeat enemy where your only option is to lay down and die. It may be possible to defeat them in a second playthrough, provided you even wish to do a second playthrough. Though on a first playthrough when after getting beaten up by a gauntlet of enemies you are then greeted with a boss battle you cannot possibly win it’s a bit of a spit in the face for the player. What’s really a spit in the face of the player is the final boss battle which goes the opposite route and is impossible to lose. The entire last dungeon is ridiculously easy now that I think about it. The game has giant difficulty spikes in the missions beforehand but the finale has you fighting slow moving giants that are at half your level. Though on that matter I was relieved as I was long tired of the games cheap difficulty in previous missions.
There are three points of gameplay. The first is breaks which are periods where you can run around a academy and talk to people or go outside to grind levels. These parts are wasted as you can’t actually interact with class zero but instead with side characters that mean little to the plot. Grinding is terrible in that it is necessary and a slow arduous process. You can only level 3 characters at a time and you have 14 to keep even. And they will need to be as if you lose your mains in a mission they are the ones who will have to finish it. Even when given a Growth egg which doubled exp this process was just as slow. The break segments between missions mainly serve as filler and I mostly found myself fast forwarding to the missions. Then there are the Real time Strategy missions which is not really an accurate term for them. There’s no strategy, you are told what to do and what you do is exactly the same every time. You kill enemies coming from a base so the soldiers from your base can take over the enemies base. The order you take over the bases is determined and there’s no skill in it. This aspect is woefully lacking and there are a grand total of three of them in the entire 20 hour game. It’s just a waste of time. The last point is the bulk of the gameplay which is you going through a series of rooms and killing enemies. This is the pattern. Enter a room, kill all enemies, enter the next room, kill me all enemies, rinse repeat till boss. The environments may change and the enemies may change but the experience remains a linear series of rooms filled with enemies with little change besides occasionally being asked to press A somewhere in the map and kill all enemies.
I am aware this is a HD release of a PSP game but visuals are very telling of that fact. I pity those who spent for the same price as a main PS3 title. I at least can say I got it off steam with a heavy discount. The CGI cutscenes may look very pretty but the gameplay visuals are bare bones. Almost PS2 level. Music is fairly unremarkable which is a deep disappointment for a FF title. So after all the negativity is there anything good I can say about it? Well the final level did have interesting challenges and small moments of great visuals. The ending I quite liked as it showed that maybe underneath all this was a genuine effort to make something great. And truthfully I like that they had the guts to take that route. Though despite efforts to make this a darker story I found its darkness more juvenile than mature. Dark storytelling takes a great writer, one who can weave tragedy and handle subtlety. This writer wasn’t even close to that. After all, you can’t attempt to write a story you want readers to take seriously when you have a bloody Moogle giving out objectives with a “Kupo!” In fact that does highlight an impression I get of Square Enix. Back in the NES era of gaming a little company was going out of business and they decided to make one last game before they were snuffed out. In order of it being their final project, they named the game “Final Fantasy” and that title sold so well that it saved them. Square is in trouble once again and they are expecting the title to save them once again. But they now seem to hold contempt for the classics they made but in a odd situation depend on their nostalgia. They once claimed they will never remake FF7 till they make a game that surpasses it and we’ll they couldn’t. Now they are remaking FF7 but the product bares little resemblance to its classic counterpart. They seem determined, nay obsessed to prove that new Square is better than old Square and in doing so have disregarded just what made them great in the first place. So many fantastic IPs like Chrono trigger, the world ends with you and Secret of mana(I highly doubt adventures of mana would have got an IOS remake if it wasn’t called Final Fantasy Adventure) are left aside while Square keeps trying to shove flashy graphics and barrels of lore down our throats. Square listen. Stop trying to be cool. You are not and it’s embarrassing. Stop trying to make movies. Make a game with a fun gameplay system and levels. Stop trying to make real time battle systems with only simplify down strategy to its bare necessities. Return back to a turn based system or go for the best of both worlds like Grandia 2 did. Want proof this is the right choice? Well look at Bravely default. In fact, give up on all future final fantasy titles, take Bravely default’s gameplay mechanics, pretty up the graphics to console level, get Nobuo Uematsu back or bring in Revo to do music and hire a damn good writer to write the story. There, a masterpiece.
