Final Fantasy Resonance is the first Final Fantasy game to use Square Enix’s housemade “2D-HD” graphical style, as it revives the now-defunct mobile game Final Fantasy Brave Exvius and turns it into a full-fledged console RPG with all the trappings you’d expect. The demo was suitably impressive at showing how Resonance will tell an original Final Fantasy story that also pays homage to the entire series up to this point. But the element that sold me most was the sense of humor it seems to have about itself, which is encapsulated in one dialogue exchange.
Resonance leans heavily on nostalgia. This is most apparent in the use of Visions, which are heroes of past Final Fantasy games that can be equipped similarly to Final Fantasy 6’s Espers. They level up while equipped, granting the user benefits and teaching new skills. To earn a Vision, you typically have to answer some questions related to a brief rundown of their story, set against a video montage showing moments from their respective games. And besides just Visions, the whole game is a medley of Final Fantasy’s 16-bit glory days, with an art style that often recalls Final Fantasy 6–if it were made at a much higher level with modern art.
So it was in that spirit that I felt so tickled by a dialogue exchange in the demo. Somewhere around the midpoint, you come to the lab of the mad scientist Dr. Lazarov–again, the combination of fantasy and sci-fi elements in this way feels very classic Final Fantasy. Lazarov has been using the bodies of your deceased comrades for experiments, and the heroes, Rain and Lasswell, are understandably pissed off. They challenge him to a fight, but instead he summons one of his abominations to fight you. You know, typical mad scientist villain stuff.