To evoke the classics is also to hold yourself to the high standard set by them. With Final Fantasy Resonance bringing the venerated series back to its origins with turn-based combat, and wielding Square’s HD-2D art style to modernize nostalgia for the pixel art era, it plucks at something I've longed for as someone who grew up in the SNES generation. While I've expressed my love for the Octopath Traveler series time and again, Final Fantasy has of course crystalized into something meaningful over the past several decades. But as much as Resonance looks like a torchbearer for classic RPGs, it also goes for a style of storytelling that often rings hollow. So, I think of it as a game of moments – when a genre-fusing boss theme graces your ears, when you execute a turn perfectly and watch all your spells fire off with big damage numbers, and when a cutscene brings HD-2D to life in a way you've just never seen before.
Resonance adapts the story and characters from the now-shuttered mobile game Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius by packaging them into the structure of a traditional RPG; no gacha mechanics, no microtransactions. It's quite similar to what Square Enix did with Octopath Traveler 0 and it's a brilliant way to bring existing stories into a format I'm a lot more inclined to play. With that comes an overworld with towns to represent each region, random encounters, an airship for roaming free and discovering pieces of land that feel like secrets, and full voice acting throughout the main story.
It largely sticks to the events of the first season of Brave Exvius, which follows the knights from the Kingdom of Grandshelt, Rain and Laswell, the mysterious magical girl born from a crystal, Fina, along with additional friends on a quest to stop the armor-clad Sworn Six from destroying the world's crystals and plunging it into calamity. Of course, there's more beneath the surface. That said, a lot of dialogue and interstitial events have been added to fill out the journey, which took me about 45 hours to complete (including all of the side quests marked on my map and poking around the overworld for optional minibosses who offer intense challenges). While chunks of Resonance's story aren't very riveting, the production value here had me forgetting that this was built on the bones of a mobile game – not that Brave Exvius was any lesser of an achievement for what it was.
That retooling extends to gameplay, which retains concepts and mechanics that work extremely well as an engaging turn-based combat system – and hearing "turn-based" and Final Fantasy in the same breath after all these years released those good chemicals in my brain, too. This is not an ATB system with an active element, but a straightforward turn order along a timeline. And the way you either plan accordingly depending on which units are up or manipulate the order to your advantage had me employing similar strategies as I do in the Trails series or the Octopath Traveler games.
It's all about elemental affinities and staggering enemies in Resonance, however. Each party member has their own set of elements covered through magic spells or element-imbued physical attacks, but they also equip what are called Visions that function somewhat like a Job system directly inspired by Final Fantasy V. This is what provides flexibility in party composition, giving you the tools to make sure you either cover all the elements or go all-in on a specific type so you can streamroll bosses. While every attack chips at an enemy's stagger meter, hitting their weaknesses is, of course, the strategy demanded of you.
I'm of two minds with this system: while it’s nice to have flexibility as you swap Visions between party members to constantly change their overall movesets, it can sometimes trivialize your combat approach. For example, going into a water-themed boss fight, I knew purely electric builds were going to be the optimal strategy. So, while it was rad as hell to watch chunks of stagger and HP get chopped off as I spammed electric attacks, I often didn't feel the need to think much harder than that. Having the foresight to anticipate the right element before a fight isn't quite as rewarding as being pushed to scheme with what you have.
Compare this to the boost and break system of an Octopath Traveler, where the tools you're given are more dynamic and free-flowing even with elemental affinities involved, which then lets you get more creative rather than just having you hammer away with one specific element. I cruised through the first half of Resonance since most enemies and bosses were pushovers. But thankfully, things got tougher in the late game where they hit harder and inflicted more status ailments to work around. Key moments where I was challenged to think steps ahead culminated in some real hard-fought battles toward the end.
Overall, it still provides enough of the puzzle-esque tactical thinking that's required of a good turn-based RPG. Party members level up alongside their mastery of equipped Visions, but you have to manually rank up Visions then apply passive perks and support spells, which gets into some interesting buildcrafting that gives some extra depth that mattered for those big fights. And I enjoyed Resonance's combat system because it still captures the satisfaction of teeing off on a staggered enemy with your nastiest spells, especially because their animations look so good and hit with emphatic impact.
Visions themselves are super fun to toy with because most of them are avatars of star characters from Final Fantasy's past. Their movesets call back to specific spells and signature attacks from their respective games, and it's nice to see parts of the series' history celebrated in a way that's integral to how Resonance plays. Staggering an enemy grants extra turns in a bonus phase, and staggering all of them (or a lone foe) leads to the sweeping stagger phase where everyone gets to pile on, which then concludes in a Resonance attack tied to a Vision of your choosing. I still find it jarring to go from beautiful HD-2D to a CGI cutscene (pulled from Brave Exvius) when summoning a Resonance attack, some of these are pretty cool, like big Shanttoto throwing a massive boulder of dark energy or Clive getting ready to hit L3+R3 to accept the truth. There's some wonderful pixel art around those cuts that look incredible, too, like Lightning, who gets a full animation set here – and it's lovely to see these characters recreated in that style.
Each is obtained by visiting shrines sprinkled throughout the overworld and going through a quiz-like dialogue sequence that walks through the events of their own stories (and beware, there are some major spoilers for Final Fantasies you have not played yet). I found this pretty cheesy at first, but it really grew on me as a reminder of how each entry captured something powerful that has stood the test of time. You never really know which shrine belongs to who, so when their music kicks in, it had me grinning ear-to-ear – and as someone who was deeply touched by FFXIV Shadowbringers, hearing "Tomorrow and Tomorrow" and recounting Y'shtola's ongoing story is a prime example of how sometimes Resonance got me.
More than the hard-fought battles against god-like beings, Final Fantasy has stuck around and won our hearts because of the stories it tells. And this is where I wrestled most with Resonance. The foundations of its story are quite solid and consistent as a classic Final Fantasy about the power of crystals that fuel these magical worlds and defeating evil to save the world against villains who reveal themselves to be more complicated by story's end. But it's always about how those stories get told and the impactful themes they explore along the way. Resonance has glimpses of hitting those same highs, yet I found long stretches of its storytelling to be quite underwhelming.
Taking the story of Brave Exvius and expanding on it was definitely worth exploring, but Resonance fills out a lot of that time with dialogue that feels like it was written for a middling young adult novel then crammed into a fantasy world. Not that fantasy stories need to be Shakespearean or high-concept, but much of Resonance reads like a script that didn't get punched up; overly talkative where it takes five lines for something that could've been said in one, and banking on a contemporary twee tone and some mustache-twirly villains. I love melodrama, long cutscenes, and tropes like the power of friendship, and Resonance has that for sure, but doesn't start dialing it in until late in the game.
But there's still something enticing about going on a journey with characters who overcome unbelievable odds. I came around on lead protagonist Rain and his brother-in-arms Lasswell because, while simple characters, they have a bond that riled me up for the conclusion. Fina turns out to be a little bit more than someone with a mysterious, dark past and was a compelling way to weave in more of the magical storytelling devices sensibly. And Nichol and Sakura turn out to be the better written characters who fit the RPG mold so well, and the emotional arc Nichol goes through is a definite highlight. However, I struggled to care about the Sworn Six since a lot of their dialogue undersells their importance to the broader lore. And that Dr. Lazarov is an incredibly annoying throwaway who is nothing more than a mad scientist to roll your eyes at.
Resonance also struggles with narrative momentum because it's shrouded in a vagueness that blurs its throughline rather than luring you in. So, it relies more on the societal issues of each region – environmental tragedies, revolt against a tyrannical government, or underclasses being exploited. These stories are delivered decently on their own, but the thematic coherence didn't come until much later, and how it all tied together through the mysterious ways of magic was predictable, if not fine.
Now, it usually takes more than spectacle to win me over, but Final Fantasy Resonance is an exception. When it matters most, the strongest moments are uplifted with some of the best cutscene work in HD-2D, wielding camera movement in a 3D plane effectively as character sprites and pixelized special effects coalescence through fluid animation that conveys emotion dialogue wouldn't be able to capture alone. The art style may have been born out of nostalgia, but Resonance proves that we're past that point and it can lead to new, evocative ways of creating worlds and elevating stories beyond the sum of their parts.
Music also plays a large role in why I look back at my time with Resonance fondly. It may be the expectation for a Final Fantasy game to have an amazing soundtrack, but the way certain town themes employ instruments that instill the feeling of a brutal, industrialized empire or a mystical city floating in the sky is magical. From the normal battle theme to the different tiers of bosses, I realized that Brave Exvius' great soundtrack was here all along and played off of many of the musical themes attached to the series. Remixing a dungeon theme into a bouncy electronic tune was like having fire come out of my headphones. And my jaw dropped when I heard a boss theme remix that had piano jazz fused with orchestral metal, a double bass drum pedal, and a latin choir that in a way that came together in unexpected harmony; it's such an impressive song I still can't get out of my head. Sometimes music resonates more powerfully than words, and it's one of the things I'll remember most.