Resonance Of Fate Review

I remember being mildly interested when I first saw this game in a magazine, only to find out that it had the SEGA logo on the front of the box, causing my interest to disappear in an instant. Fast forward many years later after having experienced countless tri-Ace games and enjoying them, I eventually found out that Resonance Of Fate was not only developed by tri-Ace but it was also directed by the same person who directed my favorite game of all time, what could possibly go wrong? When I heard that a PC port of the game was on the horizon and that it was going to be self-published by tri-Ace themselves, I decided that it was finally time for me to give Resonance Of Fate a go.

I’ll start by saying that Resonance Of Fate doesn’t really feel like a tri-Ace game… but it most definitely feels like a Suguro game. It’s as if Suguro left tri-Ace to work with Square-Enix or Mistwalker and carried over some of his ideas from Valkyrie Profile 2 in order to make a game that feels isolated from other tri-Ace games. What I mean by this is that while Valkyrie Profile and Star Ocean have completely different tones, they both follow a very similar formula. Both of them being action RPG’s with an emphasis on character management and growth in the sense that you are encouraged to interact with a variety of different systems outside of battle, in order to make the process of grinding levels/items to make your characters more effective in battles more interesting.

Other tri-Ace games tend follow this formula as well but Resonance Of Fate is the odd one out in the sense that it is not an action game, it is a synchronized time strategy game that lacks the fun factor of character management that other tri-Ace games are known to have. Resonance Of Fate kinda feels as if it is trying to cater to a completely different audience by employing its own formula as well as its own thematic direction which feels quite alienating to a tri-Ace fan such as myself

Now don’t get me wrong, Resonance Of Fate does have character management but it all feels different to Star Ocean and Valkyrie Profile in the sense that you’re not actually managing your characters specifically (for the most part at least), rather you are customizing guns which can be equipped on any character. I suppose this could be considered to be Resonance Of Fate’s item creation/weapon synthesis as to customize guns, you will have to craft the individual attachments using parts looted from enemies but this is literally the bulk of the game’s character management so you better love guns because every facet of this game revolves around them. Leveling up only serves to increase your weight capacity (allowing more attachments to be placed on a weapon) and the character’s maximum HP, as well as acquiring skills depending on which weapon you have equipped in a linear fashion.

At first glance, the gun customization seems quite interesting. You get to place attachments wherever the hell you want. Sadly none of this is cosmetic so don’t expect Serious Sam Double D levels of gun stacking on the weapon aesthetic but do expect to mount multiple scopes on your SMG because tri-Ace logic dictates that more scopes makes enemies easier to see when in reality having more scopes on a weapon only ends up making it heavier and therefore more cumbersome to use with only the first scope being of any use but this is a JRPG so who the hell cares, go crazy with gun crafting, put those multi-barrels on your gun, it may look ridiculous but you’ll regret it later if you don’t. Gun customization is so important in this game that neglecting it might as well be a one way ticket to the game over screen so you’ll have to do it a lot.

By the end of the game, gun customization becomes less of a cool distraction and more like a bloated weapon synthesis that is more complicated than it needs to be and since it is such an integral part of character growth, gun customization can often feel like a slog to get through at times which is a great shame to be honest, especially once you realize that the guns you create aren’t cosmetic. I suppose the game makes up for this by allowing players to buy clothes for the characters to wear and unlike most games these days, not a single piece of clothing has been sold separately as DLC, they’re all available to buy in game. This is quite the feat if you ask me considering the state of the industry these days. There’s a surprising amount of features available in the character customization, even going as far as to change a character’s eye colour, giving player’s lots of ways to personalize their own distinguishable character at no extra cost, remarkable!

What isn’t remarkable however is the game’s story. Resonance Of Fate has quite possibly the worst story I have ever seen in a tri-Ace game and that’s coming from someone who managed to beat the cringefest that is Star Ocean 4. While Resonance Of Fate may not be as cringeworthy as Star Ocean 4, the story is so incredibly boring that I’m amazed at how I managed to stay awake throughout the whole thing. The plot is pretty much nonexistent for more than half the game as you are merely doing odd jobs for the tower’s nobility and by tower I mean the world because much like in Ar Tonelico, the entire game takes place on a massive tower that soars above the clouds. This means that you will spend ages going from elevator to elevator in order to reach a certain floor of the tower and complete quests be they main story quests or side quests, this gets tedious very quickly as there’s no easy way to travel from a to b in this game.

Speaking of travelling, I forgot to mention that the entire world map screen is covered with hexes. What I mean is that instead of watching your character walk around in an overworld, instead you have a cursor that moves on a top down isometric grid filled with hexes that you need to break through in order to progress. How do you get hexes you ask? You get them from battles. You know what that means don’t you? If you want to progress through the game you’re going to have to farm these hexes which means grinding, lots and lots of grinding and believe me, you will want to do more than just simply progress through the game, you will want to fill in all the hexes to get access to all the loot littered around including bezel shards which I will get to later.

See all those hexes? Once you fill all of those in, random encounters become completely pointless.

Put simply Resonance Of Fate has you spending a good portion of the game following the same formula over and over again. Before you even begin doing the main story you will want to head over to the local guild and do all the sidequests, yes all of them, do not leave a single one unfinished before finishing the main story or it will be gone forever and the rewards for finishing them are a pretty big deal as they give you a lot of vital customization parts that will make battles more manageable in the long run. Plus completing quests gives you hunter points which gives additional rewards upon completing so many and there’s a final reward for completing them all which adds another incentive to do them.

Once you have accepted all of the side quests, now you have to start grinding hexes. It is recommended to grind hexes as early as possible so that you get items that would otherwise be inaccessible early on to make some of the earlier fights a lot easier than they would be otherwise so you’ll spend the next part of the game filling out all accessible areas of the map. Once you do that you will want to start doing all the side quests, travelling back and forth between floors as you do them. Finally you want to start the main quest and once you’ve finished that, you go to your home base, save and move on to the next chapter.

Why am I telling you all this you ask? Because the game is ridiculously hard if you don’t know what you are doing… and I mean ridiculously hard, to the point that you will quickly get burnt out if you don’t pick up on the basics fast. A lot of people recommend heading to the arena to learn the combat system before you even start the very first story mission but even if you do that, you will not learn the combat system because the tutorial does a terrible job at explaining things to the player. You can’t just jump into Resonance Of Fate expecting it to play like any other JRPG you have ever played because if you do, you will be seeing the game over screen a lot.

First things first, the most important thing to realize is that there are two types of attacks, standing attacks and hero attacks. Standing attacks cost nothing to do but during these attacks, enemies can attack you. As Resonance Of Fate is a synchronized time strategy RPG, you will want to spare as much time as you can to outmaneuver the enemy. Therefore it is often favored to use hero attacks in the latter half of the game. It is important to note however that hero attacks cost 1000 hit points to use (1 bezel’s worth of hero gauge). This isn’t immediately obvious however but once you become better acquainted with the game you will come to realize this. Of course I’m going to help you dodge all this needless inherent complexity by telling you that hero attacks use hero gauge which requires bezels and guess what? Bezels are basically your total hit points, your hero gauge is the hit points you have left.

What about the actual hit points you ask? Oh that’s different, running out of that kills you then you get a game over but get this, if you run out of bezels/hero gauge, not only do you lose the ability to perform hero attacks but you enter critical condition where you become severely crippled to the point that you are almost guaranteed to be greeted by a game over screen every single time you see it. Therefore it is very important to watch your bezels carefully because if you run out of them… you’re done.

So what happens when you are attacked? Do you lose bezels/hero gauge? Nope, you take scratch damage (unless you get poisoned which I’ll go into later). Scratch damage accumulates over time and once you lose an entire health bar of scratch damage you will lose bezels for every 1000 health your character has in order to fully restore your scratch HP. Those bezels will become littered around the map requiring you to pick them back up in order to bring your maximum hero gauge back up, if you don’t pick them up, enemies will and they will heal enemies, plus you are unable to gain hero gauge if you have no bezels left to hold it.

Defeating bosses will often reward you with bezel shards, you can also find bezel shards while filling in the map and by fighting enemies in flashing red areas on the map. Collect enough bezel shards and your maximum hero gauge will go up 1 bezel.

Because of all this, it is absolutely vital that you do not level up too much too early. If you have even slightly higher than 1000 health, you will lose 2 bezels every time your health runs out regardless of how much health is actually restored. Of course later on in the game you will need to have more health as enemies will deal more damage but until you have enough bezels, you should try to avoid leveling up too much in order to prevent your characters from having way too much hp or you’ll get a nasty surprise (you level up individual weapons, not characters but with each level you gain a boost in HP for the character). Despite all this you will still have to farm hexes anyways so don’t think that you can escape the monotony of grinding, you will still have to do it… early on at least. By the latter half of the game you should have filled the entire world map with hexes, therefore fighting random encounters becomes completely pointless. Does this all sound like fun to you? I hope so because this is what you’re in for when you play this game.

Don’t think I’m done scaring you away from this game because I’m not. Performing hero attacks not only consumes a single bezel of hero gauge (which we all know by now is a very valuable resource) but it also has you moving forward in a straight line as a circle begins to spin. This circle represents your weapon’s charge and you usually want to keep it spinning in order to improve the effectiveness of your attacks. Once it stops spinning, you have to press the x button to execute the attack. You can also jump in the middle of these attacks and this allows you to hit multiple enemy parts at once. You’ll want to do this often as breaking off enemy parts restores hero gauge one bezel at a time (not the bezels themselves), killing enemies also restores hero gauge so be sure to KO the enemy if you choose to perform a hero attack for maximum efficiency.

Another thing to note is that if you collide into anything in the middle of a hero attack, your character will stop in your tracks causing your hero gauge to go to waste. I swear this has happened to me so many times it’s ridiculous. Some of the larger enemies are especially problematic and while you might think that you could run under a giant golem’s legs are under their massive cannon that’s miles above your character’s head, think again. Ideally you want to be as close to the enemy as possible to increase your charge speed (another reason to use hero attacks).

There’s also multiple levels of terrain to be aware of as well as hazards littered around the map such as barrels and even land mines that are planted by enemies. You can (and usually should) shoot and destroy them to deal damage and possible status ailments to anything near them. Don’t worry about running into landmines with a hero attack, they will blow up and do nothing to you (you are invincible during hero attacks)… but running into barrels is not a good idea, nor is it a good idea to run into walls.

Use the jump ability to circumvent these walls when they appear and be careful when you perform tri attacks in case your other characters are in awkward positions to prevent them from running into walls during these attacks. Try to have them jump as soon as you have access to them, even if it means cancelling one character’s charge. Oh wait I forgot to explain tri attacks didn’t I… they’re basically hero attacks but every character performs them simultaneously for the price of 1, using them costs resonance points as well as bezels, the more resonance points, the more laps around the triangle each character makes, allowing for more attacks.

Did I forget to mention that status ailments in this game are devastating? Be sure to avoid getting inflicted by them as much as you can because if you do get inflicted by status ailments you’re going to have a very hard time. Thankfully you can inflict status ailments on enemies pretty easily as there are no immunities like in other RPG’s. Surely you know what that calls for. I should also point out that the poison status completely bypasses your bezel barrier and deals direct damage to your character’s health so you can die from poison even if you have maximum hero gauge… ouch.

 

“You can’t just jump into Resonance Of Fate expecting it to play like any other JRPG you have ever played because if you do, you will be seeing the game over screen a lot”

 

To make things worse, if you want to heal status ailments or scratch damage, you need to use the character with the first aid kit. If the character with the first aid kit is frozen… you’re screwed, prepare to get your ass handed to you very quickly. Each characters can equip two items, either a handgun, SMG, Grenade, ammo box or first aid kit. Handguns deal HP damage but not much of it, they’re pretty worthless tbh, at least if you have plenty of grenades. When fully charged, the damage they deal doesn’t increase so don’t bother charging them up unless you want to get a higher chance of gauge breaking.

Gauge breaking splits the enemy’s health gauge into segments and when a segment is depleted, players are rewarded with an extra bezel of hero gauge. This can be handy against enemies who lack breakable parts but it isn’t always needed. SMG’s deal scratch damage and while they cannot kill enemies like handguns, you will use them a lot because they are your main DPS. Fully charging the gun apply’s damage multipliers to your attack so be sure to fully charge your SMG as soon as possible.

Once you gain a second SMG (new weapons are very rare and hard to come by in this game), it is highly recommended you replace someone’s handgun with it. You only need one handgun user. Grenades deal both scratch and HP damage in an AOE. Grenades are very handy later on in the game and it’s recommended to have someone use both a grenade and a SMG. Finally there’s the ammo box which changes the properties of the attack you are using. Some bullets apply status effects while others apply additional damage, you’ll need a gun to use them though, grenades won’t work.

The goal of the game is to lower the enemy’s health with scratch damage then finish via SMG’s/grenades then finish with either the handgun or a grenade which converts all the scratch damage delivered to enemies into HP damage, much like Final Fantasy Dissidia’s brave damage is converted into hp damage, the difference is that scratch damage heals over time, this applies to you as well, however enemies cannot deal direct damage to your hp unless they poison you.

Did you bother to read this far without being scared off? If so then you may actually enjoy this game… fancy that! For those that are wondering why I told you all of this information instead of actually critiquing the game’s combat is because I want to illustrate to you all just how goddamn complicated this game is. Now that you have read all that, you never have to do the tutorial of Resonance Of Fate as I have saved you so much precious time that you probably won’t appreciate as much as you should. As for my thoughts on the combat, Resonance Of Fate is basically Valkyrie Profile 2 if you removed all of the action, attack areas and the dash ability was replaced with hero attacks, with layers upon layers of inherent complexity dumped on top of it. Does it need to be this complicated? Of course not. The question is, is there enough depth to make up for the game’s ridiculous complexity?

Well let’s just say that by the latter half of the game I found an exploit, if you can read between the lines of my explanation on how the combat system works you can probably figure it out but for the sake of keeping the experience as fun as possible for you, I shall not spoil that exploit. Let’s just say that finding this exploit made the latter half of the game a lot easier. Don’t get me wrong I still had trouble with some sections but the boss fights in particular became considerably easier once I figured out how to deal with them. In fact I’d even go as far as to say that the fewer enemies on screen, the easier the battles get later on. Ultimately the answer to the question I asked at the end of my last paragraph is both yes and no. Does it have a lot of depth? Yes, does it have enough depth to outweigh the level of inherent complexity? No.

Resonance Of Fate may require an encyclopedia of information to play but once you finally figure out how to play it, it’s not really all that difficult, heck I found the final boss to be an absolute joke compared to some of the earlier encounters in the game simply because by that point I had learned the game’s combat system well enough to know the best way to win. There were some tough fights in the final dungeon though so I wouldn’t say that the game became an absolute cakewalk by the end, rather it became considerably easier to the point that certain sections became a joke. In other words, expect a lot of difficulty spikes. One group of enemy encounters may not be as tough as another group of enemy encounters and vice versa, regardless of where you are in the game. Some enemy encounters are going to be a pain in the ass whereas others are monotonous to get through because you already know exactly how to win against them.

I will say though that learning the game did actually feel quite satisfying, even if most of it is inherently complex. I think RPG’s require a certain amount of inherent complexity in order for them to be somewhat cryptic for the sake of keeping things interesting, just not as inherently complex as Resonance Of Fate. To enjoy this game to its fullest you are going to need patience and a lot of it. The gameplay can be enjoyable if you’re willing to invest time into mastering it but it takes a special kind of gamer to do that and quite frankly I’m not one of those people. I still enjoyed it to a certain degree though. I wouldn’t say you need to be a hardcore JRPG fan to be able to enjoy this game, anyone can jump into it so long as they have the patience to learn something new as hardcore JRPG fans will have just as much to learn as people who don’t play JRPG’s, old methods won’t work here.

Leveling up is pointless, especially early on as you don’t have many weapon attachments available to you. Later on you’ll likely have gained so many levels anyway that you won’t need to grind at all and there’s barely any benefit in doing so, especially if you have filled all your weapon slots.

I think if the story was better, the learning curve of the gameplay may have been more tolerable but sadly this is not the case. You’re probably wondering if the story picks up in the latter half of the game. I’d say that it picks up in the final quarter of the game but I’d also argue that by the time the story picks up, it feels a bit rushed. Unlike Valkyrie Profile which had a similar problem with its story but made up for it with its excellent world building, Resonance Of Fate’s world building is severely lacking which is devastating considering how ambitious the game’s setting is.

I would have liked to learn more about the poorer areas of the tower and maybe have the lower level inhabitants involved in the game’s story but sadly they’re kinda just there, there’s nothing to truly distinguish rich and poor except one side of the tower has sewage and debris everywhere while the other is more opulent in its appearance. There is a bit of dialogue from NPC’s that give a few more implications of poverty but there’s not enough to truly make the world valuable, it just feels empty and I think this is what ultimately lets the game down the most.

Could you get any less nuanced than this?

On the plus side, the game has the tendency to throw in quite a few gags in between some of the earlier missions and to be honest these gags are the best part of the game’s story even though they aren’t really relevant to the story at all. The story appears to build up to something big at first but you’ll be surprised to find out that the story is actually very simplistic. Put simply Resonance Of Fate’s story is at its best when it doesn’t take itself seriously, when it does take itself seriously, it falls flat on its ass. Even Star Ocean 4 ties its story together better than Resonance Of Fate and that’s saying something considering how many times the story gets side tracked in that game. I swear there is so much needless bullshit in this game it is unbelievable.

The characters themselves are a mixed bag… and there’s only 3 of them. You have the edgy teenager, the funky middle aged dude and the chick. The only character worth noting is the funky middle aged dude, Vashyron. I found Vashyron’s characterization to be the most diverse of the three as he has a pretty well rounded mixture of seriousness and goofiness that makes him somewhat unpredictable. He’s a pretty laid back character for the most part and often acts as the voice of reason for the group.

Leanne is quite odd in the sense that she is written as a fiery, strong-willed and likable character but at the same time some of her lines express a lack of confidence in her abilities. It’s pretty jarring to watch her kicking ass in battle only to beat herself up by saying that she’s an amateur. To make matters worse, the other character’s beat her down as well by making out that she’s a novice, even later on in the game. I find that this ruins what would have been a pretty refreshing character. I’m not a feminist or anything, I’d just rather they written her into a stronger, more confident character considering her traits and all.

Finally there’s captain edgelord, Zephyr. Every single time I look at this character a linkin park song starts playing in my head. He’s almost always moping, so much so that he could give Cloud, Squall and even Sieg Wahrheit a run for their money. In fact he is so unbelievably emo and edgy that i dyed his hair red and dressed him in white just so that he could look as close to Sieg Wahrheit as possible. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m a sucker for these types of characters most of the times, mostly because I find them amusing and Zephyr doesn’t disappoint in this regard, his character is so unbelievably edgy it’s laughable. I can’t say that his character is any good though… unless you’re into edgy shit I doubt you’ll give a shit about him.

Would it kill you to smile?

I also regret to inform you that the music, while not terrible is pretty sub par for Motoi Sakuraba’s standards. Usually he shines in most tri-Ace games but Resonance Of Fate is arguably his weakest tri-Ace soundtrack. There’s some nice prog rock tracks here and a few good ambient ones but nothing particularly stood out to me as being memorable. I’d say the boss theme is probably the most memorable of the bunch. Ultimately I’m disappointed by the soundtrack of this game, maybe it’s because Motoi Sakuraba focused more on his prog rock this time round which didn’t appeal to me as much as his more mixed approach of orchestral/prog rock. I suppose it’s a matter of taste but this is no Valkyrie Profile 2.

Voice acting on the other hand is pretty good compared to that of most tri-Ace games. While the main cast of characters have surprisingly natural voice acting, some of the cardinals in particular have some really hammy voices, so you get the best of both worlds in this game. I think the voice acting for the main characters in particular was the best part though, especially since the game revolves around the three of them and you hear them talking to each other a lot. They feel like actual conversations, not forced lines that feel misplaced like in Star Ocean 4. It really makes the world feel more natural and believable even though it’s clearly ridiculous and surreal like other JRPG’s.

Visually the game looks pretty decent, Valkyrie Profile 2’s art style seems to linger a bit here though there’s a lot of brown and grey sadly, possibly due to the game’s steampunk setting which lets it down a bit if you ask me. I think the character designs offer a nice contrast to this however. Put simply, Resonance Of Fate is very grungy yet somewhat refined in the visual department. I suppose you can’t expect too much from a giant tower now can you… regardless I do think the visuals meet tri-Ace’s standards of quality so that’s something I suppose, I just think that the grey and brown really isolates this game from other tri-Ace games as there is a clear lack of vibrancy by comparison which I find to be rather bothersome.

Resonance Of Fate is a very difficult game to recommend. You are going to need both patience and tolerance to get through this game but if you can cope with the game’s complexity and the story doesn’t bother you, I believe that you can find some value out of this game. For everyone else this game is a tedious slog that should be avoided. If you plan on picking this up, I recommend the PC version if you can, it is a pretty solid port and the only thing you’re missing is SEGA outfits since SEGA aren’t part of this game anymore. The graphical quality of the PC version is vastly superior and all of the issues have been fixed. Support great PC ports people, the industry needs more of them!

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Story/Plot: Mediocre

Visuals: Satisfactory

Gameplay: Satisfactory

Music: Satisfactory

Lifespan: Quite Long

Difficulty: Hard

Would You Replay? No

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Overall: Satisfactory

 

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Value: £25.00