This is a review of Final Fantasy Resonance.

Legacy Before Resonance: Final Fantasy 16 and the Weight of Tradition

Final Fantasy 16 remains a flawed but memorable entry in the series, and one of its sharpest ideas is how it treats legacy. Clive and his band of revolutionaries do not merely fight villains; they attack inherited order. They burn cities, depose oligarchs, and shatter crystals. That is a blunt argument against tradition: the past must be dismantled so the future can begin.

The game also reflects its own position in the series. As the most recent numbered entry, Final Fantasy 16 feels like a teenage experiment trying to escape the shape of Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy Resonance has the opposite problem. It does not rage against its heritage. It tries too hard to imitate it, and that imitation brings its own consequences.

From Brave Exvius to Resonance: A Story Taken From Season One

Story has always been central to Final Fantasy. The series name itself comes from the late-era feeling that SquareSoft, then a desperate company near bankruptcy, might be making one last fantasy. From that point forward, the franchise leaned heavily on storytelling, often through plots that grew strange and ambitious.

The names behind that tradition include Hironobu Sakaguchi, Yoshinori Kitase, Kazushige Nojima, and Daisuke Watanabe, among many others. Their stories have used amnesia, time travel, multi-dimensional rifts, and even patriarchal space whales. The series has never been shy about narrative excess.

Final Fantasy Resonance joins that lineage by borrowing its tropes without always understanding why they work in earlier entries. The result is a collection of familiar character types: mages unsure of their identities, swordsmen at war with their fathers, quiet loners following the blade, and womanizing mercenaries fighting for a nation's fate. For a reviewer with a high tolerance for anime nonsense in role-playing games, it is still a lot to absorb.

The deeper issue is not that the story is strange. It is that the cast feels shallow. The characters lack chemistry. Plot events arrive without enough time to be felt. Spoiler warning: one mission sees an entire city swallowed by floodwater, but the world seems to return to normal once the immediate problem is solved. That kind of erasure would feel impossible in Final Fantasy 7 or Final Fantasy 8, where the falling of Sector 7's plate or the damage to Trabia Garden carries weight across the world and the cast.

Early Hours: Over 10 Hours to Start, 30 Hours to Improve

Part of the problem comes from Resonance's origin. The game began life as a doomed mobile project, Final Fantasy Brave Exvius. Its story was taken from season one and reanimated into Resonance. The graphics, battle system, and some key mechanics were changed, and in some cases improved. The story, however, remains the weakest part.

The review notes that things feel better about 30 hours in. That is a meaningful shift, but Resonance is only about 30 to 40 hours long unless the player chases every open-world side mission. A turning point at 30 hours does not fully rescue the overall plot, especially when the moment-to-moment writing can feel over-written. A word like puissance may sound dramatic, but it does little if the standard conversation around it feels like chittering nonsense.

Battle Mechanics: The Real Thread That Connects 40 Years of Final Fantasy

Many players argue that emotional storytelling is the backbone of Final Fantasy. A stronger case can be made that battle mechanics are what kept the SquareSoft and Square Enix series alive for the last 40 years.

The franchise has constantly probed how players fight: the traditional turn-based epoch of Final Fantasy 1 through Final Fantasy 3, the active-time battle experiments of Final Fantasy 4 through Final Fantasy 9, the conditional turn battles of Final Fantasy 10, and the strange, ambitious combinations that followed. Final Fantasy has always been willing to examine its own combat rules.

Resonance could easily have fallen back on nostalgia. Instead, it builds a battle system that is compelling and hard to put down. It combines the synergy and stamina setup found in Final Fantasy 13, Final Fantasy 15, and the Final Fantasy 7 Remake series with a more traditional turn-based structure that feels closer to Octopath Traveler than to many numbered Final Fantasy entries. That comparison is notable because Octopath 0 also transformed a dead mobile game into a more successful full-game release.

Stagger, Visions, and Eight Chapters: How the Combat System Finds Its Shape

In Resonance, enemies have both health and stamina. Reducing health defeats them, but draining stamina interrupts attacks, triggers a stagger state, causes them to take more damage, and gives the party a bonus turn. During that bonus phase, certain skills gain additional effects. The sequence can end with a summon of a vision, a bonus character drawn from the series' long history, who delivers a large attack and can confer benefits to the allied party.

That sounds complicated because it is, but Resonance takes over 10 hours to fully start its engines. The interlocking pieces are introduced gradually, so the system becomes natural by the time all elements are active. Common enemies can be handled quickly, though tougher mobs still hobble an unprepared party. Bosses appear often enough to keep the player alert, especially while hunting down visions and leveling up the company as the world grows harder and uglier.

The chapter bosses, especially those ending each of Resonance's eight chapters, are highlights. Even an overleveled party can struggle if the player ignores stagger, vision choices, and role-playing mechanics. The battles are punishing in a way that makes stat buffs and debuffs matter. The game does not quite reach Shin Megami Tensei-level tactical obsession, but it is not far off.

There are also strong mechanical shifts when certain characters join the crew in Chapter 4. The number of possible builds grows noticeably once different visions are equipped to different characters. Resonance producer Keisuke Nakashima has said the game's combat is largely inspired by Final Fantasy 5 and Final Fantasy 6, and the influence is visible. Visions function almost like a proxy for Final Fantasy 5's still best-in-class job system, while each character has their own strengths and unique abilities in the manner of Final Fantasy 6's core cast.

Airship and Final Third: Where the World Finally Breathes

As with many Final Fantasy games, everything exhales when the airship arrives. The open world finally feels open. Side quests, which earlier can seem like arbitrary go-here-do-this distractions, begin to matter. Exploration rewards the player with strange hints about the world, peculiar new weapons, a cave full of Marlboros, and puzzles involving hidden Espers.

This is also when the party begins to click. The intended purpose of each character becomes clearer, and previously unimportant visions start fitting into wider strategy. The feeling is close to reclaiming the Ragnarok in Final Fantasy 8, opening the control panel for the Fahrenheit in Final Fantasy 10, or winning Setzer's Blackjack in Final Fantasy 6.

Spoiler warning: the final third sits near a point of no return. It is a phase where the world feels like your own oyster, the threat of doom is distant enough to let the player enjoy the atmosphere of a world on the edge of ruin, and every team member has settled into a tactical niche. At that stage, the game is so enjoyable that the player may not want to advance toward the ending.

The story still refuses to kick into gear, and there are some aggravating dungeon designs. Even so, the latter half becomes a riot because of its escalating and interesting boss fights. Resonance plays up its Final Fantasy inspirations and becomes better in its final third, even if the narrative remains its weakest layer.

Where Resonance Stands Now: A Combat Experiment With a Story Problem

Final Fantasy Resonance is a decent game and a fascinating what-if experiment. It asks what a pixel-based Final Fantasy might look like in 2026. As a visual statement, it reads as the best-looking high-definition 2D pixel-style game its reviewer has played. As a mechanical experiment, it explores role-playing combat in ways worthy of the series' most inventive inspirations.

The limitations are equally clear. Underwhelming world-building, a forgettable story, and pacing issues that feel egregious even by relaxed genre standards keep it from becoming truly great, no matter how strong the climactic battles feel.

There is a lingering question: would Resonance have been stronger if it had removed its Final Fantasy Brave Exvius history root and stem, replacing an episodic, gacha-supporting story with something more aligned with its full-release role-playing ambitions? If a player comes to Final Fantasy for emotive storytelling, memorable characters, and a complete world to get lost in, they will likely leave disappointed. If they come looking for addictive, brain-scratching combat puzzles, Resonance is easy to recommend. The tragedy is that the game never quite becomes more than the sum of its parts.