FINAL FANTASY RESONANCE

I'm a Tifa simp and a Square Enix casual fan. I only found out this was a Brave Exvius remake while writing this review (thanks, Ava), and suddenly it made sense why some of these faces looked familiar. It might also explain how basic the story is: it was probably written for the mobile game first. I played on PC with the English voices, finished the campaign and all 33 tracked side quests, and left a pile of hidden ones and secret bosses for later.

Full disclosure: I heard good things about this game, and I don't think it's that great. Am I just pickier? Touch my crystal and find out.

Two parts of this game matter, and I only love one of them. The battle system is basic: turn-based, with a timeline showing who acts next, a Stagger gauge on everything that moves, and a lot of pressing the same buttons. It gets grindy and repetitive. Don't start on Expert either. I did, and it turned the early levels into a grindfest. Lazy difficulty design, too: enemies just get more HP and you deal less damage. I swapped to Normal and never went back.

The build system, though, is where the fun is. Visions hand out abilities you can mix across characters within a cost limit, and the party composition has real room to play. If you're new here: I cheese. I do side quests the moment they appear, and I like min-maxing my party and figuring out the optimal loop. This game let me. Before the end of chapter 7 I stumbled into a place called Dragon's Maw, beat enemies I had no business beating, and came out at 70 for a level-55 boss. From there it was over. My two casters, each with Arms Akimbo plus Dualcast, throw four Ultimas a turn apiece. My support buffs, heals, debuffs and chips in damage on the same combo, four or five casts a turn. The tank, with Ribbon accessory and Reraise, soaks every hit in the game, AoEs included, with Arms Akimbo into Multi-Cover and Guard. I hadn't even given him Squall's Double Action yet. The final story boss took single turns to beat.

Which brings me to Octopath Traveler, because the comparison ran in my head the whole game. Octopath's boost system makes every attack a decision, and you have to actually exploit weaknesses to win. Here, non-elemental spells like Meteor and Ultima bypass the need to care about elements at all. The journey there was fun; the destination left me empty. Two small quality-of-life gripes on top: the battle screen offered me fifty skills when I only ever used a handful, with no presets to save and no way to hide the rest, and Zoldaad badly needed a quest tracker on the train menu. Couch Dad is not browsing every single map to find the right one.

Weak, with select gold moments. The gold is almost all in the side quests. The main quest never stuck with me; more than once it made me cringe instead. But take them on, dive into each character, and they get to shine. Nichol's side story is the best thing in this game. So there are hidden gems here, just not where the game points the camera.

Everything else arrives on schedule. Two chapters in, I had a hunch about where this was going, and so will every JRPG player out there. The twists are predictable, none of them land heavy, and the plot holes are the kind you can see from orbit. My personal favorite: if you've lived 700 years, it shouldn't take you that long to find love. Yet here, everybody who matters finds their one true love at exactly year 700. Convenient. And the last fight is where the design falls apart: it felt random, forced, and not compelling at all.

The final boss was spoilera dude you met once in a flashback, apparently a good guy turned insane. The "victory lap" of beating Umbra was a fakeout no one would ever fall for, and…

The music is great. Elements Garden, the Brave Exvius composers, wrote 33 new tracks and brought the old ones along, and every piece of it is good. None of it stuck in my head for days, and I couldn't hum you a tune now, but there wasn't a weak track either. All of them baseline good, and for a 40-hour game that's more than most manage.

The throwbacks are the Visions: Warrior of Light, Terra, Cloud, Shantotto, Y'shtola, Clive, each one with a little multiple-choice get-to-know-them chat when you meet. The choices change nothing about whether you get them, and that's the point. It's a moment, not a test. I enjoyed every one of them. And Sephiroth is in there as an optional boss, if you've ever wanted to watch him lose to a tank build.

Being generous, the messages work in general. There's a lot of focus on love of different kinds (blood family, found family, siblings, lovers, enemies), which is always good. And some personal side quests made this cold black heart of mine feel something.

What doesn't: it's all archetypes. Every anime and JRPG template you can name is here, to the point where I rolled my eyes all the way to the roll credits. And if you're around my age, raised on the PS1 and PS2 Final Fantasies, this story falls short of our demographic. It feels young and basic. Mature themes get a nod and move on; Octopath and Final Fantasy XVI actually sit with them.

Here's the strange part. I usually pick my favorites among the women for the looks and pay attention to little else. I'm just cultured that way. In this game, the men are the ones who carry it.

Nichol first. The strategist, my favorite anime archetype: his character, his side quest, his whole story. He walked in with a formation chart and left with my heart. Lasswell can be funny as hell, and his good moments I'll always cherish; his story climax, though, was kinda cringe and didn't make sense to me, so he fell off a bit. Jake, the sleazy man, is funny too. He got a lot of good scenes, and every good one is a funny one. I didn't care for his serious backstory. A funny character trying to be serious, when all I wanted was more of the jokes. Lid, among other things, is there as his comic-relief partner, grounding him; the mechanical chocobo idea is good, but I never really used her, so I didn't see all of it. Sakura took a lot of the spotlight, and I enjoy her character enough not to mind.

Rain is your typical goody two-shoes lead. No substance of his own; the cast around him brings it. The two love interests are the two archetypes you already know: one chases the hero, one is too innocent to ever say what she feels. The Archwitch, though, the one who taught you the tutorial? She made me scream mommy. Again: cultured. The antagonists are mostly well written too, and I did enjoy most of their arcs.

I played in English and never tried the Japanese, because this is an 8/10 dub. Being able to read the lines instead of matching lip sync helps, and decent voice actors do well with that.

US$49.99 at the time of writing, which is standard industry pricing for what it is. HowLongToBeat puts the main story at 39 hours and everything at 58. It's a good game, not a great one: fans of Final Fantasy and turn-based should buy it at the release price. Everyone else can let a sale decide.

Good, not great, but a game I enjoyed. If you're a hardcore Final Fantasy fan, you'll enjoy this one too; there's enough nostalgia bait here to feed a whole generation of us. That said, a lot of you are around my age now, and the story stayed young while we didn't.

What the story misses, the party makes up for. The build system kept me going, and the music was good company. It's been a while since I finished a game, and this one got me to the credits with no regrets.

Final Fantasy Resonance: an old tune played by a new band, decent enough to hum along.