Final Fantasy Resonance Review – Visions of Final Fantasy’s past

No RPG franchise is bigger than Final Fantasy. For some people, it literally is RPGs, setting out a long-running formula that’s been twisted, changed and iterated on into forms you could barely recognise. Final Fantasy Resonance is the latest entry in the long-running series, a remake of free-to-play mobile title Final Fantasy Brave Exvius with the microtransactions stripped out and lavished with the HD-2D aesthetics to pay homage to the franchise’s origins.

After an action-packed prologue in the past, our plucky hero this time out is Rain, a knight of Granshelt. This guy channels some major Tidus and Vaan vibes, with his ruffled blonde locks and slightly naïve outlook doing nothing to quell that notion. You’re dispatched to check out the Earth Shrine’s damaged barrier, travelling via airship to discover that the crystal there has been shattered – the first step on a path that threatens the entire world – and so you set out on a journey to protect the remaining crystals, facing off against the nefarious Sworn Six of Paladia, while embarking on the occasional side quest along the way.

Final Fantasy Resonance will delight old-school Final Fantasy fans, bringing a classic and instantly recognisable turn-based combat system to bear, replete with turn orders, elemental weaknesses, random encounters, Limit Bursts, Phoenix Downs and a well-loved musical trill when you level up.

Visions are where the old and the new meet, with Rain and his companions gaining the ability to call forth Visions of other Final Fantasy heroes, using their abilities in battle to gain the upper hand. You start out with Leah and Tronn, both characters from Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, before you gain a bunch of more recognisable faces from the mainline games. The moments where you engage a Vision’s main attack are Resonance’s most impressive, with stunning attacks that light up the screen, often shifting to CGI cutscenes that show them outside of Resonance’s pixel art.

To unlock further Visions, you’re going to have to undergo challenges, which are, essentially, a mixture of personality test and Final Fantasy quiz. At each of the Sanctums you discover, you have to answer three questions related to a particular Final Fantasy game, while videos of that game play out in the background, amping up the nostalgia to maximum levels. If the crystal likes your answers, you’ll unlock a Vision from that title, and you can then use them in battle, paired up with the characters from your party. Thankfully there’s no questions about the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow…

There’s further depth to this system, with each character having a Role, and each vision having one too. While you can aim to match the same type to one another – the game does, in fact, suggest this – spending time with Visions lets you unlock some of their abilities via Mastery Bonuses, which you can then permanently slot into that character.

If you equip different Vision types, you can then build out your perfect character, with an array of useful skills drawn from every Role. I can see people really digging this system, and there’s the potential for it to be a massive time sink, as you do the math – and grind to level up – to bring it all together.

Is Final Fantasy Resonance the best-looking HD-2D game yet? It’s an incredibly striking game, blending 2D pixel-art characters with 3D landscapes, interspersed with stunning character portraits, evocative pixel animations and fully CGI moments. The 3D world is relatively simplistic, though, and I found myself yearning for the more engaging pixel art landscapes of Octopath Traveller and Triangle Strategy, which pull everything together in a more cohesive way. Resonance’s art design tries to bridge the gap between the original Final Fantasy games and their modern counterparts, and while it’s mostly successful, I can’t help but wish they’d chosen one of the possible lanes and stuck with it.

While the visuals pull in different directions, Final Fantasy Resonance’s audio certainly does not. The orchestral soundtrack is delightful, shifting from bombastic battle stomps through to uplifting adventure and dream-like moments of melancholy. It feels thoroughly Final Fantasy-like, helped by the appearance of some classic FF themes, and it’s brought to further life by the fully-voiced cast – at least through the mainline quests – who do a great job of embodying their characters with panache and genuine pathos.

Despite boasting retro-styled graphics, the Switch 2 version of Final Fantasy Resonance does experience the odd performance hiccup during your adventure. In some of the busier areas, and particularly in the overworld, the frame rate can drop, causing the game to chug along for a few moments. With the type of game Resonance is, it doesn’t cause any real problems, but it does take some of the shine off the lovely art design. Hopefully, it’ll be patched up in the near future.

While there is a lingering sense here (and with Octopath Traveler 0) that a barrel was hastily scraped, Square Enix has ensured that this doesn’t feel like a mobile game. Resonance is not as widely expansive as some modern RPGs, and retains a focus that I found refreshing, bringing back a traditional form of Final Fantasy that many people will have thought was long gone.