// KOTAKU — GAMING
Square Wants Final Fantasy Resonance To Be Both A Tribute To Its Past And A Gateway To Its Future
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.
“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 Pe