You've all got your Japanese PSN accounts set up, right? Good because as of an hour or so ago the Final Fantasy Type-0 demo is live. I just downloaded it and played for a little while.
The demo opens with a long cutscene that I assume sets up the game. I don't speak/read Japanese outside of a few key phrases, but each character [in the... royal family? Or something. They all have card names like the Royal Flush Gang.] gets their own vignette in what feels like a long trailer for the game. They each give a short speech intercut with war footage. It's like an old World War II serial but with a Final Fantasy aesthetic. Think sweet armor, weapons, lots of blood and chocobos dressed up like war horses.
This is followed by a shorter cutscene that I guess sets up one of our main characters. All I gathered from this was someone I should care about gets hurt, but I was too distracted by the chocobo that gets gunned down. I've never seen a chocobo covered in blood before. It's grim. For a demo it's pretty beefy. We're dropped into what looks like a school based on the uniforms and young people populating the area. I haven't read anything about the story yet so I'm going into this completely fresh. And again, I don't read Japanese. I can decipher 'yes' and 'no' but not the questions I'm answering.
The schoolgirl you start out as eventually stumbles her way into some sort of training exercise in a small wooded area. In the school hubworld all you can do is roll, but in here all the combat controls are opened. Waves of enemies are thrown at you to be defeated. The combat controls like a much more solid Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep. Where that game's fighting was fun, yet repetitive this just stays fun. Granted it's just a demo and may get boring along the way, but with the large selection of characters and magic attacks I doubt it. I only played as two of the characters. The starter character had a sword, lightning and fire attacks and a healing ability. Melee combos are pulled off by holding the attack button, which likewise will charge up magic attacks causing more damage and depleting more MP.
Camera controls feel loose in a good way. The camera doesn't strictly follow you, but hugs your back enough as not to feel binding. The R button whips it behind your back. And the game is gorgeous. The cutscenes are as great as we've come to expect from Square Enix, looking better than most American animated films we get these days. From what I saw the level design doesn't fall into the KH trap of big empty rooms with pretty walls, but again it was just a demo. The areas felt lively and populated without too much stuff getting in my way.
Final Fantasy and for that matter RPGs as a genre have never really been my forte [not counting Kingdom Hearts if that even counts]. I only started really following the genre about a year and a half ago with Final Fantasy VII, which I just picked back up and am on the second disc. Since then I've really enjoyed some RPGs like FF Tactics Advance, Dragon Quest V and Chrono Trigger. This will actually be the first Final Fantasy game that I buy at launch and get to play as everyone else is playing it. And from the looks of the demo I will not be disappointed.
What did you guys think of it?
EDIT: Wait I was wrong about the world leaders. It's your PARTY that has the card names, not them.
EDIT EDIT: NeoGAF guide to making a Japanese PSN account.
yeah, let's totally start this shit up again.