Metal Gear Solid V
Final Fantasy XV
Silent Hills
That's it.
-Final Fantasy Type-0 HD. It has received stellar reviews in Japan and I am pumped to play it at last.
Don't get too pumped. It's a good game compared to some of the more recent titles, but unless they really change some of the fundamental mechanics of the game, it's also really broken at some points.
I've been keeping this in for a long time, considering whether or not I should write a proper review somewhere, but these are really some points people need to know about FF Type-0 before the buy into the hype.
- No phoenix downs in shops, and they don't resurrect fallen characters, but rather re-raises characters once they die if you've cast it on them beforehand.
- 14 characters that you pretty much all need to grind for because you can't revive dead characters which means you're going to have to rely on reserve party members a lot, and EXP is only given to active party-members.
- Despite not having any real revive option besides the re-raise state, you'll often meet enemies that can one-shot kill your characters. Just as you have the kill-sight allowing you to crit enemies, often to death, enemies sometimes also get an agro-state that randomly gives them enough power to kill you in a single blow.
- If all your long-range characters die, you're screwed because many enemies can't be killed in close-range because they're either flying, or standing on some inaccessible part of the map.
- Most missions will require you to be several levels higher then what you are at once you finish the previous mission which means you need to grind in-between each mission.
- Hardly any way of leveling Summons since they can only be used in missions, and only stay summoned for a minute or two. Summoning also kills the character doing the summoning unless you have re-raise cast on them, which only one character can do, unless you have Phoenix downs(which again, cannot be bought).
- Despite the fact that summons are really hard to level, and that they kill a character without re-raise cast on them, they're your best (often only) choice of taking down a large boss without loosing loads of characters in the progress due to the massive damage they do. Unfortunately, since they're so hard to level, you'll loose that edge pretty quickly, which means you're back to just throwing your regular characters into the meat-grinder.
- Apart from the hub-city, all other cities are copy-past mini-hubs with little to no content or relevance to the story.
- Story is kind of fragmented since you have 14 characters to worry about, most of which aren't given all that much screen-time in relation to the over-arching plot.
- Because the game runs on a time-cycle, and each inter-action in the hub-city costs 2 hours from your time-pool, your interactions are limited. If you spend all your time on certain things, you'll miss out on story segments. Spend all your time on story-segments, you'll miss chances to grind your characters (leaving the hub-city costs 6 hours, or 12 if you go on a campaign side-mission).
- Campaign side-missions usually have a level requirement 6-10 levels(sometimes even more) above your current level as they're unlocked, but these missions disappear between each story mission, which means you have a choice of either grinding for many hours to do the side-campaign before advancing the plot, or advancing the plot and loosing out on the rewards of the side-campaigns.
- You can only have 1 item to a dedicated button, and going to the menu to change this, or use an item is almost impossible in missions because going to the menu doesn't pause the game-play. Good luck trying to find a new set of healing items if you run out of whatever potion you had equipped in the middle of a boss-fight.
- Equipment/magic/skills etc can only be changed at save-points or at stores, meaning that if you equip skills that don't work or aren't well-suited for a mission, you're essentially screwed until you reach a save-point, or unless you restart the mission.
- All missions are ranked, which then determines your pay. If lose a lot of characters, you're punished by being poorly ranked, yet having many characters is supposed to be your back-up in case your primary dies since you don't really have any reliable options for reviving them. If you don't have enough cash, you won't be able to afford new equipment, which will punish you even more down the line.
This means, you'll need to grind a lot to make sure you primary party is strong enough to stay alive the entire mission. But, if you only use the primary party, your 11 other party members won't gain any experience from the mission, meaning you then have to grind these guys even more after the mission is finished.
These are just some issues at the top of my head. The game has a good story in general, really nice battle system, a nice soundtrack, a world-map with random encounters, and lots of content. In many ways it feels much more like earlier FF games from the PSX era, but it also feels really poorly executed.
Like, they knew what they were supposed to make, but ended up not really going all the way because of some sort of obsessive compulsive attachment to design philosophy that has driven the newer game - this need to innovate just for the heck of it.
Like "Yeah, let's have 14 characters! That's new and exiting! Also, let's remove general revival items! Also, let's have a time-cycle with limited hours!" and doing this with no concern about game-balance.
So yeah, I'd be kinda on the fence about that one. Unless you really want to buy it for the FF15 demo, and if they don't release a demo for it, I'd wait and hope that a friend buys it and try it out before buying it, because buying it full price (like I did for the PS Vita) is probably going to leave a sour taste in your mouth if you go into it expecting something as good as the earlier titles.
