Final Fantasy Type-0

Final Fantasy Type-0 is a dark action RPG set in the world of Orience, where fourteen cadets of the Class Zero unit fight in a war between empires over the crystals that keep their homeland alive. The game belongs to the Fabula Nova Crystallis series and scores points with a raw, mature story about loss and sacrifice that stood out sharply from the pastel-toned JRPGs of its time. Combat plays out in real time on open battlefields, with the player switching between cadets who each have their own weapons and abilities, combining attacks with magic.

The original PSP version was released only in Japan in October 2011 and never officially made it to the West — English-speaking players could only access it for years through a fan translation. Due to its scope, the game was split across two UMD discs and offered co-op multiplayer over an ad hoc network, letting four players take their favorite cadets into shared missions. The controls were adapted to the PSP's compact button layout, and the game ran at a lower resolution, which limited both the size of the battlefields and the number of enemies on screen at once. It was precisely this portable version that defined the whole game's tone — a dark story in a pocket format was a rarity in 2011.

The original version also works with an in-game calendar that keeps ticking even outside the main story missions — between chapters, the player decides whether to spend time on side missions, training the squad, or the main plot, before the deadline runs out and the story moves on regardless of what got done. The PSP version's distinctive atmosphere also includes permadeath: a fallen cadet can only be revived in battle up to a certain point, and if that fails, the player loses them permanently for the rest of the playthrough, which makes even ordinary skirmishes with rank-and-file soldiers unusually tense.

Why play it: For Final Fantasy fans who want to experience the original, raw form of Class Zero's story the way the first Japanese players did, including the co-op multiplayer that the later HD version doesn't offer.