Well, I'm partway through Chapter 3 (of 8, I believe) in
Final Fantasy Resonance, and in general I like the game but despite being a huge improvement on the original mobile version, Brave Exvius, I can't say this is a particularly noteworthy entry in the series. It's just too damn eager to be liked, so damn desperate to reach for a reference to past games in the series, from the speech ticks of the NPCs to...well, you saw the eye-rolling screenshot. It reminds me, somewhat, of some of the complaints I saw of the similar Fire Emblem Engage.
The plot is so flimsy (so far) it's barely even worth mentioning: there are a bunch of mysterious dark soldiers running around destroying the 8 elemental crystals that sustain the world, and you chase after them as they do it. The character writing is fairly above-average, but this is as stock Final Fantasy as it comes and it doesn't do much to make the characters particularly engaging.
I mean, c'mon. There's an amnesiac girl who fell from the sky named "Fina."
As you explore, you'll find shrines (well, the same shrine just with a different name on it) dedicated to heroes from past Final Fantasy games. These "Visions" can be equipped to your characters to give them an additional set of attacks and buffs, as well as a "Resonance" Super Move you can trigger if you manage to place an entire enemy party in the "Staggered" state in a single party turn.
Yes, it's a modern Final Fantasy game, so we're once again wearing down stagger meters before you're allowed to do real damage to major enemies. I'm not sure that was the wisest move in a game so fixated on recapturing the spirit of games that predated Final Fantasy 13, but whatever. Unlike the modern games, though, normal attacks do stagger damage in addition to normal damage, and if you do the slightest amount of leveling you can pretty easily one-shot or single-stagger most enemies with just a normal attack so it evens out.
The way the Visions are setup is a bit...strange. It's basically a stand-in for the traditional Final Fantasy job system. You unlock permanent buffs and equippable abilities as you level-up the Visions for each character, but unlike most FF job systems you can't carry over attack abilities between Visions, just the buffs and permanent stat boosts you unlocked. This means you're making serious changes to your party composition when you change Visions since you really want that elemental coverage to exploit staggers.
Also, in a truly baffling move, every time you collect a Vision, the game does a 2-3 minute long retrospective on that character's game in the series and the choices they made, spoiling the **** out of the game for anyone who HASN'T played every game in the series. Yeah, aside from FF2 and the online games (neither of which I would care about spoilers for) I HAD played all these games, but in a game clearly designed to be an ambassador to past Final Fantasy games...why would you do this?
Also, minor nitpick but while the game features a generally decent English dub, the "Resonance" super moves that trigger canned FMVs from Brave Exvius...aren't. They are Japanese-language only, which just screams cheap and lazy to me, especially with more recent characters like Cloud that already have current English voice actors.
Where I do think the game shines is, no surprise, in the production values. The music is generally excellent, bordering on outstanding at times (the lyrical song that plays throughout the Water Cave, the last dungeon I did, is particularly noteworthy.
In general, I don't like Square Enix's "HD-2D" art style. In something like the Octopath games, I find that it generally results in extremely gray coloring due to combination of muted colors and "realistic lighting"...that generally results from the sky being either eternally overcast or so damn bright that the entire screen is nothing but lens flares. The end product looks like the worst of 2D married with the worst of 3D: extreme pixelation married to cheap, untextured 3D environments with bad lighting and very little animation. I dread the day people actually get what they claim they want and Square Enix remakes Chrono Trigger in that engine.
FF Resonance doesn't change my opinion on the art style, but it does try to aim for quite a bit more color than usual and a wider selection of animations. From what I've seen, the Dragon Quest HD remakes look like they'd be way more up my alley, but I don't understand why Square Enix is so married to the idea that what everyone loved about old RPGs was how pixelated they were. Why can't we get a modern RPG that actually takes advantage of full Vanillaware-quality 2D sprites? Hell, that kickstarter may have been cursed, but even the developers of Eiyuden Chronicles (which I will one day get around to playing my KS copy of) had the right idea.
Still, the game is enjoyable enough, simple and easy as it's been so far. I do really appreciate how breezy the dungeons are, only being short half hour sessions at most. Gets straight to the point. I just wish it wasn't the equivalent of a JRPG cover band: only playing the greatest hits you've already heard. No more. No less. Maybe it'll show some ambition as I get to the later parts of the game.
Topic: Rolevember 2026: The Backlog of Time (Read 1780 times)
