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Final Fantasy Resonance Saves A Great Story From Live-Service Oblivion
It's not often that a live-service game gets any sort of attention after the servers have shut down, but there was something special about Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius. It was more than just a mediocre gacha-based RPG with Final Fantasy branding slapped on it--it featured a fully original story with unique characters, a fully fleshed-out setting, and plenty of that unmistakable Final Fantasy flavor. So when Square-Enix announced Final Fantasy Resonance--a full-fledged single-player remake of part of Brave Exvius's story--there was excitement. Former Brave Exvius players could revisit the setting they loved, and those who hadn't played could enjoy the story without all of the gacha baggage.
Retooling a live-service, gacha-monetized game into a single-player experience is no easy task, however, but Square-Enix clearly felt that the legacy of Brave Exvius was worth the effort. And while Final Fantasy Resonance succeeds admirably in retelling the saga of Rain and the battle against the Veritas, it does have a handful of shortcomings that keep it from becoming the next great Final Fantasy epic.
Resonance brings us to the world of Lapis, where adopted brothers Rain and Laswell are doing routine tasks for the Grandshelt Knights. Things quickly escalate, however: The pair encounter a mysterious armor-clad warrior, who's powerful enough to shatter the kingdom's Earth crystal before setting the kingdom's castle ablaze. One near-death encounter and mysterious-young-girl rescue later, Rain and Laswell learn that more armored sentinels are seeking to destroy the remaining crystals that maintain the world to settle a long-simmering grudge. Thus begins a grand adventure with twists, turns, mysteries, revelations, and an ever-growing party of traveling companions--the classic FF formula we've come to love. For the most part, it hews close to the original narrative of Brave Exvius, with some detours and extra exposition along the way.
In many ways, Final Fantasy Resonance feels engineered as a callback to the olden days of the series. Story- and progression-wise, Resonance feels more in line with the 16-bit Final Fantasy games: mostly linear with some side trekking you can do if you feel so inclined. The narrative pacing is brisk, though it does take time to savor individual character arcs, like Rain and Lasswell’s rivalry, Nichol’s sense of familial duty, and the mysterious circumstances surrounding Rain’s father, Raegen. There are some fun little additions, too, like side quests that offer additional insights into the characters and setting, and on-field conversations you can trigger where characters banter about themselves.Places you visit offer hidden trinkets and treasures if you’re willing to poke around suspicious nooks and take side roads, making exploration satisfying. The HD-2D graphics also feature frequent callbacks to pixel-based Final Fantasy titles that eagle-eyed nostalgia fiends will find delightful. The soundtrack is excellent, offering new versions of classic Final Fantasy songs as well as its own set of defining music leitmotifs. With its presentation, it's easy to imagine Resonance as some sort of lost "middle step" between the pixel and polygon eras of FF.
For the most part, the game is a visual treat: Detailed sprites have fluid animations, and environments are packed with artistic flourishes (the water city Olderion and its surroundings are a personal favorite). The cinematic sequences also attempt to do action and camerawork in ways not yet seen in Square-Enix's HD-2D games. When it works, it looks great, but there are also times when odd-looking compositing of the pixel art over the background or an awkward animation takes you out of the moment. Still, it's hard not to respect the effort, even if there is a lot of reuse of Brave Exvius assets throughout.
So how does Resonance differ from the mobile game it's based on? For starters, the gacha-related element of the game has been completely eliminated. The concept of Visions--characters' spirits who aid the heroes with their unique abilities--still exists, with most of them derived from classic Final Fantasy titles. In Brave Exvius, these Visions were obtained and powered up through gacha — randomized rewards obtained by spending in-game currency (which can also be bought with real money)., but in Resonance you obtain them by visiting shrines hidden throughout the world, then power them up using Magicite items. There's a mix of both familiar faces and original characters in the Visions, though I found it disappointing that only the "main" characters in each FF game (and one beloved villain) got Visions when Brave Exvius was filled with fan favorites.
While Resonance succeeds admirably in retelling the saga of Rain, it does have a handful of shortcomings that keep it from becoming the next great Final Fantasy epic
While Visions were separate units in Brave Exvius, here they act as sort of a modular skillset, able to be equipped and exchanged throughout your party as needed to augment a character's default skills. Every Vision's skill loadout is unique, and by increasing their Mastery Rank through battle, characters can learn and equip individual Vision abilities, even if they aren't using that Vision. For example, when fully mastered, Terra's Vision grants a passive skill that allows characters to break the 9999-damage cap, while Zidane gives his wielder the Steal command. These can be set in a character's ability menu once learned. This system allows for fun character customization, letting you mold characters to your tastes--though one issue is that characters who join the party later have less to work with, simply because they join without any innate Vision skills.
Combat is the other area where Resonance deviates from its Brave Exvius roots. The often chaotic hybrid of turn-based, menu-driven, and tap-to-act combat that the mobile game offered has been completely replaced with a turn-based battle that feels like a hybrid of Persona, Octopath Traveler, and Final Fantasy XIII.
Enemies have two meters attached to them: a health meter and a stagger meter. Smacking a foe with weaponry or magic depletes health, but it also reduces their stagger bar. The amount of stagger damage you do varies depending on your stats, various buffs, what sort of techniques were used, and so on. Enemies also generally have one (or more) weaknesses, and hitting that weakness deals both increased health damage and significantly boosted stagger damage.
Staggering enemies is important, because not only does it cancel all of their upcoming actions for that round of combat, it also greatly lowers their defense, leaving them open to a world of hurt from your highest-level techniques. The character who triggered the stagger also gets a bonus action at the end of the combat round. If you manage to put all the enemies onfield into stagger, you get the Sweeping Stagger status, which gives your entire party bonus turns, as well as lets you use the ultimate technique of one of the Visions your team has equipped to finish the round. If any enemy managed to survive the round, their stagger meter resets, and the cycle begins again. The benefits of staggering enemies are immense, making it essential to figure out how best to put enemies into stagger (almost always through hitting weaknesses) while keeping your own team safe from their attacks.
It's an interesting combat setup, which is why it's so frustrating when battles become slow-paced slogs. Even sped up, you'll run into fights that take their sweet time, since enemies frequently have high HP--more or less requiring you to stagger them to deal any real damage. (There's no auto-battle option, either.) I understand wanting players to engage with the mechanics, but combined with battles being unavoidable random encounters, it means you're often stuck just menuing through to hit all the weaknesses and hoping it's enough for the Sweeping Stagger so you can summon a Vision to wipe the board clean and move on.
Compounding this issue is that a decent chunk of encounters simply aren't very interesting. Fights with interesting gimmicks that force you to change up the base strategy of "target stagger bar, heal when needed, then use high-cost high-damage skills during stagger, repeat" are rare, and many of them tend to be optional or late-game encounters. Those encounters are great, and they show the kind of strategic challenge that the combat system is capable of delivering. More often, though, Resonance would rather give you damage-sponge enemies that require little more strategy than patiently poking their weakness over and over again--which means that unknowingly entering certain fights without those skills is a recipe for tedium, since you can't swap Visions or party members mid-fight. (At least you can reload a save from combat.)
But for Resonance's faults, the game otherwise delivered exactly what I wanted--a way for everyone to experience the story, characters, and world of Brave Exvius once again. I can only hope that this is the first step in Square-Enix reviving some of its shuttered mobile games in ways that keep them playable for the future--especially since there's still a lot of story from Brave Exvius that goes beyond the events of this game. As both a remake and a standalone experience, Final Fantasy Resonance shines more than it stumbles.
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