Title: Mind Zero (or Mind = 0)
Developer: Acquire, ZeroDiv
Publisher: Aksys Games
Platform(s): PlayStation Vita
Genre: RPG
Mind Zero by Acquire and ZeroDiv has received a lot of flack well before launch in English speaking territories for apparently being a poor Persona clone and having a horrible ending. Most people criticizing have not played it and are only going by what they read online. Mind Zero has a few parallels with Persona in terms of concept but it is definitely not a clone. It is a dungeon crawler at heart and gets the job done barring a few annoyances.
The dungeon crawling is grid based and in first person just like in Demon Gaze and countless other dungeon crawlers. Battles on the other hand aren’t as unforgiving as those in Demon Gaze. The mechanics in battle are great and dungeon crawling for the most part and battles ended up being my favourite part of this game. More on the game mechanics in a bit.
The story revolves around high school students whose lives change when they form contracts with MINDs. MINDs are powerful beings. There are two different worlds that are interconnected and only a select group of people can see MINDs and go into the other realm. There are two detectives looking into the situation as well who seem to run into you often. The basic premise is good guys controlling their MINDs to stop the bad guys from using their MINDs for evil. The characters range from completely bland to interesting with a few forcing me to spam the R button to skip through dialogue. The voice acting is nice and you have an option to switch to the original and really great Japanese voice acting when you load your save file.
The navigation in game is in the style of a visual novel or exactly the same as Persona 3 Portable if you’ve played that. The character portraits look nice although some characters look bored throughout. The art style throughout is pretty good but the battle animations look a little low budget overall compared to the rest of the interface. Being able to use the touch screen to advance dialogue is nice but Mind Zero suffers from touch latency and I found myself resorting to the physical buttons as far as possible. Fortunately the actual map navigation touch is fine and only the menus and other interface touch targets are affected. Tutorials are not too annoying and I did not feel lost with the control scheme at any point while playing through the game.
The battle system is very well done barring the animations during combat. Each party member can fight on their own or summon their MIND and use MIND skills or attacks. Each party member has 3 gauges: TP, LP, and MP. LP is your health. TP gets depleted when you use skills or burst mode that allows you to perform one action before the turn begins. The MP gauge is used by the MIND. This gauge refills after each battle unlike the first two. While the MIND is active, the character’s LP will not be affected as the MIND absorbs all damage. Pressing L activates or deactivates MIND during battle. I can’t figure out how the free turn is granted to a side during battle but the random element adds to the difficulty in some cases. Another parallel with the Persona series is how skills work. Skill cards can be equipped and these directly affect the magic your MIND possesses and as the game progresses, the ability to upgrade skill cards is unlocked. More slots are unlocked after levelling up by a certain amount. Dungeons in Mind Zero look underwhelming for the most part. Some bits look unfinished and others look plain out of place. Dungeons have way too many floors and this feels apparently because of how boring they feel. Enemy encounters happen pretty often and the ability to save anywhere is great. The music in the game is actually really good. The boss theme in particular is awesome.
The main problems with the game barring the few mentioned above stem in the loading times. If you come to Mind Zero expecting a Persona clone with those levels of production and story, you will be disappointed. As a dungeon crawler, the battle system will make you keep coming back regardless of how the ending of the game is. The ending leaves the door wide open for a sequel which hopefully happens for closure’s sake at least. If you’re a fan of Etrian Odyssey games and dungeon crawlers in general, Mind Zero is for you. The game gets some stuff right but there is a bit too much hindering it from being a must play title.
