Is Resonance of Fate that bad? It looked pretty cool and quirky.
Yeah, it really is "that bad". For further information, I suggest reading my many
impressions of the game (along with those of several others) in the Reader Reviews "Rate the last game you played" thread. In short, the game barely teaches the user anything about its gameplay systems (and what it does teach is very confusingly handled), the story is an inconsistent mess that makes no sense, progression through the game is extremely repetitive and
heavily grind-focused (the difficulty curve is all over the map). That game single-handedly killed the JRPG genre for me for at least 6 months.
There's certainly potential in the concept and there are
aspects of the game that could be nice (like having control over your characters' outfits and having guns), but nothing about the game really comes together. I really think the only reason anyone payed any attention to that game when it came out was because it was "the more traditional JRPG" released alongside the very un-traditional Final Fantasy XIII (a game I enjoyed
so much more despite its issues).
If you really want to play an HD JRPG, play Valkyria Chronicles on PS3. That game is awesome on so many levels.