I had few expectations going into Final Fantasy Resonance, the premium game based on Square Enix's mobile gacha Brave Exvius. Those expectations lowered in the first 10 hours, thanks to its frankly atrocious writing. But after clearing most of the story and approaching the endgame, I find I've changed stances entirely.
Resonance is everything Final Fantasy has struggled to achieve over the better part of two decades — confident, innovative, engaging, and, most importantly, completely and unashamedly itself. It's the blueprint Square Enix needs to follow for the series' future. Whatever Resonance's faults, and there are many, it's a Final Fantasy game that cares little for anything outside itself.
It's not struggling with some existential crisis about what a Final Fantasy game needs to be, or how to make it “relevant” for modern audiences. There's no craven devotion to the past or some vaguely formed notion of legacy. It's arguably even less concerned with legacy than Bravely Default, which, despite some clever uses of classic Final Fantasy, still relies heavily on the series' bygone era.
Okay, there's some craven devotion to the past in Resonance, like when it throws out "spoony bard" or other painfully on-the-nose references. But once it settles into its groove after the mid-game, Resonance is just itself, for better and worse. Witches turning into chocobos?
Zombies, magic, and science coexisting without anyone batting an eye? Anything goes, and Resonance is confident enough in its own logic to tie everything together so it feels natural instead of discordant. If you're wondering why that kind of confidence matters, think about the past 15 years of mainline Final Fantasy.
It's a period characterized by uncertainty and self-doubt. For Final Fantasy 13, Square Enix prioritized prestige over all else and delivered one of the loosest stories in the series that took two (equally loose) sequels to sort out. Then they sacrificed Final Fantasy 15 to the transmedia gods, splitting it into multiple parts distributed across books, movies, an anime series, and games, because that's What Media Did at the time.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
