Final Fantasy Type-0

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It was their destiny, and theirs alone to decide. Free from fear of fate, gazing undaunted into the eye of death.

A game in the dumbfoundingly popular Final Fantasy series, Final Fantasy Type-0 (known as Final Fantasy Agito XIII until late January 2011) is an Eastern RPG for the Play Station Portable. According to an interview with Famitsu it is still a part of the (newly renamed) Fabula Nova Crystallis Final Fantasy, which is a Pretentious Latin Title meaning "The New Tale Of The Crystal", the name change done solely to prevent the assumption that Type-0 was dropped from the Fabula project.

In the land of Oriense, there are four regions: Rubrum, Milites, Concordia and Lorica. Each of those regions has a crystal, and this crystal powers their military forces which are trained at four Peristylia (a combination of military academy and Wizarding School), each represented by one of The Four Gods. The countries have been at peace, honoring the Pax Codex between them.

However, the expansionist Empire of Milites, led by High Commander Cid, has found a way to shatter the crystals and has set their sights on Rubrum and the Peristylium of Suzaku. Twelve students somehow retain their powers from the crystal pact, and it's up to them save their homeland and become Agito, the savior of the world.

Type-0 was originally slated to be a cellphone game, but this was changed early in development. It was released in Japan on October 27th. Both a direct sequel and an overseas release are in the works.

Playing the game again after completing it results in a different story.

Tropes used in Final Fantasy Type-0 include:

• Action Girl: All seven of them.
• Alternate Character Reading: The character for "Light" is read as "Hope", where they refer to The Four Gods of Oriense.
• Art Evolution: Being a cellphone game at first, it's not avoidable. Note that in early trailers, Ace is a White-Haired Pretty Boy with younger facial features. Other characters that appeared in the trailers also underwent the same evolution, like how Seven still wore Class Zero's red cape and didn't have her unique shoulder guards as can be seen here
• Artifact Title Drop: At some point, a Class Zero student is deemed to be the world's "Agito," or "Savior." It's not exactly a Title Drop, due to the game's name changed to Type-0 instead.
• BFS: Gilgamesh is back with one, and he seems to have picked up weapon ideas from Garland since his last appearance.
• Bittersweet Ending: Machina and Rem are de-crystallized by Arecia, but all their classmates (and Kurasame) are dead and their country is devastated by war.
  • Earn Your Happy Ending: On the other hand, completing certain criteria convinces Arecia to perform a Cosmic Retcon where the crystals were removed from Oriense's existence, sparing Class Zero and Kurasame and giving them a happy ending reminiscent of an ordinary school day, sort of.
• Bloodier and Gorier: Surprisingly enough, as the Final Fantasy theme of swords and guns usually hit like bluntly or with out effect. People are set on fire, maimings and blood are prevalent, death is shown a lot more on screen, and even the magic system requires magically pulling a life force known as Phantoma out of their enemies' bodies through forcibly exploding them into a messy pulp.
• Call Back: In the opening movie the twelve protagonists stand in a group ready to take on Milites under a flag of Rubrum flying freely. In the ending they lie dead, huddled together next to a pile of their weapons and with a torn flag of Rubrum made from their capes defiantly flying from its flagpole.
• Cast From Hit Points: Summoning in this game requires you to kill a party member.
• Child Soldiers: Maybe not children, but Suzaku's idea of specialized warfare seems to be sending young teenagers into violent and bloody battle to fend for themselves. It gets even worse when their Crystal only bestows the height of magical ability in one's youth, and further diminishes as they get older, which doesn't leave much choice for youth born in the country.
• Cool Sword: Seven, Jack, Queen, and Machina.
• Cosmic Retcon: In the secret ending, Arecia, intrigued by Class Zero's actions which broke Oriense's cycle of war and destruction, decides to change history such that the crystals would cease to exist and all of Class Zero (including Kurasame) would live together as a happy, if somewhat ordinary, class.
• Crapsack World: Man, unless that trailer is seriously misleading us, the world of Type-0 in the timeframe of the game is not a particularly nice place to live.
  • It becomes especially ironic given that the art is done by Nomura... and obviously using his stylized and colourful artstyle.
• Critical Hit/One-Hit Kill: A very important part of the gameplay. There are lots of enemies in the game where the player has to attack at the right time in order to score a critical hit on them. Sometimes, this is the only way to damage them at all.
• Darker and Edgier: Unquestionably so, compared to the entire rest of the franchise (with the possible exception of the original Final Fantasy Tactics and Versus XIII), unless the game's 2011 "debut" trailer is lying to us. It depicts a world caught up in a full-on, no bullshit global conflict with plenty of death and suffering all over the place, and includes such shots as a Milites soldier shooting a dude in the face when the camera is from said dude's perspective, and the camera lens is splattered with blood. Not exactly common fare for the usually-restrained FF franchise.
• Dark Reprise: The second segment of the final boss theme features a remix of the game's main theme, this time with Ominous Latin Chanting.
• Decoy Protagonist: Viewpoint characters Rem and Machina are made out in publicity as the main characters, despite Word of God saying that they are only outside observers to the story's events.
• Dragon Rider: Concordia relies on the dragoons of the Souryu Peristylium for offensive and defensive combat.
• Dual-Wielding: Machina, Rem, and King.
• The Empire: The aptly-named Milites seems bent on conquering everything in their path.
• Everybody Lives: In the secret ending, it is implied that Arecia's Cosmic Retcon negated the possibility of a Milites invasion, and thus its accompanying fatalities (such as Class Zero). This is evidenced by a Ship Tease between Emina and a very much alive and well Izana (at poor Nine's expense).
• Extranormal Institute: The Peristylium
• The Four Gods: The symbols of each of the four countries revealed so far, with the protagonists' country being represented by Suzaku, The Vermilion Bird.
• Fun with Acronyms: The Military Operation, Organization, Guidance and Logistics Expert, aka the MOOGLE. Doubles as a Mythology Gag.
• Gender Equal Ensemble: The gender split of the 14 playable characters is exactly even: 7 girls and 7 guys.
• Heroic Sacrifice: The official goal of all the Class Zero students is to sacrifice themselves to become "Agito", the country's saviour. They succeed.
  • The Heroes Die.
• Holding Hands: The ending scene contains two instances of this. Some members of Class Zero held hands as they were dying, and Machina holds Rem's hand to comfort her after they find the bodies.
• Hotter and Sexier: Compared to the rest of the series anyway. The scenes of Emina in her bikini are the most gratuitous fanservice to yet come from Final Fantasy, which considering their past instances of such is saying a lot. It's also the first time the developers have been forthcoming with the design process behind the Panty Shots of the female characters, and recurring Ms. Fanservice summon Shiva barely even qualifies as a Cute Monster Girl, just being a buxom human in a bikini top and miniskirt.
• Improbable Weapon User: Ace uses cards, Deuce uses a flute, and Machina uses screw-drill-sword-things. And let's be honest, Sice, a scythe isn't the most practical thing, either.
• In the Hood: All the main characters in one cutscene.
• Instant Awesome, Just Add Dragons: Concordia's armies are full of dragons.
• Keystone Army: Defeating an enemy commander causes all other enemies to surrender.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia/Wistful Amnesia: Oriense's Crystals have a very strange way dealing with the dead -- memories of any recently-deceased Oriensian will disappear from anyone who knew him/her, presumably to spare them the sense of grief and despair. But it doesn't prevent anyone from becoming curious over their missing memory pieces and finding out more. The rest of Class Zero would, in their Heroic Sacrifice, ultimately restore Oriense's ability to remember the fallen.
• Lazy Backup: Averted. You don't get a game over until all the playable characters are ko'd. Whether or not there will be exceptions to that rule remains to be seen.
• Limit Break: Preforming basic attacks builds up a meter that lets you use your special attacks.
  • Combination Attack: The most powerful of which, Trinity Attacks, must be executed in tandem with the other two party members.
• Loads and Loads of Characters: There are fourteen playable characters.
  • And then there is this trailer.
• Messianic Archetype: Each of the twelve students is trying to become one as part of Operation Apostle.
• New Era Speech: Cid of Milites gives one to his armed forces, before they launch an invasion upon the Peristylium of Suzaku.
• Mythology Gag: Several.
  • The Kingdom of Concordia employs Dragoons who ride dragons as their military, like the original Dragoons of Final Fantasy II.
  • Magitek Armor similar to Final Fantasy VI's appears.
  • "Peristylium" comes from the Latin word peristyle, which is a private garden. Final Fantasy VIII's military academies were called Gardens.
• School Uniforms Are the New Black: Most likely, since all the promotional material has shows the playable characters in their school uniforms.
  • Nonuniform Uniform: Let's put it this way to save time; no two characters wear their uniforms the same way.
• Patriotic Fervor: The opening movie begins with Cid rallying his troops in a Mien Kampf Liebenstraum-esque speech, and ends with Ace standing tall, driving a pole bearing the flag of Rubrum into the ground before he and his classmates go to war.
• Sigil Spam: Anything that remotely Rubrum will have some kind of gear motive on them, whether it's clothes that its people wear, summons, or architectures.
• Shout-Out: Rubrum includes towns named Innsmouth and Arkham. Milites has a town named Arwen.
  • Mechanical giant scorpions
  • There's an airship named Setzer
• Sidequest: The MOOGLE will give them out.
• Slice of Life: Certain cutscenes revolve on the daily lives of Class Zero and other associated schoolmates between missions.
  • The secret ending shows a much happier day in Class Zero's lives in a world where the crystals no longer exist. Emina remains teacher and is dating Izana, much to poor Nine's grief; Machina drags Ace out of the library to play; Sice accidentally presents to Seven a love letter meant for Kurasame, even as he walks in on them; Trey and King ditch band practice, much to Jack's chagrin; Cater and Eight accidentally knock each other out when the former leaps off a ledge; Deuce, Cinque and Queen talk about a Ship Tease between Ace and Mutsuki; and Rem wakes up from a bench, rises, and smiles to the sky.
• The Smurfette Principle: Averted. In contrast to the "three females rule" of other Final Fantasy games, there are 7 girls in the main party.
• Stable Time Loop: Turns out Arecia knew all along that Oriense is trapped in one as part of her and the Arbitor of Lulusanth's experiment to see which of them gets to open the gate to the Invisible World -- the latter through sacrificing billions of lives, Arecia through the "mighty souls", which come in the form of the sixteen students of Class Zero. However, within the last 600,104,971 iterations of this cycle, Class Zero has been doomed to fail Operation Apostle each time by becoming l'Cie and dying in battle, and Oriense to destruction because of Cid's actions, and along the way four such pawns were abandoned, leaving only twelve to try and hold off Finis long enough for either deity to finish their own experiment, each being apparently an Anthropomorphic Personification of a given power: Ace represents trust, Deuce to kindness, Trey to knowledge, Cater to courage, Cinque to innocent, Sice to persistence, Seven to understanding, Eight to calmness, Nine to action, Jack to ignorance, Queen to intelligence, and King to resolve. Come the 600,104,972nd cycle, Machina and Rem, two such "abandoned" pawns representing fear and love, respectively, helped the twelve defeat Cid -- not that this keeps Machina and Rem from crystallizing and their classmates from dying, though. Fortunately, their actions, which changed Oriense's destiny, convinced Arecia (with some help from Joker and Tiz, the two remaining "abandoned" pawns representing pain and decrepitude, respectively) to revive Machina and Rem and allow them to record their classmates' deeds 50 years later; and at best, she abandons the experiment altogether and changes history such that the crystals would cease to exist, giving Class Zero and Kurasame another chance at life as a Wacky Homeroom of the sorts.
• Summon Magic: Called Gods of War or War Gods in this game.
• Theme Naming: Twelve of the playable characters are named after playing cards and French dice terms. The low numbers are dice terms, possibly simply for sounding more like names. The other two characters that are playable have Latin and Japanese Meaningful Names.
  • The four countries in the world are named for the four Chinese God Beasts. Suzaku (Vermilion Bird) for the heroes and Byakko (White Tiger) for the villains being most prominent in the story thus far.
  • The cities of Concordia mostly have names from Hindu mythology.
• Too Many Belts: Where a normal school uniform would have buttons to close up their shirts and coats, we have buckles here. Thanks Nomura!
• Trailers Always Spoil: Rem, after becoming a Suzaku l'Cie, dies after Machina, made a Byakko l'Cie and clad in Milites armor, accidentally impales her, with neither recognizing each other until it was too late. They soon crystallize after this, but Arecia revives both of them.
• Vaporware: The game was infamous for this for a while; it was announced in 2006 as a cellphone game (that is, something traditionally very easy to put together), and it was 2011 before we got a release date... on the PSP, on two UMD discs. For a long time, people speculated that the project had just been canceled.
  • The creators of the game admitted that development on the game didn't even really start until 2008, two years after it was announced, and even then it had to be kept to a minimum for the first year so they could focus on The 3rd Birthday.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: AIRSHIP BATTLES.
• War Is Hell
• White-Haired Pretty Boy/White-Haired Pretty Girl: It's a Square Enix game. Don't tell us you're surprised. (For the record they are Seven, Sice, and Qator Bashtar.)
• Zettai Ryouiki: Sice, Cinque, Rem, Aria and the female Suzaku soldiers score an easy A in this.