Final Fantasy Type-0 HD both dazzles and disappoints

After years of waiting for a Western Playstation Portable (PSP) release and then a Playstation Vita port, neither of which ever materialized, Final Fantasy Type-0 HD for Playstation 4 will finally bring the game once planned to be released as Final Fantasy Agito XIII to the world outside Japan. In fact, the West and Asia will be getting Type-0 HD on March 17 2015—two days earlier than Japan, and three before Europe gets the game at last.

As we all know by now, the game will be accompanied on release by a demo of an early portion of Final Fantasy XV. But while the comparison to such graphical fidelity might not work in Type-0’s favor, the game actually does look a lot better than one might expect.

(See: Final Fantasy Type-0 HD is coming to Asian Xbox Ones with a demo of FFXV)

Seen side by side with the PSP original, the difference is thankfully night and day—those worried that the PSP title would never be able to do its new platform justice can rest easy. Some textures are still a little rough, but they end up looking more like average Playstation 3 examples than just upscaled PSP ones.

Given the expanded control options a PS4 controller offers over the PSP, which had just one stick and one set of shoulder buttons, you might expect both control and camera issues to have been fully eliminated. However, the right analog stick is bizarrely tagged to target switching, when any shoulder button would have just as easily served. This leaves the camera difficult to control in the heat of the moment without tagging out of battle mode entirely.

At several key points, old instincts kicked in, and it was hard not to try to move the camera with the right stick, only to end up facing in an entirely new direction and all of a sudden not being able to see oncoming attacks from much closer enemies. Which, in a game as fast-paced and dodge-heavy as Type-0 (truly living up to its Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII heritage), is not exactly ideal.

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The missed opportunities in the control scheme wasn’t the only disappointment surrounding the game’s appearance at TGS, either. Director Hajime Tabata confirmed that the original version’s ad hoc co-op mode would not translate to online co-op for the PS4 version, as this would have required extensive reworking. Instead, he said he hoped that fans would focus on the strength of the game’s single-player experience, but that may not satisfy those who’d been expecting the feature.

When pressed about the lack of the Vita version many had been expecting, Hajime mentioned that thanks to Remote Play, players could still enjoy the game on their beloved handheld (though that’s unlikely to please the diehard Vita fans). But he also explained that because demand was so high for a remastered version of the original, they’d decided to produce the HD PS4 version rather than merely porting to the Vita—and that working on three consecutive PSP titles (Crisis Core, 3rd Birthday, and Type-0) had done his eyesight no favors, making it a bit of a relief to be making a game for a full-size screen at last.

(See: We can’t get enough of Final Fantasy Explorers)

Certainly the game looks nice on a large screen, if not on a level with other PS4 titles. While many may be considering picking up Type-0 for the Final Fantasy XV demo, the title stands up on its own merits. Just so long as you can get past the at-times awkward controls, and the disappointment of no online co-op, there’s still the game that we clamored for over these past years, and that proved fairly popular in Japan as one of the PSP’s last great games. That’s enough to reasonably expect it to be one of the PS4’s early good games, at the very least.

This story is part of our Tokyo Game Show 2014 coverage.

Read what we thought of another recent Final Fantasy HD remake: