Fantasy Earth Zero

Fantasy Earth Zero Hand-on Preview:

Square Enix and Gamepot have teamed up to bring us Fantasy Earth Zero. It’s not Final Fantasy and it’s not Earth (as far as I can tell) but it’s far from zero. When you first step into the game you’ll choose from one of three classes - Scout, Sorcerer and warrior. I chose a Scout for starters.


Obviously scouts are ranged types, warriors are melee types and sorcerers are magic types. In regards to races you’ve only got one, Human. But you can choose your gender. Once you’ve got your character sorted you then move on to faction choice. There will be five, but at present are only two. This will simply give you a nation to belong to so that you know whom to fight for territory which is one of the underlying mechanics of the game.

Honestly, I’m a bit disappointed in what the game looks to be offering. I had expected far more, some massively interesting story, some unique battle system or some outstanding environments. Instead there are severely restricted environments in which you can’t even meander through the forest which give it a sort of MMO on rails feel. The graphics aren’t that outstanding either and the character models are blocky. The faces look like masks hastily slapped onto polygonal heads and they’re generally less than what one would expect from the likes of Square Enix.

There’s a lot of walking to and fro, as in many MMOs. Fantasy Earth Zero doesn’t give you a run option and there’s no auto-walk so that means you have to spend a lot of time just holding down a movement button going from point A to point B making the game very dull and boring at times. Aha, I found the autorun (it’s not on the in-game controls chart).

Even in many of the instanced areas you’re pretty much walking from encounter area to encounter area. The listed features on the main site say "attack, jump, dodge, run and experiece fast-paced, exciting combat." Well, there’s attack, jump, dodge at least.

The game uses what appear to be multiplayer instances called fields. However, there seem to be some problems with this at present where you cannot always create a field in order to complete a quest. I’m sure it’s just some technical problem that they will sort out over the course of the testing phases.

Fantasy Earth Zero has a skill learning process, like many RPGs but it’s limited to pretty much just attacks from what I’ve seen. My scout does also have the ability to hide but other than that, after seven levels of progress, it’s all attack skills. That seems quite one-dimensional to me. I have yet to see any kind of crafting in the game as well so it looks to be a mostly PvP-focused affair after you grind through enough levels to get into that facet of the game.

There are loads of NPCs just standing idly by waiting to chat with you. Which one sells something that is of use to you? Oh well you won’t know that without actually talking to them. That then means that you need to wander about until you find the right person for what you’re hoping to accomplish because each sells class specific gear instead of one big shop with all of it.

There are some interesting mission types that play into the fight for territory. When you are on a field with a tower you can build obelisks which then expand the territory under your control. As you gain more and more territory you do damage to the opponent’s tower until it is destroyed. But you can’t get to these missions until you’re of a certain level and that means a lot of mindless grinding until you can do something more interesting. A very limiting feature I must say.

If the whole point of the game is to take place in these battles for territory, then hindering your ability to participate in them seems counter-productive to me. Plus, insisting that you grind and grind just to get to them also sort of makes the game less fun. It’s sort of like saying, here’s this really good key lime pie, but first you have to eat this huge pile of stale biscuits.

Now I did manage to get into a battlefield, and was unable to do damage to the creatures inhabiting it, which of course meant a very quick death for me. I’m not sure if that was a technical glitch and that at such a low level I shouldn’t have been in that area or something else. But I hit them with my skill-powered attacks and did zero damage.

Overall, I think the game has a long way to go before it’s both ready for gamers and worth the time investment. That’s not to say it won’t be either. Just right now I felt like it was too much running around and not enough payoff.