Final Fantasy Type-0 can be more than a little overwhelming. Between the barrage of proper nouns and 14 playable characters, it will probably take you some time to get adjusted to the pace of Square’s newest role-playing game.
We’re here to help. If you want to get the most out of Type-0 — which came out today for PS4 and Xbox One — here are some key tips that will help you get the best out of both combat and exploration. (Check out our review of Final Fantasy Type-0 HD here.)
(Special hat tip to Prima for giving me some tips before I started the game last week.)
Take your damn time
Every time you finish a mission in Type-0, you’ll find yourself back at your home base academy with a giant, imposing time-stamp on the bottom right corner of the screen. Don’t worry too much about it. Though that timer can be intimidating, it actually only ticks down when you A) talk to people with exclamation points over their heads and B) step outside of town and then come back. The timer won’t move at all when you’re exploring the map or wandering around.
Although you won’t be able to do everything there is to do on a single playthrough, you do have plenty of leeway to explore, fight, and take your time between each main story mission.
Talk to your classmates
As you wander around the world, you’ll notice that some people have exclamation points over their heads. Talking to these people will both get you items and knock the mission timer down a couple of hours, which may or may not be worth it, depending how interesting those people are and what they wind up giving you.
One thing to look out for: when the people with exclamation points are your party members, talking to them will often lead to cut-scenes or other interesting side-bits that make for way better conversation than your average NPC. So prioritise talking to Class Zero classmates over everyone else.
Your best friend is the dodge button
Don’t bother casting walls or trying to block enemy attacks; the best way to survive in Final Fantasy Type-0 is just to get the hell out of the way. Watch baddies’ movement patterns and try to anticipate when they’re going to strike, then roll to the side or behind them so they can’t hit you. Usually, enemies will be most vulnerable right after they attack, so it’s good to get in a rhythm of dodging and then immediately striking.
Don’t just spam attacks
When enemies in Final Fantasy Type-0 are vulnerable, you’ll see big red or yellow circles appear over their bodies, like this:
Attack an enemy when that circle’s up and you’ll either do heavy damage (if it’s yellow) or instantly kill them (if it’s red). This is by far the best way to take down enemies without dying and finish missions as quickly as possible, which gets you better rewards.
Every enemy has a different attack pattern and different vulnerability timing, so you’ll have to figure the rhythms out as you go, but one key tip here: If you just mash the attack button, you’ll prevent your opponent from ever triggering that vulnerability. Patience can be really useful in this game.
Pick balanced parties
Try to make sure you’ve got both a healer and a ranged attacker in your party at all times.
Keep some of your favourite characters in reserve
You may be tempted to just whip out your three best characters for every mission, but actually, you’re better off keeping track of the Class Zero members you most like playing with, then picking just one of those and keeping the rest in reserve. If you like playing as Ace, Jack, and Queen, for example, you might want to play as Ace with two other party members, so if Ace dies, you can roll back in with Jack or Queen. If you started off with those three, on the other hand, they could all die at once and leave you stuck with inferior options.
Go to class
One of the most entertaining and lucrative sidequests is also the simplest one: between every mission, go talk to the moogle in Class Zero and take every class he has to offer. The rewards are great.
Save often
You can screw yourself over in Final Fantasy Type-0, losing too many party members just before you’re due to take on a big boss, and although you can always abort a mission and try again, it’s also a good strategy to keep multiple save files, and save as often as possible.
Try to keep all of your characters leveled and equipped
Yes, this is a lot to ask — you have 14 damn characters. But it’s worth taking a few minutes to go through them all, upgrade as many abilities as possible, and give them all decent equipment. You never know when you might go through your whole party on a single mission.
Be careful when asking for support
Before every mission, your moogle buddy will ask if you want to accept help from other cadets — this is generally not a good idea. Those cadets will randomly replace your party members, preventing your troops from gaining experience and levelling up. Though you’ll get rewards for doing this, it may also weaken your party considerably.
Seriously, explore the world
If you don’t take the time to wander through Type-0’s optional towns and caves, talking to everyone and doing the random little activities they have got to offer, you’re missing out on half the game, including guys like this:
Feel free to skip the RTS battles
They’re honestly kinda dumb.
Get yourself an airship
It’s possible to play through all of Type-0 without realising that you can find and drive your very own airship. Do not make this mistake. When you get to chapter 7, go to the front of the academy and find the quest-giver who offers a mission called Operation Homecoming. It’s really easy. Once you’ve finished that mission and you’re in the city of Bazz, go find the person who wants you to kill an Iron Giant in the Silent Keys. When you get to the Silent Keys, kill all the giants and turn on all the engines.
Take some dramamine
You’ll need it before you move the camera around.
Don’t worry if you miss things along the way
When you finish Final Fantasy Type-0, you can start a new game with your old save file, carrying over all your characters’ levels so you can start from the beginning on a higher difficulty setting. This game is built to be played twice. In fact, there are some essential albeit optional plot scenes you’ll only see if you play through the game a second time. This is annoying, yes, but hey, at least you don’t have to worry if you miss a sidequest or two.
Comments
21 responses to “Tips For Playing Final Fantasy Type-0 HD”
Tip 1. Play the FF15 demo.
Tip 2. Finish the FF15 demo.
Tip 3. Talk about the FF15 demo online.
Tip 4. If you think you’re done with the FF15 demo, sell type 0.
Is Type 0 that bad? Or are you just speaking for the internet public?
I’m kinda just responding to how I’m seeing people react to the game. Seem more interested in the demo like it’s MGS2 all over again.
Type 0 is pretty good. But damn that camera to hell. Not sure even Dramamine would help.
*lightly taps stick*
*camera does full 180*
@Neo Kaiser – It’s saddening that people aren’t buying Type-0 for Type-0. I was honestly very excited to be able to reconnect to the FF series through Type-0, and with the time I’ve spent playing it so far, I don’t regret any of it. I did touch FF-XV first, just to see how it would play up, but honestly it’s only a demo, and a lot of things may be different when they finally release it. So after 15 minutes, I started up Type-0 and my gosh, the feels started happening.
@Andy – For a good 10 minutes I was trying to figure out if there was anyway to reduce the camera sensitivity. Eventually you do get used to it. Very eventually. I end up just rotating the camera bit by bit.
The demo was pretty damn good. And damn that behemoth. Am level 30 and after 7 minutes I had him down to about 90%. Just ramuhd him to death instead. Will try again in 10 lvls or so.
Booooooooooooo
I actually did the opposite and managed to sell my demo code for $30 on Ebay. Made my copy of Type-0 only $38.
I actually barely played the FF15 demo. I fired it up yesterday to show some friends, but didn’t do a lot before stopping and putting on a movie. It looks pretty, and I like being able to jump.
This should be a warning label on the damn game!!!
Take some dramamine
You’ll need it before you move the camera around.
Right now i’m torn on this game, I looked at it new I would like it etc etc and so I purchased it import style instead of my usual EB rent it first.
The problem is I live with a multitude of illnesses of which rewuire me to take high does morphine and I’m already on anti dizzyness/vertigo medication and stuff to increase my super low blood pressure and this camera is the single worst I’ve ever seen in a video game to date.
Only made 100 times worse by the horrible resolution of the textures, the terrible coding, FPS and omg those after images and blurring its, jesus it’s like using a first generation plasma bad if you blew up a ps1 game on the ps3 with all those extra options turned off to smooth stuff out, it is quite clearly a pathetic hatched job visually.
and it makes me feel SICK as all hell. In combat its not nearly as bad and when roaming the big map but as soon as it hits school I start to feel so sick so fast.
Outside of this I quite enjoy the game for what it is, its a solid 6.5/10 turned into an almost unplayable waste of money for me. On the bright side I can sell the FF 15 XB1 demo for $30-40 and get 1/2 + of my money back. (Heard nothing but bad things about that demo, may as well be alpha build stuff which will only make me not want to even touch the game).
Can you Remote Play?
The XV demo is really, really good. I haven’t had this much fun playing a demo since PSX.
I liked the game but really could not handle the camera. Made me ill. Returned it to EB this afternoon 🙁
You have heard only bad things about the FF5 demo… then you must not know anybody, and live in confines. The demo is exactly what it is, a DEMO. And it is very good! After the disappointment of FF13, and after paying the demo I cannot wait to play the whole game. Yeah it needs some smoothing out, but otherwise it is pretty epic.
I agree that the camera in Type-0 is pretty bad at first, but you get used to it. Sucks that your illness is getting in the way of you playing an awesome iteration of the Final Fantasy saga.
I’m thinking I’ll take Type 0 back to EB on Tuesday when I get Bloodborne and get a full refund.
Minus the demo code which I’ve already used 😀
Oh gaaawd its one of you people lol
I’m still waiting on Australia post for my game pre order. Is the camera THAT bad that it induces motion sickness? I don’t know any game with a camera that terrible. But I’m not prone to motion sickness. Lol
Ok, so is it the motion Blur that’s triggering this motion sickness? While it’s pretty bad, the camera controls on some YouTube videos look ok enough, so maybe there’s a setting to fix this? Otherwise what about TV settings? I’m pretty sure my 2009 HiSense TV has some anti motion Blur settings hidden somewhere
Yes, it probably has the worst camera in any game I’ve played. Outside of combat, it makes me feel sick and dizzy.
Besides the terrible camera, the game itself isn’t that bad. It would of been a lot better if it was actually developed for the PS4/Xbox One, not handhelds.
It’s something that is really hard to know until you play the game, but trust me, the camera truly is just horrible. It’s sluggish and slow, and never looks where you want it to, it has the weirdest motion blur i’ve ever seen, which contributes to the motion sickness, it’s constantly shaking and at poor angles, just terrible honestly, it’s like the camera hasn’t been touched since the PSP release.
That’s probably the case. I honestly am not expecting much different from the PSP release, apart from upscaled graphics and some anti-aliasing
Oh please let there be some fucking anti aliasing. That was the thing that annoyed me most about the PSP
There is, you can definitely tell they have upped it due to the crispness of the surroundings but the broken camera absolutely insults how beautiful they made everything and it all feels like wasted effort
Yeah most certainly agree the camera makes you want to walk all the way to se hq and slap them in the face and say no this was a mistake in games 10 years ago, fix your shit. The only saviour is if you basically don’t use your right thumb stick which is how I play now. Ff 15 is very promising but soo many bugs I’m a little worried.
Ok, so as of midday yesterday(technically) I got my copy of Agito (damnit I’m gonna call it by its original name) nearly 8 hours were sunk into this game today. I am on the cool down in chapter 3, and 5 of my 14 party members are now level 25(i nearly got my ass handed to me in chapter 2 because I was a genius and charged after both the Golems, losing 10 members on them- my entire party was level 17 for what was a level 13 mission, so I thought I had levelled enough) and that frigging L’cie wiped me down to my least favourite character(that slow ass katana guy)
I have this much to say so far:
While I didn’t suffer motion sickness, this camera is typical of the camera in most PSP titles I owned. To make up for the lack of a second stick, the camera anchors itself a fixed distance, but clips. Also the motion Blur is pretty terrible. However that’s not the worst offender in this lazy remaster of a great game: to me the single thing that gets me riled up the most is the damned jaggies. Seriously- it looks like they used FXAA X2 and what’s worse is the horrible textures on the male character clothing. But I’ll be damned if I could find jaggies on the female cast in the cutscenes it’s almost like they explicitly paid more attention to detail on plain bike pants and blue striped panties under skirts than they did for the guys shirts. It’s not like the PS4 is going to run into issues with being able to run this game. Also why is it in this day and age, the girls in this game are so damned athletic while the guys are lumbering masses of flesh?
Oh but this game is fantastic. I haven’t even downloaded the FF XV demo yet because I kind of saw it was 01:08 when I saved the game last and I thought well shit, bed time
Mmm hi , i played final fantasy type 0 but every time i die in the game ! the start the game from the beginning and every time i chose continue they said < no game in save file > please what should i do ?!