The opening cut scene sets a scenario of war, and not the glorified kind of war where everyone gets to be a hero.

Related reading: Check out our interview with the game’s director here. It might only be a stop gap solution as we wait for Final Fantasy XV to be released, but it’s a game that stands on its own merits just as well. Getting over the game’s heritage as a PSP game, the rest of the Final Fantasy Type-0 experience is everything that happens when Square Enix gets its premier franchise right. They’re minor characters so not something you’ll see too often, but every time they crop up you’ll be pulled out of the consistency of the fantasy, and that’s something atypical for Final Fantasy games, which have always been consistent in their aesthetics. They’re also built from about a tenth of the polygons of the remade characters, so look very triangular and cheaply textured. But minor characters have flat faces and a mouth that opens and shuts like one of those string-controlled puppets.

With a large ensemble cast (which we’ll get on to in a moment), there’s enough variety in the characters that you’ll develop favourites and come to care about them.

The important characters, such as the major NPCs and the player’s own team of heroes, have all been given detailed rebuilds, and look impressive. No, the most noticeably ugly thing about the game is the character models. Square Enix has done an excellent job of hiding it as much as possible – environments are actually really quite gorgeous, and while the overworld looks a little like an old PlayStation One Final Fantasy game, the art direction throughout is consistent and the world conveys scale, even if it looks simple. Short of rebuilding it from scratch, it was always going to be a game with some ugly assets that simply don’t look as good on a big HD TV as they did on the tiny, low resolution PSP screen. It’s a PSP game, designed to run on a tiny screen and with some of the most primitive 3D hardware ever produced, that has been blown up for the most powerful console yet. Let’s get something out of the way right away: Final Fantasy Type-0 HD is not an attractive game.

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