2497: The Further Adventures of Class Zero

After some further time with Final Fantasy Type-0, I’m now 100% on board with what it has to offer. It’s a slow burn, to be sure — its rather drab early hours don’t really sell it all that well, but by the time it’s flinging Alexander, Bahamut Zero and Gilgamesh (including the correct music) around with gay abandon it’s hard not to enjoy the ride.

I’m planning a Final Fantasy month over at MoeGamer at some point in the near future, so I’ll write more about this then, but I did want to comment a little on the game’s tone, because it’s markedly different from the mainline Final Fantasy series, and makes this abundantly clear from the outset.

Mainline Final Fantasy games are benchmark JRPGs for many people; they’re regarded as the quintessential example of “young hero gathers a band of companions and saves the world”, despite a number of installments deviating from this stereotypical formula. One thing you can say with a reasonable amount of confidence, however, is that, on balance, they’re optimistic affairs, all about bonds of friendship and love overcoming great evil and that sort of thing. This isn’t to say that the series doesn’t have its dark moments — in fact, several installments’ darkest moments make up some of the most iconic and influential moments in all of gaming history — but on the whole, it’s a series designed to make you feel like part of a heroic epic with all the optimism that involves.

Type-0, meanwhile, occupies the complete other end of the spectrum. I talked a little yesterday about how it de-emphasises the role of the individual in favour of a large cast of characters, and the further you play, the more this becomes apparent. Part of Type-0‘s background lore is the fact that when someone dies, anyone who knew them forgets who they were, even if they were very close. This is one of many reflections the game makes on the horrors of war; a very literal interpretation of Stalin’s supposed (and possibly misattributed) quote “when one dies, it is a tragedy; when a million die, it is a statistic”.

Type-0 lays it on fairly thick with its depictions of the brutality and the senselessness of war. It doesn’t do so in a particularly preachy manner, however; the game’s setup is such that it’s fair to spend some time pondering whether anyone — including the side you’re on — are the “good guys” in the conflict depicted. Instead, we simply see various horrors unfolding, both through the eyes of Class Zero on the ground, and through the distant detachment of the narrator during the documentary-style cutscenes that punctuate the main beats of the narrative as a whole.

One particularly chilling moment comes in the aftermath of a mission late in the game, which culminates with your side in the conflict summoning Alexander as an ultimate weapon of mass destruction; in order to do so, many of your allies give up their lives as they channel their magic and life force into the summoning. The devastation that Alexander wreaks is immense, presented to you in simple, cold statistics — white text on a black screen — after the battle is over. While in the heat of the moment, Alexander’s summoning is pure Final Fantasy fanservice, the realisation that the spectacular light show you just witnessed cost the lives of many people on both sides of the conflict makes you wonder whether or not it was worth it.

I’m nearing the end of the game now, I think; just two more chapters to go. I’ll be interested to see how it ends — particularly if it concludes on as bleak a note as its opening sequence, featuring a seriously wounded soldier trying his best to reach his destination with his also wounded chocobo, then finally dying, forgotten, on the streets as the conflict continues to rage around him. I’m also interested to do a second playthrough once I’ve beaten it once; not only are you at a more suitable level to tackle the optional “Expert Trials” on a second playthrough, there are also additional missions called “Code Crimson” which add additional details and context to the story.

Considering Type-0 is a spinoff game in the Final Fantasy series rather than a mainline installment — and considering it originated as a Japan-only, handheld-only title — it’s impressive quite how much lore has been packed into this game, all of it reviewable through an in-game encyclopaedia. You don’t need to know most of it to appreciate the story, mind you; it’s simply there as “additional reading” if you find it interesting. While I wasn’t sure about Type-0 when I first started playing it, the longer I spend with it, the more fascinating I find this war-torn world that seems to be on a collision course with absolute disaster, so I very much welcome this additional content, particularly as some of it comes in the form of cutscenes that explain what happens to a number of minor characters along the way.

I’ll have definitely beaten it at least once by the time Final Fantasy XV rolls around; whether I’ll have made it through any more of that remains to be seen, but now I’m familiar with how it all works and got to know the characters, I’m certainly up for a bit of New Game Plus.