[00:08] This time bringing you my review after 100% for Final Fantasy Resonance, which launched about a week or so ago, and I've been playing it since. However, few things to know. Uh, for starters, most people know about the reviews by
[00:22] everything I go over, and my Steam profile is public and linked below as well. And in the case of this game, I did not get a review key for it. I did pay for this on launch day. But after playing and really enjoying the demo
[00:35] world in which I wasn't going to play this game. However, I did want to mention in particular that while the achievements cover the vast majority of few things they do not cover, which I mentioned just because sometimes
[00:49] all of the game's content, and I just thought that was interesting in this of the way, let's dive in and talk about what the game actually is. If I were to describe Final Fantasy Resonance succinctly, I would probably say it is
[01:04] obviously a love letter to old school Final Fantasy games, both mechanically, character-wise, story-wise. And if you look at the game through that lens, that is to say, it's not trying to exactly reinvent the wheel here, it's a really
[01:17] great time. However, that is interesting for another reason. Resonance here, it is my understanding is a remake of a gotacha game. I believe it was called like Brave Xius or something like that that people enjoyed for the most part
[01:29] have sort of repurposed that storyline and everything and brought it forward from that game is in here, but that's the gist of it. And I think that's especially interesting, not only because they've been taking uh games like that
[01:42] and repurposing them such as they did with Octopath Traveler Zero, but in this case, I think it works out surprisingly well. It really does feel like again a love letter to the series as a whole. However, it's probably no surprise then
[01:55] that this game leans pretty heavy on the fan service and I think in many cases pretty blatant they're just doing it because like hey look Final Fantasy which is mostly the case for the visions. For everything this game does
[02:08] really really well. It does have a couple of drawbacks in my opinion. Uh the story takes a long time to get where it's going and get interesting. It starts out with a really fantastic cutscene and setup and then you spend
[02:20] about three chapters doing very honestly kind of boring stuff until the game really starts to pick up around chapter 4 and then everything after that I was having a great time. Now I think some of that setup does pay off and I can see
[02:32] does run into that problem where I think you're going to lose people taking so back a couple of mechanics I don't exactly miss like the random battles. And this I thought was actually really interesting because a lot of these older
[02:46] random battles. Not all of them, but you know, some of them absolutely do. But here I could not find one outside of just using the airship to avoid ground end of the experience, I was like, "Oh yeah, I definitely don't miss this."
[03:00] Combine that with a handful of dungeons that I would say are uninspired at most. experience for the most part, there are a couple of things on the edges that I think are a little bit annoying. And I want to detail all of that over the
[03:12] quickly talk about the technical state. This is usually where I talk about any say that this was honestly a pretty smooth experience for me. I didn't really have any issues of notes, and in fact, looking over the user reviews over
[03:26] like anybody else is having technical problems either. And so, I am not issues to speak of, or at least widespread ones, I should say. So, let's we're going to talk about difficulty.
[03:40] difficulties, effectively easy, normal, and hard as per the usual. And these know, how much health they have, how strong they are, that kind of thing. Now, in typical JRPG fashion, uh there is very much the ability to like grind
[03:55] and overcome challenges. Most enemy scaling stops about 70. Like the optional super boss Ultima is going to be a level 70 creature. There are a couple of fights that go all the way up to 99, but those are entirely optional
[04:08] achievements as I mentioned a little bit earlier. So, the way I like to look at difficulty for a game like this is just like how much of that grinding do you balance and it's going to give you a decent challenge, but if you take the
[04:21] time to outlevel stuff, it gets very very trivially easy. In fact, I accidentally trivialized the final encounter because uh what you would normally call postgame actually opens up in the last chapter before you go to the
[04:33] pretty normal level progression you took to get there. And so, if you take the time to run around and do the extra stuff before you go beat the game, you're going to be uh vastly overleveled in comparison. And I kind of just
[04:46] destroyed the final boss very easily, just to give a little bit of an example options to tune the experience or if you're, you know, having some trouble There's no penalty for doing so, you can change it whenever. Dealer's choice on
[04:59] that front. Next up, let's talk the story setup and my thoughts on it. Now, I obviously don't want to spoil the story for people who haven't played it. I do think it winds up in a really good place, but the setup could have been
[05:11] handled a little better. Now, beyond that, I am going to provide a little to hear all that, you know, probably go ahead and skip past this, I would imagine. But otherwise, let's go ahead and dive into it. So, the game kicks off
[05:23] with this incredible cutscene setting up a war between two peoples, only for the character you're playing in this intro to turn into a crystal, and along with several other crystals, suddenly open a portal into seemingly another dimension
[05:36] before vanishing and disappearing. Then, the game sort of smash cuts to our actual protagonist, Rain, with the implication that at least hundreds of years have passed. Now, Rain here is a member of the Knights of Grandelt, the
[05:50] kingdom that you serve. And as it happens when we take control of him, Earth Crystal shrine to the north, which you show up to only to find some of the figures from the opening cutscene to be here destroying the crystal, which is
[06:03] obviously a problem. Those crystals are very important to the stability of the realm. And so, the main story begins. You have to track this guy down, see the crystals, and get to the bottom of this entire mystery. and then naturally
[06:16] figure out how it ties back in with all of that stuff that the game actually started with. Overall, I would say I really enjoyed the story, but as I've mentioned a couple times, it just took too long to get to the good part. The
[06:28] setup, which is basically the first three chapters, is a bit of a slog and and pulling you around by the nose to each individual area before the game suddenly opens up. Chapter 4 is just
[06:40] once you get that done, you get access to the airship. In chapter 5, the world opens up. The story starts bringing things together in a more cohesive better at that point. And while I can appreciate that some of that payoff
[06:54] buildup, it's just a really slow time getting there. However, I will say I of the characters the time they need to grow and change. Like, there's some things not exactly working out the way you might have expected, some bait and
[07:10] switches, that kind of stuff. some solid humor, including uh actually making use sell that stuff. I think they did some really incredible stuff here with pixel art, not only just visually, but also how they used it to tell stories. And I
[07:24] came away really enjoying the story, even if it's not going to make my list of top five Final Fantasy narratives. Moving on a little bit now, let's talk progression. So, progression largely boils down to three things. However,
[07:36] there are some layers to each of them, and that is basically levels, gear, and visions. We will ultimately have up to eight characters once we have all of four with you at a time. All of your characters gain experience and
[07:49] leveling up regardless of whether or not you're using them in combat. However, as you level up, stats increase and you gain their base abilities. At certain abilities for them to use just as a baseline. These are usually important to
[08:03] which we'll talk a little bit more about in the combat section, but they do a good job of differentiating each of these characters mechanically. However, that is of course then augmented by both gear and visions. So, gear is pretty
[08:16] you're putting on characters, your usual run of their weapon type, armor, as well as accessories. There's quite a few of these. They can have different effects, which will then allow you some customization in combat. However, you're
[08:29] likely to wind up with uh certain weapons in particular because we've got our legendary arms and then our crafted weapons. One of the visions you pick up, and she will make if you bring her adamant type weapons for each character.
[08:42] These are very good. Can definitely be considered mostly in-game. However, they legendary arms, which are not all weapons to be clear. But the legendary arms require you to find ancient items
[08:54] and then bring them to an altar and pass a trial. finding and upgrading those is what they are. However, you're not going to get enough of them to equip on everybody and they do vary a little bit. Now, what is also really interesting
[09:06] visions is actually that each individual and substory, if you will. And completing that not only gives them a boost to their baseline stats, but it also uh in some cases can give you both
[09:19] abilities as well as special accessories meant for that character in particular, which can be really strong and also adapt to whatever their overall mechanic touch. And then last but not least, we
[09:32] have our visions. Visions are a huge mechanic here. They are essentially your character in other Final Fantasy games. And then you'll earn points and level up those jobs up to a maximum of nine or these visions as it were. And as you
[09:45] only the abilities that they have equipped by default, but once you've leveled them up, you can spend points on assigning up to a certain amount of those abilities to carry over as you use other visions. Now, as a result, some of
[09:58] like Terra, who has the break limit. But characters from other Final Fantasy games. This part is almost purely fanervice. The visions have one really important story element in the very last
[10:11] fight of the game. However, even then, it's not like about them as individual characters. So, in that way, it's very much a hey, remember like cloud from credit where it is due, I actually do think this system has one thing that is
[10:25] really helpful. So, I've played pretty much every mainline Final Fantasy game. characters, and that means that at a glance, I can pretty much tell what they're going to do simply by which character I am looking at. For instance,
[10:39] characters from the Final Fantasy series, was a dark knight turned paladin as part of his story. And so, a lot of his abilities focus on both dark and light damage, but also the duality of that system as a whole. So, there is, if
[10:53] games, a certain like contextual language to what each vision can actually do for you. However, that still could have been accomplished by just calling them regular job names. And I don't think using these other characters
[11:05] was a necessary thing to do, but it does again sort of sell the idea that it's a love letter to the series as a whole. Either way, uh using these visions in combat gives you access to their big resonance abilities, which we'll talk
[11:17] more about there, and that will give you different uh forms of damage outside of else I wanted to slot here in the progression discussion is farming, which is to say killing a whole bunch of monsters for experience and vision
[11:31] experience in order to level these guys up fast. This mostly takes the form of various versions of cactar. They can give you either a ton of experience or a ton of vision experience which will level you really, really fast. The catch
[11:43] is they have a really high evasion and they're hard to hit. However, using abilities that will guarantee your hits, you can kill these guys really, really consistently and do a ton of damage, getting guaranteed exorbitant amounts of
[11:55] experience, making the leveling process very, very quick. Now, that's really helpful for a couple of areas where these guys are more guaranteed to spawn. In fact, somewhat hilariously, there is a farm spot just outside the continent
[12:07] a farm spot just outside the continent of farm p. However, getting to it is through, I would say, the most annoying dungeon in the game called Dragon's Maul. And your reward for coming out the other side of it is an island that you
[12:19] can't access otherwise that spawns nothing but the highest level of these experience. So, if you go through the hassle of reaching that spot and then just clearing those cactars out, you can easily level up once you get to like
[12:33] main story, and just sort of blast your way to like 8090 really fast. And then the content and it will be dramatically easier from there. So just sort of your
[12:45] typical JRPG grinding type stuff I wanted to mention. It's very applicable here as well. The rest of progression is more indirect stuff or applies to where we'll leave this part. Bringing it then to the gameplay and world section.
[12:59] So, this being a JRPG, especially a throwback JRPG, we've got our world map we're going to jump into locations, usually towns and dungeons from there. Now, this game does at the start of chapter 5 give you an airship to quickly
[13:14] that. The story is a little more linear and then it opens up and you get to tracking down all of that extra content important to note on your way there that while the game will autos save fairly
[13:27] regularly, like as you enter areas and whatnot, you can go to ins to uh rest up have the items or spells to do it outside of an inn. And then at those various save points where we can manually save the game and usually pitch
[13:42] a tent to rest as well, which is important. Also, these save points act as your teleports back to the beginnings of dungeons once you've reached the end save point or potentially more than that, but the final save point of a
[13:55] way back to the beginning so you don't have to run through it to leave. That's important for uh avoiding the RNG encounters. But outside of those baseline elements, we've got a few things of note. For starters, Sanctums
[14:08] places you will go and just find visions. It's not the only way to result of side quests or meeting certain people or even finding slightly more the lookout for the Sanctums of Light because that's where you're going to get
[14:22] most of your visions. There are also caves. Caves are usually inhabited by a cave master which is a boss fight of whatever level the cave itself is. And the reward for that are usually items that you can then upgrade your visions
[14:35] themselves with. So, magistite of some description and you can use that to upgrade up to a maximum of rank three your visions and get that much stronger proper dungeons. Uh I did want to mention that these are for the most part
[14:48] them are interesting, but for the most part the dungeons are very basic and them. And they're not really like bad or anything, but they're all more or less the same. You just kind of run through a pretty standard straight path. Uh any
[15:01] item or two. There's occasionally like little secret rooms, but those are usually pretty obvious when you see them, and nothing too crazy overall. So, the dungeons were like fine. I guess the only one that really stuck out to me was
[15:14] that place kind of sucks. So, Dragon's M is clearly like an in-game area, and the reward for doing it is, as I mentioned, access to that farm spot to then quickly farm up to uh the higher levels to finish up the content. However, Dragon's
[15:28] Moss sucks for a variety of reasons, but the main one being that you cannot run fight them, and all of the enemies here And you have to fight a couple of bosses. Now, the problem here is this
[15:41] means you have to fight these guys. They take forever to fight because of their don't actually have the ability to deal much damage to you or anything, you in there, I guess. So, it just becomes this like really annoying slog if you go
[15:54] to the other side of it. And it's memorable for being really tedious. And even then, the actual path through the dungeon is very straightforward. Now, beyond that, the world is filled with a few things such as the various side
[16:07] They'll also, for the most part, show up on your map. There are one or two of like talk to people to uncover, but for the most part, they will show up on the map. Some of these side quests are really, really well done. A lot of the
[16:20] good. There's some other side quests, especially a couple early on that really stuck with me. And there's some good content there worth doing even outside of the context of the rewards in terms of the story. We've also got a few side
[16:32] activities like completing the arena, gathering up all of the tablets, who's the only one who can actually summon them, and then of course gathering those ancient items or adamantite to get other items, etc. Now,
[16:45] the tablets are all over the place, and you can gather them up and turn them into the Oblivion Palace, and you'll get rewards for doing so, just to give you a little extra reason to thoroughly explore areas. But, for the most part,
[16:57] pretty standard JRPG stuff, and the world is compact enough that none of it is like really difficult to find or anything. However, I did enjoy tracking certain secrets. Now, the other big part of this game, realistically, though, is
[17:10] the characters. So, we're going to talk about a lot of this together here that way. But, we're ultimately going to have eight of our main characters. Rain, Lasswell, Fina, Arquage, Fina, and then
[17:23] Jake, Nickel, and Sakura. Now, the really cool thing about these characters or the thing that the game actually does is that in addition to the visions that you'll equip them with and do all that sort of fun stuff with, they all have
[17:35] well that I thought was really fun. Starting with Lid because I forgot to name her there. Lid gets access to a mechanical chocobo called Mecha bow. You can do a bunch of side quests to upgrade this thing's abilities. And some of
[17:49] ability you get called Mecca Mog Scan can just assign a weakness to an enemy. And that honestly trivializes a lot of fights that play into mechanics because will actually stay with them through their phase transitions. And bosses that
[18:03] would otherwise be very annoying can be made very very easy with that. But that's just one example. Uh Jake uses a bunch of guns, but he has a luck mechanic. A lot of his abilities either give him or spend luck and then that
[18:16] provides various effects depending on the individual level of the luck when he used it. So that was fun. Uh Nickel gets a bunch of formation abilities. Like as he levels up, he gets a bunch of partywide buffs that have all sorts of
[18:28] buffing your character. He also makes a pretty good healer. Fina, as I mentioned, or the base Fina, if you will, gets access to your summons. So, and then when you do that, Fina can then summon that character, which is useful
[18:43] to keep in mind before we even start talking about the stuff with the visions themselves. However, while visions across the board can be useful because of the abilities they give you access to via like their elements or giving you a
[18:56] widespread of coverage in terms of like physical, magical, etc., all the usual stuff. Certain ones come with more important abilities than others. Terra one that has the break limit ability. Now, thankfully, you pick her up very,
[19:09] with basically everybody because then they can assign themselves the break initial damage limit, which is going to make everybody's life easier. However, you can using visions and characters base abilities, get some really cheesy
[19:24] stuff going. Uh there's a sort of meta ability with Rain, our main character, that allows him to make eight attacks in a row. And if you combine those eight enemy, you are just going to destroy that thing. There's also the Mecca Mog
[19:37] trivialize some fights. But the really cool thing I liked about this is that necessary. Like if you want to just outlevel stuff, you can for the most part make it relatively easy just by doing that. But thanks to all the
[19:51] characters alongside what the individual visions can give you, they did create a system where there's just a lot of really cool fun stuff to uncover and like synergies to find. And while there is uh again sort of meta stuff that is
[20:04] obviously very very strong, I do think there's enough room here to find things that you find enjoyable and with the way the game is structured and everything topofthe-line best choice all of the time. there's room for experimentation
[20:18] which is something I really enjoyed mechanically. Nonetheless, though, we do still need to uh go over the basics. So, as I'm sure you've seen on screen here, combat is ultimately a turnbased affair, and it's going to use a timeline bar
[20:32] of upper left, each character goes at a speed attribute, which can be adjusted, but every character does get to go in a some way. That's important because if you use an ability like slow, it's going
[20:46] to push them to the back of the queue for that turn, but they're still going to mention that specifically because there are uh bosses and the like that, might get like three, four attacks in a row directly, and that actually might
[21:00] something to be aware of, I suppose. But nonetheless, basic turn-based setup as you would expect. However, enemies also have a stagger bar. Pretty standard these days. However, your ability to stagger them is based on all sorts of
[21:13] have like certain categories that they fall into. Like breaker is something stagger and break enemies as a lot of their abilities lean into that. This is aided by attacking a monster's weakness. Not every monster has a weakness, but
[21:27] thanks to Mechaog scan, once you get that far into the game, you can assign a And attacking whatever weakness that happens to be, you know, like what element, etc., You can increase your stagger damage to an enemy and stagger
[21:39] them more quickly. It is really helpful to do this because when you stagger an but you'll also deal increased damage to them while they are staggered. The character that staggered an enemy also gets an extra turn in the bonus phase at
[21:52] the end of the round. However, if you manage to stagger every enemy, your entire team gets an extra turn. And then what's more, at the end of all of their resonance ability of one of your visions. that is to say, their sort of
[22:06] super ultra move that they can then unleash. And if you time all of that correctly, you can use the stagger phase to deal absolutely massive damage and capitalize on it as much as possible. One of the ways you could potentially
[22:18] capitalize on that is your limit breaks. There are various uh vision abilities which you gain limit breaks. As you participate in combat, you can fill that up, you can use that character's limit ability and deal extra damage as well.
[22:32] So all of that together shouldn't have been much of a surprise. All of those elsewhere. And while they've been combined in a bit of a novel way that I enjoy the mechanical depth of here, obviously none of it is exactly the most
[22:45] innovative system in the world, but it is an enjoyable system, which I think is did a lot of fun stuff with combat and exploration here, which is what got me through the slower, earlier parts of the game in terms of the story. That does
[22:59] Machine section before we start wrapping this up. I should be really quick here. It plays very well on both of them as you would expect. The old Pixel JRPGs did really, really well on like handheld systems. So, unsurprisingly, they do
[23:11] really well on these types of hardware as well. But either way, it should play let's move on to positives, negatives, and we'll wrap this thing up. So, on the what they did with the art here. I think the pixel art is gorgeous. Some of the
[23:25] of the CGI mixing that they did with like the vision attacks, etc., is a little bit strange, it didn't bother me that much personally, you can skip those that plays at the beginning that you cannot skip, which I thought was a
[23:39] love what they did with the art here. I think the uh gameplay and the combat mechanics in particular, like how you can mess around with the visions and fun stuff with, was surprisingly enjoyable. And while there are obviously
[23:53] a very few clear winners in terms of synergies, there's room for in combination with the individual mechanics of the characters, I enjoyed and just exploring the world that they've built here. And that's where I
[24:07] was having the most fun. On the negative side of things, as I have mentioned, the interesting. Like the first three chapters were pretty dull. I know some people are inevitably going to point to the writing because writing is a very
[24:20] of it definitely comes across as a little bit corny, but it didn't bother I'm more annoyed with just again how long it took to get to the interesting the edge of the experience. I don't enjoy the way they handled the dragons
[24:34] mod dungeon. I think the random battles are something that I uh definitely don't miss from these older games. This experience only reinforced that and the way they do is what made Dragons Mos so annoying. But that's really the only
[24:48] actively not having fun. if that makes sense. And so when it comes to a conclusion, uh this game is selling for $50 US, which is what I paid for it. And for that price, I had a great time for the most part. A couple of things on the
[25:01] edges, as I mentioned, but by and large, this was honestly a delightful little experience and a throwback to some games of my own childhood. And if you look at it through that lens, I think it's great. If you have no interest in like a
[25:13] rehash of some of those mechanics or a look back at that time, then this game probably won't do anything for you. But if the premise of that throwback is interesting to you, I think the game is wonderful, which is where I'm going to
[25:25] leave this review. So hopefully you enjoyed all that. If you did, by all that YouTube jazz. We are a decent bit postrelease here. I imagine some of you your thoughts about it. But regardless of any of that, truly just thank you so
[25:39] appreciate it. May you wander in wisdom and have an amazing day.