The first HD-2D Final Fantasy game may be retro-inspired but it’s very far from being shallow nostalgia bait, even if Cloud Strife is in it.
For fans of classic – that is, old school – Japanese role-players, Square Enix’s creation and application of its HD-2D technology has been very welcome. It allows the company to take venerable 2D games and breathe new graphical life into them, keeping the original isometric viewpoints and 2D characters but dropping them into lush-looking 3D worlds.
Until now, the technology has been applied to the Octopath Traveler and Dragon Quest franchises (as well as the recent The Adventures Of Elliott) but Final Fantasy fans have long wondered what it would be like if some of the early games from that franchise received the HD-2D treatment. Well, they need wonder no more, because Final Fantasy Resonance, the first HD-2D Final Fantasy game, is due to be released on October 22 for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.
It may sound like an original Final Fantasy game – and it feels like one in gameplay terms – but Resonance is loosely based on one of the more obscure elements of the franchise, the free-to-play 2015 mobile game Final Fantasy Brave Exvius. It’s a strange connection, that you don’t need to know anything about to place Resonance, but if that’s what’s given Square Enix the confidence to experiment then so be it.
Despite the complications inherent in its origins, Resonance is coherent, distinctive, and polished. We managed to play it for the best part of an hour at Gamescom, on Switch 2, a console that has always felt a particularly well-suited platform on which to play HD-2D games.
Our play-through consisted of about 10 minutes of random overworld exploration, followed by the whole of a dungeon, including its final boss battle. We had been given a fair bit of help, in the form of a decent stock of typical Final Fantasy potions and restorative items, plus a full battle group consisting of four characters.
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That wouldn’t necessarily have been a given at that point in the game, since Resonance features two main playable characters, Rain and Lasswell, but has a feature called Visions, which allows you to add other characters from the franchise to your battle party. Which explains why our party included Cloud Strife himself, who proved useful since he has the ability to automatically sense enemies’ elemental weaknesses (although the traditional Assess ability is also present in the game).
In a brief potter around the overworld, which looked superb in the distinctive HD-2D style, the first element of Resonance which stood out was its turn-based battle system. That’s old school turn-based as well, with no sign of the ATB (Active Time Battle) mechanism from the more modern games, which means you know exactly when team members are able to make their moves.
Despite that retro element you’re still able to do pretty much anything that you can in any other mainline Final Fantasy game: select abilities or items, cast spells, summon when allowed, and even launch resonances. These are attacks that are unique to characters and depend on their pre-defined character class. Resonances can only be triggered later on, in longer battles, so they were somewhat akin to limit breaks, although limit breaks are also present – and indeed proved quite decisive in some of the more epic battles.
Having had a taste of the overworld, we descended into a dungeon named the Wind Shrine. Instantly, Resonance demonstrated the range of its visuals, with some highly polished cut scenes, cleverly mixing 2D and 3D animations.
The Wind Shrine itself proved to be a classic Final Fantasy dungeon, involving a certain amount of environmental puzzling: a pretty labyrinthine built on many levels, with lifts and horizontally-moving blocks to trigger. As is customary in Final Fantasy dungeons, it was dotted with random enemies and contained plenty of obscure corners and cul-de-sacs in which chests could be found, yielding mainly crystals and the odd weapon.
According to Square Enix, Resonance’s storyline contains plenty of Final Fantasy staples, including the likes of crystals, airships, espers (which can be summoned in battles) and moogles.
Having negotiated our way through the Wind Shrine’s labyrinth (a process which took about 35 minutes, including the odd exploratory deviation) and equipped a couple of our characters with superior weapons which we found, it was time to take on the boss, a pretty fearsome Wind Demon. Even after we discovered his weaknesses we had to rely on the use of the odd phoenix down and curative spell (we also had some group-curing mist potions in our inventory).
Eventually, through judicious use of limit breaks and resonance attacks, along with making hay when we managed to stagger him and the minions he regularly summoned, we prevailed after a good 10 or so minutes, triggering another lavish cut scene.
