// KOTAKU — GAMING
Final Fantasy Resonance’s Combat Was An ‘Experiment’ To Combine FF5’s Job System with FF6’s Unique Characters
Fall Preview 2026Final Fantasy ResonanceRPGSquare Enix
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.”
“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.
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. “W