My first exposure to a certain type of Final Fantasy fan occurred in 2006, when a friend of mine angrily insisted that a game can't be Final Fantasy if it doesn't have turn-based combat.
This was in response to the hybrid real-time combat of Final Fantasy XII, and series developer Square Enix has been forsaking that kind of guy in the two decades since. There hasn't been a traditionally turn-based mainline Final Fantasy in 25 years, which makes Final Fantasy Resonance exciting. A new title assembled using assets from the mobile title Brave Exvius, Resonance follows in the footsteps of last year's Octopath Traveler 0 in turning a phone game into a console experience that will live after its predecessor's servers are inevitably shut down.
Resonance is not as large or audacious as Octopath was, and its main story relies a bit too much on tropes and concepts from previous Final Fantasy stories to stand on its own. Thanks to pleasurable combat that's wonderfully easy to bust wide open and a solid sense of exploration, this throwback RPG was worth the 40 or so hours it took me to finish.
Final Fantasy Resonance is full of ideas you've heard before
The best Final Fantasy games have some of the most emotionally affecting and thought-provoking stories you'll find in any big-budget RPG. I often put Final Fantasy X, in particular, on a pedestal thanks to its compelling combination of gut-wrenching romance and an examination of how theocracy can take hold over a society.
All of that is to say that Resonance doesn't reach those heights. Its story concerns a ragtag group of adventurers traveling around the world to stop some evil dudes in cool armor from destroying elementally attuned crystals, in hopes of preventing a global catastrophe. Resonance occasionally hints at greater storytelling ambitions in some of the areas you travel to, such as the desert nation of Zoldaad, which is embroiled in a tense revolutionary fervor against a despotic king. Generally, though, you don't spend enough time in these areas for their individual plotlines to carry much weight, and the game thematically falls back on basic ideas like "the power of the human spirit" too often.
This over-reliance on well-trodden concepts extends to the primary cast of characters. They're endearing enough thanks to decent English voice acting and some solid character-specific sidequests, but for the most part, they adhere to archetypes you've probably seen before. Rain, the protagonist, is a blonde guy with a big sword. His friend Lasswell is a brooding katana wielder, Nichol is a stern, strategic mage, and Sakura is a centuries-old sorceress who has the appearance of a child.
I don't dislike any of these people, and I'll admit that by the very end, Resonance crossed the low bar of making me care about what happened to them. But all of it goes in the exact "let's go save the world" direction that you think it will, and the final villain was kind of a nothingburger for me.
The combat always kept me guessing, even with awkward menus
While Resonance never reaches the narrative heights of its predecessors, the turn-based combat is pretty excellent. It's exactly what you'd want out of an old-school-style Final Fantasy experience: Enemies on the left, party on the right, and every offensive or healing spell can either be cast on a single unit or on multiple units, just like the classics. Enemies have elemental weaknesses, everyone is susceptible to all sorts of negative status effects, and smart use of buffs can win the day for you. It's good stuff.
To its credit, Resonance blends retro-style design with more modern ideas. There's a visible turn order on screen (really stretching the definition of "modern" there), you can optionally adjust the speed of battle, and every enemy has a stagger meter underneath their health bar that, when depleted, paralyzes them for a turn and makes them highly vulnerable to damage. Stagger every enemy onscreen in one turn, and you get a bonus phase where every character gets to act, and you get to unleash a huge, flashy super attack.
Those super attacks come from "visions," ghostly spirits that you equip to a party member, whom the visions hang out behind during fights. I am a huge fan of the vision system's gameplay ramifications, as it acts as a sort of soft class system. Each vision imbues its attached party member with a new moveset of unique, upgradable moves tied to specific elements, giving each vision a defined role in combat.
And yes, these visions are mostly cameo characters from previous Final Fantasy games. Cloud, Terra, Squall, Tidus, and other assorted protagonists from past titles are all here, with one representative from each mainline game. This is sort of a double-edged sword; I appreciate this system as a clever way to reuse assets from the mobile game, but it also means Resonance occasionally hinges too much of its excitement on making you do the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the screen meme because you saw a guy you recognized from another game.
Square is lucky that Resonance is a pretty good game in its own right, as all these cameos otherwise just remind you of games with better characters and stories.
Even with too much weight placed on references, Resonance consistently whetted my appetite for this style of combat thanks to smart encounter design that encourages regularly switching visions in and out of different situations. The only issue here is that the menu design makes that kind of a chore. It just takes one or two extra button presses to get to a full list of your visions, and figuring out who is best for each situation is a slower process than it should be as a result.
Resonance will do until the next proper FF comes around
We don't know when the seventeenth (!!!) mainline Final Fantasy is coming, nor what form it will take. Until then, Resonance is a satisfying appetizer of sorts.
Aside from the quality combat, Resonance kept me going by giving me an airship relatively early and letting me explore the world as I saw fit. Of course, the story progresses in a linear fashion, and lots of areas are inaccessible until you see a certain cutscene, but there are lots of little islands, caves, and other fun things to discover if you take the time to explore. By the end of the game, my party was overpowered as hell because I had put the effort in to find things that would give me advantages in fights.
That sort of thing was missing from the last mainline title, Final Fantasy XVI, so I appreciate its inclusion here.
Its soundtrack also deserves a shout-out. Composer Noriyasu Agematsu channels the classics reasonably well with battle themes that drive up the adrenaline, overworld themes that set an appropriate mood for each area, and cutscene tracks that make the otherwise middling story developments feel emotional.
As a fun bonus, Resonance also looks and runs great on Switch 2. It's probably the best-looking game in the "HD-2D" style yet, and the cinematic pixel art cutscenes are especially jaw-dropping at times. The frame rate drops a little bit here and there, but not enough to appreciably distract from the experience.
Final Fantasy Resonance often feels more like a really good cover band than a member of the original act, but that's OK. The end result serves as a reminder that Square Enix is still perfectly capable of making games in this style. Hopefully it's a sign of better things to come for the mainline series.