Final Fantasy Resonance Is a Missed Opportunity for Square Enix

The first HD-2D entry in Square Enix's beloved RPG franchise is big on nostalgia and little else

By that barometer, Final Fantasy Resonance is not only a Final Fantasy, it is the most Final Fantasy. It has so many crystals.

Resonance, co-developed by Square Enix and Lancarse, is so overtly an homage to every other game that bears the Final Fantasy name. It is packed to the brim with Easter eggs, references, and illusions to what came before it. This is largely a holdover from the game's source material, the now shuttered mobile title Final Fantasy Brave Exvius. Much like Octopath Travel 0 before it, Resonance seeks to strip away the predatory gacha mechanics of the game it was built on and offer up a more streamlined big box title complete with a fresh coat of paint.

This, however, only highlights the core issues of the base experience, namely how much of it relies on reminding the player of games that came before it. Nostalgia may have succeeded in getting Brave Exvius players (of which I myself was one for a couple years) to spend real world money on beloved characters, but it falls flat in Resonance. The game is not only in the shadow of the series' past, but also the shadow of more qualified modern successors to the throne that don't have the luck of bearing the all-important franchise name. It is a game with several flaws that franchise fans will likely be able to overlook to appreciate the handful of moments that manage to work just right. That too is quintessentially Final Fantasy.

A tale as old as time

Resonance begins as so many early games in the legendary RPG series do. The world’s many magical crystals are threatened by a great evil and a gang of plucky heroes must put a stop to it. Along the way they’ll laugh, cry, and learn that the greatest power of all is love; a mission best accomplished by going on a sick road trip with your best buddies. The proper nouns of the story are new (the protagonist is named Rain, a weather-appropriate spiritual successor to Cloud and Lightning) but the overarching strokes are familiar. So many plot beats can be directly traced to similar moments from past entries in the series. Two knights that lead an airship? Final Fantasy 4. An amnesiac girl with a powerful affinity to Espers? Final Fantasy 6. The list goes on.

A story that relies on tropes can be accused of being lazy, but there is a reason tropes exist in the first place — they work! Resonance largely employs tropes to its benefit. It swaddles the player in a comfortable blanket of familiarity that may be predictable but is never unsettling. This aversion to risk feels like a holdover from Brave Exvius, which Resonance only retells the first season of. The paramount goal of a gacha game is retaining players and extracting as much money from them as possible. Narrative swings could affect the player base and, by extension, profit. That means there are few lows in the story, but few highs.

That isn’t to say there are no highs. When Resonance’s narrative occasionally finds its rhythm, it can offer some wonderful emotional catharsis. A standout moment centers around an Aerith/Yuna-like priestess who balances the weight of duty with the desire to live for herself. Too often, however, the tendency to bring other Final Fantasy games to mind only leads to comparisons that aren’t in Resonance's favor.

Lost in translation

The same is true when it comes to the game's mechanics. Combat is turn-based, though it does not use the series' now-signature ATB system. Instead, battles are focused on turn order and using elemental weaknesses to stagger enemies (Final Fantasy13’s most enduring contribution to the series). It’s engaging enough but lacks a sense of urgency or real innovation that is on display in Octopath Traveler’s excellent boost-break system. The jump from mobile removes something Brave Exvius actually did quite well: By utilizing the touch interface of mobile devices, players could chain attacks and hit enemies simultaneously. It’s a major loss and one of the various ways in which I am constantly reminded that Resonance is not an improved or better game than Brave Exvius by default. Sacrifices had to be made.

Other hallmarks of the series are included in battle as well. Each character can execute a showy Limit Break when a meter fills that deals extra damage and acts as a nice showcase for Square Enix's HD-2D engine. (Square Enix smartly chose to develop the game in that style, and it is just so right to finally play a game in this style that bears the Final Fantasy title, even if I still think Octopath Traveler 2 is the engine's crowning achievement.) Fina, one of the game's main party members, is the only true summoner of the crew and gets to call Espers to her aid throughout battle. This not only reflects her narrative uniqueness in Resonance but adds just a little extra to the sometimes repetitive battles.

The most advertised system in Resonance, however, is the use of Visions. These are essentially equipable tag-team partners for each party member that unlock access to additional skills and spells. A handful of Visions are original characters from Brave Exvius, but you'll probably ignore them completely in favor of iconic characters from past Final Fantasy games that you can add to your party. While these are supposed to act like a Job System, allowing you to flesh out the main cast's combat capabilities, I largely found myself just defaulting to my favorite protagonists (had to keep my boy Squall around) at all times because I wanted to see their fancy 3D animated attacks that trigger when you stagger all enemies in an encounter. Collecting a Vision requires you first watch a montage that summarizes that given character's game. It’s meant to, once again, remind you how much you love Final Fantasy. The remnants of Brave Exvius' leveraging of love for the series to collect money makes Visions feel relatively empty. Throughout my playthrough, I'm asked to remember the series at every turn, which only means I hardly have a chance to appreciate Resonance as a game that stands on its own. Perhaps I wouldn't like the answer I'd find if I thought too long.

The removal of frustrating and predatory gacha mechanics is a net positive for Resonance. You will not need to spend money to unlock Visions through slot-machine-like pulls, and you can explore the world freely without progress being intermittently halted because your daily energy ran out. Even by genre standards, Brave Exvius' implementation of gacha systems was rough. Without these barriers, however, Resonance feels unnaturally frictionless. Playing on "Normal" difficulty, combat itself never felt like a true challenge and I never once felt the need to truly grind, as I always arrived at dungeons at the appropriate level with minimal preparation. This leaves the world feeling empty as well, as exploring it doesn't surface too many wonderful secrets that felt like such a hallmark of the early games Resonance so clearly is inspired by.

The exception to Resonance’s general breeziness comes via so-called Esper hunts, which require you to track down summonable monsters in the world and challenge them to a grueling encounter to gain their support. It's a shame almost nothing in the main quest, not even climactic boss fights, comes close to this. Per series tradition, Resonance does have several endgame super bosses that offer a heightened challenge. While I didn't battle every one of them in my playthrough, they do offer some of the more interesting combat encounters in the game, but their inclusion does not fix the game's lack of meaningful challenge throughout.

By any other name

I will begrudgingly give Square Enix some brownie points for the existence of Resonance alone. At a time when the bar for game preservation is on the floor, a company taking the time and money to preserve a defunct mobile game in a form that people will (hopefully) be able to play forever is admirable. Between Resonance and Octopath Traveler 0, Square Enix is clearly committed to giving at least some of its failed live service titles a second life.

Perhaps we should be more interested in why Square Enix has so many shuttered live service games to choose from for this kind of treatment in the first place. For every Brave Exvius there are a handful of similar titles that will likely be lost forever (though please let Nier Reincarnation be next to get the remake treatment). Furthermore, Resonance is far from perfect. The derision of mobile games in the industry may make it easy to think we have lost nothing, but there is so much of Brave Exvius worth preserving that is currently still gone, including multiple seasons of further story beyond what Resonance adapts. Perhaps, if sales satisfy Square Enix, we will get these eventually, but that is never assured.

Resonance is a popcorn game — best experienced on a handheld with a snack and something playing on the TV. Regardless of its unoriginality, Resonance carries the Final Fantasy name and the HD-2D engine, a privileged combination that sets it up for success beyond the likes of Octopath Traveler, Harvestella, and Dungeon Encounters, to name a few. All of these games also offer nostalgia for the same games that inspired Resonance, but offer more insightful iterations on their narrative and mechanical hallmarks. Some have crystals, some are turn-based. All of them feel equally, if not more so, Final Fantasy than Resonance.

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Final Fantasy Resonance will be released Oct. 22 on Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on Steam Deck using a prerelease download code provided by Square Enix. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.