Parent's Guide: Final Fantasy Type-0 HD - Age rating, mature content and difficulty

Final Fantasy Type-0 HD is an HD upgrade of the PSP game of the same name, and is a mission based role playing game set in the middle of a war. With four factions at war over control of four magical crystals, you take control of the fourteen students of Class Zero, a special, top secret super class at a defence college. With all fourteen characters of Class Zero fully playable in the game, the one thing you won't be lacking in Final Fantasy Type-0 HD is choice!

Your time in Type-0 will mostly be divided between two rather different tasks - exploring the world of Orience, visiting towns, chatting to folks and completing side-quests, and going on the game's main story driven missions. Each mission plonks you at the start of a dungeon, city, or other military stronghold, and asks you to fight your way in. After choosing three of your class of fourteen to start things off (you can draft the others in to replace your fallen comrades should the worst happen), it's up to you to make your way towards your goal, beating up any enemies you come across on the way. How you do this depends on the character you're playing as, as each has a rather different weapon, from swords and spears to crossbows, pistols, and perhaps most unusually, a flute or a pack of playing cards. With a list of four commands in the bottom right hand corner of the screen, you have a variety of moves at your command - from magic to more basic attacks - and all you really have to do is mash, or hold the button to do them.

In terms of accessibility, Final Fantasy Type-0 is not the easiest of games to get to grips with. With 14 playable characters, each with their own moves and fighting style, and no standardisation between them (some characters attacks require you to hold a button, others only need a tap), it can be more than a little bit tricky when you're first starting out. Some sort of individual, character specific tutorial would be nice, but there's surprisingly little in the way of pointers here, considering the complexity of the game. The rather zoomed in (and touchy) camera may also cause problems for less experienced players, while the lack of any sort of range indicator when you're using ranged weaponry may also make things tricky for new players. As your ranged weapons can only fire over a certain distance, it can be all too easy to stand just that little bit too far away from your target, only to have your weapon totally miss.

Final Fantasy Type-0 HD uses a manual save system, with checkpoints scattered throughout dungeons and towns, which are the only places you can save your game. On the plus side, there are three difficulty levels to choose from, with the easiest level giving your characters a lot more health, whilst reducing the damage enemies dish out, although it is still easily possible to find your entire team of fourteen wiped out by a particularly tough enemy - something which sends you back to your last manual save.

Perhaps unusually for a Final Fantasy game, there's actually a substantial amount of gore in here, with large bloody puddles shown on the floor in some cutscenes, while others show a sword stabbing an (off screen) character, causing a red mist to spurt across the screen. That said, there's nothing in the way of bad language here, and little in the way of sexual content, beyond one quest that sees you spying on a female character in a bikini.

Age Ratings

Format Reviewed: Playstation 4