Ok, I spent 6 hours reading all the story/database stuff at FF Wiki, downloaded a 100% save and scoured through the history database, the character/enemy database, watched some of the key new game+ cutscenes, and started a new game+
The narrative is a lot more enjoyable on the 2nd run just because you actually understand what is going on behind what's presented. You understand the character motivations, you know who everyone is, you get all the jargon. Might actually enjoy the story this time around. Plus running around killing everyone in 1 hit instead of me being killed by everyone in 1 hit is a nice change. Should be able to speedrun the story fairly quickly.
The story is interesting. The worldview is really fleshed out thanks to the database (like XIII basically), however if you take a story that is kind of not that good? And then you layer it with layer upon layer of details and convolutions to make it deeper and create a satisfyingly large worldview, does that in itself make the story become good? I don't really know. The story seems interesting and good from a perspective of "look how complex it is" but then when you finally grasp all the details and you summarize the core tale into 3 sentences, it sounds kind of dumb. Still, I would have rather XIII had Type 0's story with XIII's production values and narrative presentation than the way we got it.
My pros and cons overall:
Pros:
-Music is incredible. Wish there were more unique tracks (about 3/4ths of the soundtrack is just different mixes/arranges of about 5-10 tunes total), but every track is really stellar.
-Excellent visuals. Great texture work, character models, CG movies.
-Battle system is fast and fun.
-Story is fairly complex and has enough depth for a full rpg tale
-It has a some nice nods to past FFs with things like Magitek Armor riding, Tonberrys, etc..
Cons:
-RTS battles. They need to seriously just be REMOVED from the western version entirely. They are absolute shit. Any college kid at a game design school could make something better than this. Obviously this is not a genre the Japanese are used to making and it shows. This isn't even "my first rts", it's just a shovelware bad RTS and there's too many RTS sections in the game both required and optional.
-The battle system simply lacks any real depth. While it's fast and fun. It never advances beyond how it is in the first 3 hours until 100 hours in. All you do is dodge and attack with either a physical attack or magic. Your AI partners are useless, and you run around the battlefield from enemy to enemy doing the same thing. You have HUNDREDS of moves between the 14 characters, however leveling up and getting new ones was not any fun because they would always be useless. So many useless moves, which might just be a fault of the battle system not requiring depth or skill.
-Enemy variety is terrible. While parts of the game feel like a full sized 30 hour rpg, the fact that you just fight the same 8-10 or so enemies over and over the entire game makes it feel small size. Especially because the battle system is just about learning each enemies attack pattern so you know when to counter hit. If anything, they should have spent another 6 months just making more enemies for the game.
-The gameplay sucks. This is just imo, but the game structure is very bad. You do 1 or 2 scripted corridor missions per chapter that are just corridor after corridor of fighting a handful of enemies (much like FFXIII) and then between them you can run around on the world map which is big and empty and has almost nothing to do. The game feels so streamlined and scripted with tons of bosses you're supposed to lose or parts where you can't die that it's like they just wanted to make a movie but had to throw some gameplay in between cutscenes. I never felt like the team had any idea what game they were trying to make. Was it an interactive corridor movie like FFXIII? Was it a walking on a world map simulator? Was it an RTS game? Was it a school simulator like Persona 3/4? Was it an airplane shooter? Every aspect of the game feels completely isolated like they were made by different teams and then stitched together in the end. Nothing feels cohesive and it just makes for a game that feels like a mess and you never quite know what kind of game it is.
-The narrative presentation is a mess. Just like the gameplay, the way the narrative is told is confused, convoluted, and jumps from event to event without ever making the player care or fully aware of what is going on. It reminds me A LOT of the presentation of The Third Birthday's story. Part of this is because they hide a lot of cutscenes in new game+, so the first time you play through the story in 25-40 hours you get an unsatisfying mess of a story and then the NEXT time you play it again you get a decent to good story. This is pretty bad design imo. BoFV and Nier do stuff like this, but they're also short games and their stories are still satisfying and able to be understood the first time and the future runs just flesh the tales and the characters and the worlds out. That's how you do it. You don't just cut out essential parts of the explanations and plot and **** up how the story comes across to a player the first time they play it just because you want to entice them to play it again. I'm guessing most players only finish games once so they're left with a half-assed convoluted mess of a story here.
-There is no character development. Even with the extended new game+ scenes, Type 0 is all about PLOT and has lots of PLOT, what it doesn't have are any actual human-like characters. Every character is an archetype and they don't change one bit from the beginning of the tale to the end. This includes the villains and the support characters. NOBODY EVER CHANGES or grows or anything, except maybe 1 or 2 minor side characters. Which makes the ending seem a bit bs as well. The story is about the large scale plot and the individual characters don't seem to matter at all. At least XIII had a ton of character development, even if the plot was kind of lame.
-The world map is a waste and not fun. The person|map size ratio is really off and coupled with the movement speed, getting around the world map feels like a chore and is no fun. Chocobos help but having to keep Chocobos in stock and keep catching them on the map is tedious. The fact that chocobos disappear while you are riding them, so you need to use several to get across the map is lame. The fact that some of the areas in the game are only accessible by going through connecting caves so you lose your chocobo and have to use another one when you get out is lame. That you don't get the airship, which is optional, until right before the final dungeon, and then there's nothing much to do with it and once you continue the story you lose it again is lame. Having a world map should be fun and enjoyable to traverse. Here it's all pretty lame and I'd rather have just had a point and click map.
-The cities are pointless. They are tiny 1 room places, they all look like one of 3 different types, and there's nothing to do in them besides find the person selling things and find the 1 person in them who has a single quest and then you never re-visit that town again.
-The game balance sucks. You're either overleveled or underleveled and your characters are dying in 1 or 2 hits or you're killing everyone in 1 hit, there's just no balance where it ever feels just right like a normal rpg. Summons are generally useless because you have to level them separately and because you can't use them outside of story missions (who thought this was a good idea??). Magic is powerful, but most of the magic is generally the same and some are useless (the ones where you have to stand still and aim and charge are not really viable when things are attacking you), and while the idea of leveling magic is cool, when you start doing that and the MP cost jumps up dramatically, it's just makes magic-based characters not very good because with spells costing over 100MP a use, you're getting like 8-9 shots of it in a stage between restore points and there's probably 30-40 enemies in between.
-And my biggest gripe is the leveling system is the worst. By giving you 14 characters and not having shared experience, and being a game where you level incredibly slow like an MMO, your characters are never anywhere near each other in levels, you always feel underleveled in your first playthrough, and it makes you pick a couple of characters you will main with and stick with them the whole game because everyone else is too far back in levels to be worth using. I'm guessing this was all because of the focus on local multiplayer because that's the cool thing to do in Japan with your buddies. However for the western release where people don't huddle around in groups with psps to play rpgs for hours, FIX THE LEVELING FOR THE WESTERN VERSION if you want to make western gamers like your game.
I'd give the game something like a 6/10 first playthrough and then 7.5 or 8/10 on future playthroughs when you're overpowered and can speed run and have the story background going in.
Also general endgame spoiler stuff:
The last dungeon was interesting but making it so you CAN'T DIE was so stupid. And the final boss, wtf? What was even the point of that. It's a mini-game while you're invincible. Why not make an actual real boss you had to fight? That just wasn't very satisfying and it sort of represents the feel of the entire game being scripted and you not really having any influence on playing the game; it plays itself etc...
Story-wise, I think with the new game+ stuff and the database they generally explained or fleshed out everything in the game, EXCEPT the Lulusanth Judge and Arecia. I get that the two of them are basically the gods of the world and to keep the balance they set up the four crystals and a failsafe that if any one crystal takes over all the rest that the Lulusanth will be released and destroy the world and reset it back to zero to do over again.
However, what I don't get and feel is left unexplained is why Lulusanth Judge let Arecia make Class Zero each time to give people a chance to (?????). What's the point of making a failsafe if you're making a chance against it.
And I get the change this cycle was that everyone, whether it's Cid, or the Concordia Queen, or Concordia L'Cie, or Class Zero, all chose self-sacrifice rather than self-preservation. They all died fearlessly for the promise of a better future. And when Arecia is touched by this history of everyone including Class Zero, she is moved and decides to not reset the world and to let it stay without the crystals and let humans create their own world on their own.
However if this control method of endless resets in order to preserve balance was originally set up by Arecia and Lulusanth Judge, why does he just let Arecia change all this and possibly destroy the balance of the world.
Not too mention that the whole idea of creating a FINIS to happen when 1 crystal took over the others makes no sense. Arecia and Lulusanth judge set up the world with the crystals because they wanted the world to keep a balance in order to not overflow the visible world/realm of the living or the invisible world/realm of the dead like Etro's job in the mythology. But if one country rules the rest...how would that change anything? People would still live and die and in the balance of souls, nothing would change with a single power ruling vs 4 powers ruling. They just what? Don't like uneven power distributions in societies so they destroy the whole world every time the balance gets upset? Honestly that seems kind of a stupid plot.
Anyhow, I just think that stuff should have gotten more development because it feels pretttty underdeveloped compared to the bulk of the story, yet it's really the most important.
Also I think the final chapter should have been the 2nd half of the game. The first half of the game should have been a military story about Suzaku trying to fight off Byakko and eventually turning the tables and conquering the entire world map, then as the halfway twist, that triggers FINIS and the second half of the game is about the bigger story of humankind's attempt to survive in the endless game of reset worlds. The final chapter feels pretty rushed as is and the bulk of the game is about the military story which in the scheme of things isn't even that important.
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