There are a lot of Final Fantasy games out there, giving us countless renditions of a character named Cid, a varied assortment of jobs and Limit Breaks, and establishing numerous other signatures of the series. While the franchise was once defined by breaking new ground for RPGS, in recent years it’s often felt like the series has looked toward embracing nostalgia and recapturing feelings of the past in order to find the way forward. And after years of the series veering into action games, it’s finally going back to its turn-based roots.
As the first turn-based single-player entry in years, Final Fantasy Resonance has the unenviable task of having to feel new and old all at once. An adaptation of the mobile game Brave Exvius, it follows in the footsteps of Octopath Traveler 0, itself an adaptation of a mobile game. It’s also co-developed by Square Enix’s Team Asano, the studio behind the HD-2D games, and similarly uses that visual style—a mixture of retro 16-bit sprites and modern graphical effects.
“As a foundation, it’s very important [for us that] we have knowledge of Final Fantasy’s history and its past. But we’re also gamers at heart, so of course we play the latest games that are available outside of Final Fantasy. We have the sensibility of knowing Final Fantasy’s history, as well as the general feeling of playing more modern games,” Final Fantasy Resonance director Hiroto Furuya tells Kotaku.
The team’s efforts to mesh a legendary gaming legacy with modern sensibilities manifest in a few different ways in Resonance. First and foremost, they’re found in the battle system, where the devs wanted to conduct what they call an “experiment.”
Square Enix
“The first concept we had in mind, simply put, is what if we take the job system from Final Fantasy 5 and the unique characteristics of each character in Final Fantasy 6, what would that look like?” says Resonance producer Keisuke Nakashima. “This type of experiment hasn’t been done in the past, so it required a bit of research and innovation. We took the stagger system, and we reexamined everything and incorporated it all together. It ultimately [formed] into what you see now, where you have these distinct characteristics, but it also allows for that additional customization element.”
The other major “Legacy” element of Resonance is the Visions system, essentially equipable summons that let you call on characters from across the series in battle, one for each game from the very first all the way up through Final Fantasy XVI. These Vision characters first appeared in Brave Exvius and have a narrative reason to exist, but when that mobile game was getting retooled into a single-player game, there was a moment at which they almost didn’t make the cut.
“There was a time in development where we explored leaving the Final Fantasy series characters out. However, we ultimately landed on incorporating them, even though there is difficulty in intermixing their worldview with ours,” says Furuya, “When you go back to the point of how cool it would be to use Cloud’s Cross-Slash, and the bombastic CG sequences, it really delivers on the spectacle and fun that we were drawn to.”
While they did, at some point, consider making some substantial cuts, the Resonance team instead adopted a more additive approach. The story of Brave Exvius has been kept entirely intact, with certain events moved around, some locations made grander, and of course, battles reworked. Apparently, new scenes have also been added to the story.
Square Enix
The general story of Resonance remains the same as that of Brave Exvius, but it’s been slightly reorganized for a better flow. On top of this, Nakashima notes that one of the things the original mobile game was known for was having a fairly grim story, featuring what he describes as a lot of “negative” scenes. While no major changes have been made to the overarching plot, there are slight embellishments to try to address that. “We’ve maintained the overall storyline. However, we’ve incorporated more neutral scenes or positive scenes and interspersed them to kind of balance it,” Nakashima says.
An example of this can be seen in the public demo, with how the team implemented specific characters. In Brave Exvius, because of its nature as a gacha game, you’d have different “character episodes” separate from the main story that you could play through for more details. But now, the Resonance team had to find a way to integrate those details and narrative beats directly into the story. Nakashima points to the Esper Siren and the Grandshelt knight Emma as two examples, characters that have now been integrated directly into the story in Chapter 1. Instead of having standalone “episodes” siloed off from the central narrative, specific points from those episodes, selected for their emotional impact, have now been carried over into Resonance’s main story.
While there’s a wealth of these small embellishments and tweaks across the game, the most obvious brand-new addition is a handful of lavishly animated cutscenes for key story moments. These cutscenes are noticeably higher-quality than the game’s basic scenes, and Nakashima confirms they’re supposed to feel a bit like the CG cutscenes of older Final Fantasy games, which highlighted big moments.
The demo kicks off with one of these, huge and bombastic in setting the stakes and tone of the game—and quite unlike anything I’ve really ever seen. To achieve this, Furuya says they started with a 3D environment, then placed the pixel-based characters on top of that, and then the camera work on top. Then there’s a little trick to help match the motion and action of the scenes.
Square Enix
“We created it in a way where, following the character movements, we replaced the pixels so it would kind of match the movement of the cameras to create that dynamic 3D feel,” Furuya says. “Once we have the motion, the scene set in place, then we apply post effects like lighting, blur, or shadow. We fully utilized technology for 3D and applied it to these cutscenes, which ultimately resulted in that unique pixel/3D blend you see.”
Because Resonance is built on Brave Exvius, it sports a quite different look from most other HD-2D games, and t’s easy to think that this game might indicate what the team thinks the “future” of that style of game looks like. But Furuya and Nakashima don’t quite feel that way.
“When we’re looking at the HD-2D team, or teams working on those titles, none of us believe that we should replicate the same visual experiences, meaning we need to provide fresh, new experiences,” Nakashima says.
But he’s also quick to follow up, saying with a laugh, “However, when we’re looking at the event scenes we’ve introduced for Final Fantasy Resonance, I feel it does add a little pressure to HD-2D games.”
Final Fantasy Resonance launches on October 22