Final Fantasy Resonance Review – A Mobile Game Reborn

Final Fantasy Resonance reimagines Final Fantasy Brave Exvius as a fully-fledged RPG that honors the series’ long legacy while forging ahead with its own intriguing ideas. Leveling up Visions can clash with the game’s otherwise fast-paced flow, but overall, this is a fantastic RPG that will hopefully blaze a path for Square Enix’s other defunct gems.

I played a lot of Final Fantasy Brave Exvius back when it was around. During breaks at my many retail jobs, on the train to school, or even while watching shows, I always blasted through battles with my favorite Final Fantasy characters while taking in the pleasant story of Rain and Lasswell. I was sad to see it go, but figured that’s just the way it is with mobile games, a pattern that kept proving itself. Then comes Final Fantasy Resonance, a full HD-2D RPG that adapts Brave Exvius’ first story arc. After my time with the game, I hope Square Enix continues down this path, as this is one of the coolest reimaginings possible for such a fleeting title.

My favorite thing about Final Fantasy Resonance is its gameplay, which feels like Final Fantasy X in how it approaches turn-based combat. You can see the turn order at the top of the screen and can affect it through specific skills and moves. There’s no active-time bar, so you can take your time planning or, if you prefer to blow through battles, speed up attack animations at will. Controlling the pace of battle is handy, as it gives players both a mobile-game-style speedy presentation and a more traditional console RPG experience.

Leveling up your party and the Visions you equip them with has an almost addictive quality, since you can mix and match the skills they unlock as you swap between Visions. This creates a surprising amount of customization, letting you grant any party member all sorts of abilities and attacks to make them into anything you want. Of course, their base stats give them roles they’re better suited to, but with different equipment pieces and Visions, you can do just about anything you want with your party.

The game’s pacing is one of the most interesting things about Final Fantasy Resonance, as it’s much faster-paced than you might expect from a Final Fantasy. Dungeons aren’t prolonged, boss fights are decently brisk, and the story progresses at a swift tempo. There are plenty of quick side missions, too, so it always feels like there’s something to do if you need a break from how fast the game can be.

That said, leveling up a character’s bond with a Vision can take surprisingly long compared to the rest of the game. You need a lot of battles to max out a bond with one character, which makes it harder and more time-consuming to max them all out than it feels like it should be. Given how quickly you get Visions compared to party members, it feels a bit inconsistent, though it doesn’t hamper the game beyond the occasional bit of frustration.

The story is definitely a bit by the book in terms of RPG tropes, but it pulls them off well enough to feel more charming than trite. Rain, Lasswell, Fina, and the rest of their allies are fun characters to follow, and the Sworn Six are delightfully villainous (with badass armor designs, too). It’s not a revolutionary narrative or anything like that, but it has the same appeal as a Saturday morning cartoon once did, nostalgic and pleasantly predictable, hitting all the right notes for a solid time.

Final Fantasy Resonance is a great start for HD-2D Final Fantasy games.

The pixel art is fantastic, just like in Brave Exvius. This style suits the HD-2D vibe perfectly, and it’s just as cool to see some of the most iconic Final Fantasy characters represented this way as it was back in the mobile game’s heyday. The 3D ultimate attack animations each Final Fantasy mainline Vision can perform look magnificently flashy, bringing the iconic characters to life in a starkly different way than the already grand pixel art.

The same goes for the music, which is incredibly nostalgic for anyone who played the original game, but its lively, whimsical tone feels perfectly fitting for Final Fantasy as a whole. The voice acting is great, too, giving these characters extra life, though the Japanese-only voices for the Visions feel like a strange contrast.