Final Fantasy Type-0 HD Guide: How to Get Good in Combat

Building an Effective Squad

The first step to dominating missions is to prepare your main team and make sure their skills complement each other. Typically, you’d want to have a short or mid range attacker, a long range sniper, and a support character. You definitely don’t want to get caught in a situation with tons of sniping enemies in high places with a team of melee experts.

Some good squad combinations include Ace/Cater/Queen, Seven/Trey/Deuce, or even Machina/Queen/Rem. Note that each of these examples consist of at least one dedicated healer or support character that can always restore your HP if you get in trouble.

Getting good in combat also means that you’ll have to switch between your characters whenever the need arises. The AI in Final Fantasy Type-0 HD is fairly competent so you don’t have to worry about your teammates wasting MP on the wrong attacks or enemies. But it’s always a good idea to swap back and forth regularly so you can farm Phantoma with each character and eliminate enemies efficiently.

Strengthening Your Reserve Characters

Let’s face it; with a roster of 14 cadets to choose from, you’re going to play favorites. And that’s completely fine, I’m not judging. However, it’d be a huge mistake to only focus on leveling a handful of characters and neglecting the rest.

There will be unexpected turns of events during main missions and careless mistakes could get your main squad wiped out. This is where your reserve characters come in. If you’re forced into a situation where you have to call out a reserve character, you don’t want to be caught playing as an under-leveled character you’re not familiar with.

You don’t have to take these characters out on missions if you don’t want to. You can always get acquainted with their fighting styles via combat simulations at the arena and level them up with the secret training option back at Akademia.

Keep Dodging, and Get Those Crits

I’ve already mentioned this in my Type-0 starter guide, but it’s worth mentioning again. Abuse the Break Sight and Kill Sight mechanics as often as you can. If you’re not a fan of level grinding, these two mechanics will help immensely when you go up against tough enemies and bosses.

Make it a habit to watch enemy patterns instead of continuously hacking away at them. Also, to make things easier for you, consider switching the lock-on option to Toggle instead of Hold on the options screen. Practice your dodging, keep a keen eye on your enemies, and attack them right before they get a chance to strike.

Jack has an ability called Tranquility that you can attach the Kill Sight skill to once you’ve leveled it enough. Though he isn’t the easiest character to play as, this ability just might come in handy if you’re looking to score critical hits on your foes. Long range attackers like Trey and Cater and perfect for hitting Kill Sights.

Summon Your Eidolons With Care

Eidolons in Final Fantasy Type-0 HD are a tricky business. Summoning one requires you to sacrifice the life of one of your party members, adding to the casualty count on your mission report. As a general rule of thumb, only use Eidolons as a last resort. When it seems like your squad’s about to give out, summon an Eidolon to give your two other party members time to recuperate.

You’ll also need to make the difficult decision of who to sacrifice. Cinque and Jack are pretty good sacrificial candidates, given their slow speeds. Though these two characters do have a high attack stat, their low mobility rate will be a detriment in battle unless you level them up.

But here’s an interesting trick to get around the whole ‘sacrifice’ portion: use Rem. Once you’ve leveled her up enough, Rem can unlock an ability called Undying Wish that allows her to cast Reraise on all party members for a short period of time. By casting Reraise and then summoning the Eidolon, the fallen party member will come back to life. However, do note that this will still add to your casualty count.

I’m not a very huge fan of Eidolons as it’s just so much more interesting to experiment with your cadets’ abilities. But if push comes to shove, use them as a last resort, a final ace in the hole.