Final Fantasy Resonance is spinning a lot of plates. The segment I played last month gave me no clue that the HD-2D RPG had been built on the bones of a gacha mobile game. Final Fantasy Brave Exvius has been gone for two years in most territories, but Resonance is here to retool what was lost and create a more traditional Final Fantasy experience with stunning HD-2D visuals, voice acting, and cameos from several characters across the series history, without the gacha mechanics that may have scared off some folks from ever playing the original game on mobile.
Resonance is both its own game, and the closest thing to the preservation of an old one that we’re probably going to get in an era where live-service games are shut down and then lost forever. It’s also a tribute to the series’ nearly 40-year history that actually rewards players who know the legacy of Square Enix’s long-running RPG series in a tangible way, while also hopefully being, as producer Keisuke Nakashima tells Kotaku, an entry point for people who have maybe only heard the Final Fantasy name in passing. Can it hope to be all of those things at once?
I sat down with Nakashima and director Hiroto Furuya to chat about how Resonance is both an attempt to preserve parts of Brave Exvius and to give players a more streamlined, traditional RPG experience without the gacha baggage, and for Nakashima, part of the appeal was being able to go back to Final Fantasy basics.
© Square Enix“I was familiar with the original work, and I was very impressed by the story, the originality, the Final Fantasy elements and the high-quality pixel art,” he tells Kotaku through a translator. “At the same time, the Final Fantasy series has moved more towards 3D action, which is great; they’re wonderful games, but I think that there’s still a segment of users that want the classic, turn-based, more approachable job- and class-based gameplay. So I figured that if we could take the best elements of the smartphone game and reinvent them with this classic style, that’s something that would appeal to a lot of fans.”
Retooling a mobile game for consoles meant having to consider what parts of Brave Exvius would and wouldn’t translate to a different system and game structure.
“So starting with the original Exvius, the pixel art and the characters are very appealing and well done, so we wanted to maintain those; however, this is going to be a new game for consoles, and a pixel art-based game, so, we wanted to keep the strong elements, but at the same time, we didn’t really feel constricted by the original title because we are creating this as a new game, essentially,” he says. “And because of that, that’s where a lot of the challenge lies, because when you’re creating a console title, you need to completely retool how the battle system and scenario hooks together, so it’s like creating a new game in that sense.”
One of the big changes that emerges as a result of doing away with Brave Exvius’ gacha mechanics is that rarity no longer plays a part in character balance, a tweak which the team hopes will give players more freedom to put together a party of characters they want to use rather than feeling like they have to use the ones who are rarer pulls, and thus inherently more powerful to match. More subtle changes include the fixed cutscene animations that the team thinks will make emotional scenes hit harder when paired with new voice acting as players get to know the original characters alongside revisiting ones from previous games.
Resonance has its own cast, from the more traditional sword-wielding hero Rain to the scrappy, aspiring Cid named Lid, but it also turns classic Final Fantasy characters like Cloud Strife and Noctis Lucis Caelum into Visions that act as secondary party members. You’ll recruit each of them by finding Vision Crystals scattered around the world, and once you approach them, you’ll hear their story and then be able to equip them in battle, not unlike how you would a Persona in the Persona series. According to Square, the team was cognizant that all these cameos could make Resonance come off like a vapid “cash grab” crossover game that simply borrowed the aesthetics and characters of old games, and wanted to ground their appearance in the larger world of the game, both by incorporating their presence into the story, and also giving players a chance to learn more about the characters they may not be familiar with.
© Square Enix“Everyone has a different play history with the Final Fantasy series,” Furuya says. “Maybe somebody’s played them all, maybe somebody hasn’t played any of them, so, our goal with the Visions is to kind of allow you to either relive the experience from the original game or to kind of get a rundown of it if it’s your first time. So, when you recruit the Visions, it kind of gives you a rundown of the story and, like, the main plot points and story beats from the original game that they’re from. We tried to present it in a way that would resonate with the users and also feel nostalgic to people that have, you know, played the games in the past.
“And so, of course, the characters kind of exist on their own in the sense that they have their own histories, and people have their own feelings and memories of the characters, but we also had to think of how to incorporate them within the game system of Final Fantasy Resonance. And so we wanted to make sure that their abilities, attacks, and things like that fit within the world of Final Fantasy Resonance, so we’re trying to balance both of those elements.”
© Square EnixPart of this system that specifically caters to super fans is that, upon hearing a character’s story, you’ll be asked a series of questions about how you would have reacted in their situations. The Vision recruitment I was able to play was for Noctis, the main character of Final Fantasy XV, and each time you’re asked about how you would have responded to his story, you gain perks for reacting the same way as the Vision character did. In theory, this is meant to illustrate a connection between the player and Noctis, so that they’re essentially drift-compatible and more synergized than someone who maybe doesn’t see the world the same way. However, when I asked if this meant that long-time fans might have an advantage in terms of game balance over a newcomer because they know these characters well, Furuya said the team wanted to be mindful of that and not make the difference between an aligned Vision and a non-aligned one game-changing.
“We really wanted to create a flat playing field where regardless of if you’re a long-time fan or if this is your first Final Fantasy, we wanted to make it so that you could easily dive in and figure out how to use the Visions,” he says. “But for me, there’s kind of too many camps of players, like people that have played the old games, and people that have maybe heard of Final Fantasy, but haven’t played the game yet. So we want both of these groups to be able to enjoy the title.”
© Square EnixWith the elimination of Brave Exvius’ gacha mechanics, a number of characters included in that title won’t be making the cut for Resonance. By the time the gacha game shut down, it had over 2000 characters players could unlock, and Resonance is only bringing back 26. Most of them are the protagonists of the previous mainline games, but there are also a handful of secondary characters in the mix. Square says that it wanted to narrow the list down to those characters who would be “more interesting” to the game as a whole, and would also bring variety to the combat system through different abilities. Square tells Kotaku it currently has no plans for additional content or DLC, so it doesn’t sound like my favorite Final Fantasy character, Yuna, or guest characters like pop star Ariana Grande will show up this time around. According to Nakashima, this is because the team wants the game to feel like a complete experience out the gate.
“Even though this is a Final Fantasy title, we’re part of Team Asano, and so we also have been working with members of Team Asano for feedback and also the general culture within the team,” he says. “One thing that Team Asano titles prioritize is that we want to make sure that the core experience is the best they could possibly be. So instead of thinking about DLC and additional content from the get-go, we’re trying to put all of our dev time into making sure that the base game is the best it can be.”
In a post-Fortnite world, crossovers that bring multiple characters and properties together run the risk of coming off like fan service with a game sacrificing substance or an identity of its own for easy cameos and references. Square Enix doesn’t want people to view Resonance that way, and says that it’s not merely plopping these characters into the world without any real direction or care.
“I can definitely see how people could take the game in a superficial way,” Furuya says. “Like if you’re just looking at the trailers and commercial materials, you could see like, ‘Oh, it’s just a cash grab with all these classic characters,’ but we didn’t want it to turn out that way, so the way we incorporate the characters in the game, we wanted to make sure that they each brought something unique into the actual overall gameplay experience. So, once you sit down with the game and play it, you’ll see how these classic characters actually make the game more interesting. But it’s something that’s a concern and was always on our minds while we were developing it. Internally, we also got to work with the core members from other Final Fantasy games, and they reviewed how the characters were presented in Final Fantasy Resonance to make sure that we did our utmost to respect the integrity of the original works.”
Square says the focus of the game will be the original characters above all else, but without spoiling anything, based on what I was able to play, it does seem like some of the classic Final Fantasy heroes will play a role in moving the story along.
“Of course we have these returning characters, but, the main characters of the game are the main cast from Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, and they have their own story to tell,” Furuya says. “So we have these Vision Crystals, but those actually play a much larger part in the story overall, and if we didn’t have returning characters serving as these visions, the story wouldn’t come together, so, we don’t really see it as like ‘fan service,’ but it’s kind of like it’s more an integral part of the story, having these vision characters.”
© Square EnixWhile Nakashima and Furuya said they weren’t privy to Square Enix’s corporate strategy regarding the pros and cons of maintaining a live-service game over creating a console game, they are adamant that, even if Resonance is building off Brave Exvius, making it has not been “cheaper” or “easier” than creating a new game from scratch; it merely comes with new challenges, which the team wants to overcome to bring the game to a new audience, rather than letting it be lost to a live-service shutdown.
“Smartphones are just one audience,” Nakashima says. “So if you wanted to bring it to consoles, there’s that option, and because the original work is strong on its own merits, that gives us a strong base to work from. However, it’s kind of a misconception that because we’re working with the smartphone game as the base, that it’s cheaper or it’s easier. That’s totally not how it works. It actually requires as much work, time, and budget as creating a new title, So for the case of Final Fantasy Resonance, we had strong content that we wanted to find a new way to bring to users. I really wanted to emphasize that it’s essentially like we’re taking the strength of Brave Exvius and creating a completely new title with it. If you’re a fan of the original, I think you’ll be surprised to see the amount of things that have been reimagined and rebuilt. But at the same time, the title stands on its own merits.”
Final Fantasy Resonance is coming to Switch, Switch 2, PS5, PC, and Xbox Series X/S on October 22.
English (US) ·