Final Fantasy Resonance review: I appreciate its Vision, even if it doesn't quite stick the landing
Rain on your parade.
A fantastic example of how to rewrite battle mechanics to suit a full-fat RPG - it's just a shame about all the actual writing.
Spoilers follow for every mainline Final Fantasy game.
I think the most memorable bit of brilliance in the otherwise flawed diamond that is Final Fantasy 16 is the way it handles legacy. There are moments where Clive and his recalcitrant band of revolutionaries rage against the way of the world: they burn down cities, depose oligarchs, shatter crystals. It's a none-too-subtle rallying cry against the binding nature of tradition: a radical plea to tear down the structures of the past in order to sow the seeds of the future.
It reflects a game that, as the most recent numbered entry in the series, also feels like an awkward teenager unsure of its place in the grandiose canon of its heritage. But Final Fantasy Resonance doesn't have that problem; it's not thrashing against the constraints of its maker, growling and grumbling bitterly as it desperately tries to break out of that Final Fantasy-shaped box it's been shoved into. Rather, Resonance is the other side of the same coin; trying too hard to live up to, emulate, mimic what came before. And that equal obsession with legacy carries similar consequences for this young upstart as it did its grizzled older sibling.
One of the most essential elements to a Final Fantasy game is its story. Even from the early days when a desperado company on the edge of bankruptcy threw caution to the wind to make the singular game it wanted to play, assuming it'd be its final hurrah - its 'final' fantasy - the series has had an obsession with storytelling. And rightly so; the brazen, often quite nonsensical plots of Hironobu Sakaguchi, Yoshinori Kitase, Kazushige Nojima, Daisuke Watanabe, and way more besides often get quite cumbersome. Amnesia, time travel, multi-dimensional rifts, patriarchal space whales - you name it, this series has had it.
Resonance, puffing up its chest as it stands in line next to its esteemed siblings, tries hard to fit in, but in doing so picks up all these tropes without really understanding why they (kind-of) work in those other games. So you're left with a grab-bag of nonsense; mages that don't know who they are, spunky swordsmen that hate their dads, reticent loners that walk the path of the blade, womanising mercenaries fighting for the fate of a nation… it's all a bit much. And I say that as someone with a high tolerance for 'anime nonsense' in my role-playing games.
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You really can't argue with this art direction.
I think my main issue with the story and cast of Resonance lies in how shallow it all feels. The cast has no chemistry. Plot points just happen, with no real time to digest or feel the impact in the world. One mission sees an entire city swallowed by floodwater, only for everything to go back to normal once you've solved the inciting incident. Can you imagine that in FF7 or FF8 - if the slums barely reacted to the falling of the Sector 7 plate, or none of the characters really noticed what happened to Trabia Garden?
This sense of worldly stasis comes from how Resonance has been reanimated, I think: it began life as a doomed mobile game, Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, its story stripped out of season one and shunted into Resonance. The graphics, battle system, and some key mechanics were altered - improved, actually - but the story… It is, by far, the weakest facet. Things, which feels almost obligatory to say for this series, get better about 30 hours in, but given it's also only 30-40 hours long (unless you're sniffing out all the open-world side missions) that does little to allay how boring the overall plot feels, and how frustratingly over-written it is in the moment-to-moment. Using cool words like 'puissance' means very little if the standard back-and-forth is chittering nonsense, I'm afraid!
At least Resonance is generous when it comes to battles. Many will argue that a good, emotive story is the backbone of the Final Fantasy series, but I actually think it's the battle mechanics that have kept SquareSoft/Square Enix's storied series alive for the last 40 years. From the traditional turn-based epoch of FF1 through FF3, the 'active-time battle' experiments of FF4 through 9, the unbeatable 'conditional turn battles' of FF10, and all the weird and wonderful mixes that came after, Final Fantasy is no stranger to probing how we play. So it should be galling seeing Resonance fall back into old habits, but instead the resultant battle mechanic is compelling and hard to put down.
Resonance uses a mix of the synergy/stamina setup from FF13, 15 and the 7 Remake series, alongside a more traditional turn-based system that - actually - is more like something from Octopath Traveler than any numbered FF entry (and that's notable, given how Octopath 0 also rejigged a dead mobile game into a somewhat successful 'full game' release). Here, enemies are furnished with a HP and a stamina bar. Whittling down HP kills them, but emptying their stamina interrupts attacks, puts them into a 'stagger' state that causes them to soak up more damage, and allows your party to take a bonus turn. In the bonus phase, certain skills gain additional effects, and it all ends with the option to summon a 'vision' - a bonus character from the depths of the series' long history - to perform a big attack that does ample damage and can confer bonus effects to the allied party.
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Just a few of the 'Visions' the game lets you equip.
It sounds complicated - and it is when all the pistons are firing in unison - but because Resonance takes over 10 hours to really start up its engines, you're able to pilot it all quite naturally as the interlocking elements are gradually introduced. Mob enemies are felled easily enough - though there are those who'll hobble you - and bosses are common enough to keep you on your toes as you hunt down 'visions' to open up your strategic choices, and level up your company to keep you battle-ready as the world gets harder and uglier around you.
Bosses, especially those that end each of Resonance's eight chapters, are highlights. Even if you're overleveled, they can be surprisingly hard if you don't engage with the stagger, 'vision', and RPG mechanics, and I feel that for every complaint I have about the characters and world-building of Resonance, I've got a counter-argument when it comes to its battles: I love how punishing it can be; I love how much stat buffs and debuffs matter (it's not quite Shin Megami Tensei-level, but it's not far off!); I love the weird and wonderful mechanics that start to crop up when a certain character joins your crew in Chapter 4, and I love how many potential builds there are with certain 'visions' equipped to different characters.
Final Fantasy Resonance producer Keisuke Nakashima has gone on record saying the game's combat is largely inspired by FF5 and FF6, and you can see that: the 'visions' sort of work as a proxy for FF5's still best-in-class job system, whereas each individual character has their own strengths and unique abilities, as the core cast did in FF6. It's a wondrous combination, and something I genuinely hope inspires whatever comes next for either the main series, or whatever other side projects this team cooks up in the Final Fantasy canon.
As is the case with so many Final Fantasy games, everything exhales when you get the airship - the open world actually becomes open, and side quests (which up until now have been arbitrary 'go here, do this' distractions) begin to matter. Exploration is rewarded with intriguing and weird hints about the state of the world. Peculiar new weapons make themselves known. You find a cave full of Marlboros. Little puzzles about hidden Espers start to appear. Your party fills out, and something clicks as you begin to understand the intended purpose for each character, and how previously unimportant 'visions' play into a wider strategy. This is peak Final Fantasy, eliciting the same feeling you get when reclaiming the Ragnarok in FF8, opening up the control panel for the Fahrenheit in FFX, or winning the Blackjack of Setzer in FF6.
Yes, the story steadfastly refuses to kick into gear, and there's some aggravating dungeon-design, but the latter half of Resonance still manages to be a riot, with its gauntlet of ever-escalating (and ever-interesting) boss fights. Resonance, playing up to its Final Fantasy inspirations, is even better in the final third - the world is your oyster, the impending threat of doom is just far enough away for you to enjoy soaking in the ambiance of a world on the edge of ruin, and each member of your team has settled into their tactical niche. You sort of don't want to hit the point of no return because here, at least, everything feels good.
Resonance is a decent game, a wonderful 'what if' experiment that asks 'what does a pixel-based Final Fantasy look like in 2026?' It's the best-looking HD-2D game I've ever played. It plays around with RPG combat mechanics in a way worthy of its esteemed series' inspirations. But some underwhelming world-building, a forgettable story, and pacing issues that feel egregious (even by some very relaxed genre standards) prevent it from ever feeling truly great - irrespective of how good those climactic battles feel. I can't help but wonder if Resonance would have been more successful if it ripped out its Brave Exvius history root-and-stem; replacing the episodic, gacha-supporting story with something more aligned with its 'full release' RPG aspirations. If you come to Final Fantasy for its emotive storytelling, memorable characters, and a complete world to get lost in, I think you'll leave disappointed. If you come looking for moreish, brain-scratching RPG combat puzzles, I couldn't recommend it more. It's a shame, really, that Resonance never quite gets to be more than the sum of its parts.
A copy of Final Fantasy Resonance was provided for this review by Square Enix.