The wind picked up, the blue light became a blue sky only punctuated by cloud. The feeling of falling is both terrifying and incredible. Fear of the moment, wonder at the experience of force and…relief in knowing that death will be painful but brief. I looked down. There was tower of immense size and structure sticking out of the ground like it was giving the world a great defiant middle finger. Babel had nothing on this construction of iron and steel. I had felt like this before in my dreams but this…
Another gust of wind as if something was cutting through the air. I was grabbed roughly and swung sideways. The arm that held me was firm but small, almost effeminate. My rescuer and I was swung sideways across a platform landing with a force that knocked the breath from me, throwing me just over the very edge with my numb fingers clinging on for dear life on the cold steel between me and an unfathomable drop.
A face appeared over the edge of the gantry, taking my arm and hauling me over with one swift motion. I was on my back coughing and gasping for air. “Th-thankyou…” I managed.
I was met with stony silence as my rescuer composed himself. I rolled over to get a better look.
“Wait…Sora?”
Resonance of Fate, like Metro 2033, is a mixed bag. BUT! It is much more fun. It takes a minimalist approach to the JRPG formula and puts the emphasis heavily on action with a side note on story. In my opinion, it works, let me tell you why…
You start the game with 3 characters acting as mercenaries, or ‘hunters’ as the game calls them in the Tower of Basel, the last remnant of humanity on a dying planet due to a natural disaster. Their pasts are shrouded in mystery. All you know is, they’re very good at killing things with guns in slow motion. Awesome. No being overcrowded with a strange non-sensical story (though that’s not to say it isn’t present) and it just lets you have fun killing things matrix style.
You are dropped into the game basically blind, no tutorial interfering with the game play, you’re a big boy it says, you figure it out. And I did. Headed to the arena and I taught myself how to play and kill creatures, gambled some coin on some battles and then I was ready to hit the world map and do some missions. Despite the lack of a tutorial, the hunter side quests that your given in addition to the Chapters overarching quest help to ease you into the game world and adjust to the way the game wants you to play.
Now I’m going to get the negatives out of the way so I can continue to gush in the knowledge that I have given a somewhat fair and balanced review of this game. First, the lack of exposition can be frustrating and bewildering, leaving you wanting to know more about what’s going on instead of the random cut scenes with characters you don’t know talking about things you don’t understand and the only way you can tell that they are evil is because they have a ‘something something dark side’ motif in their surroundings and a hammy villainous speech. There’s a feature where you can buy clothes for your characters, which is ok if you want to play dress up, but it doesn’t seem to have much effect in game and none at all in the battles. It’s nice but seemingly totally superfluous. While the character archetypes are downplayed they are still very much cut from the same mould as most JRPG heroes but thankfully much less annoying. The out of battle graphics are barely Playstaion 2 worthy and are so linear you could walk straight through them without even noticing. For being a steam punk post apocalyptic world they don’t seem to be playing up the scenery very much, which is disappointing. The soundtrack is pretty average, nothing that will stick in your head but it also won’t annoy you too much.
The interface is fairly easy to get your head around, as is the weapon customisation and synthesising which you’ll be doing to get parts for quests, ammo or grenades, and other gun parts. The missions and side quests are easy to keep track of and approach, even if at times they are a tad simplistic at times.
The world map is comprised of the various layers of the tower of Basel broken up into hexes that are either coloured or colourless that must be broken down with hexes that you get from defeating foes as well as from quests. There are also terminals spread out on the levels that you can power up with coloured hexes to act during random encounters, like increasing attack power or elemental effects. It actually works pretty well, allowing you to expand the map as you defeat foes and the amount of backtracking is reasonable without pissing you off to the nth degree.
The characters don’t let on much about themselves, although I can hazard a bet they were all brought together by some strange event to be revealed at a later date. Most of their dialogue is witty quips or smutty humour (which isn’t always endearing, watching a man in his late 20’s do the Carlton dance while thinking about his employers boobies may be hilarious but it’s also a little sad, the taint of the Japanese pervert still lingers here). Again proving that less is more we don’t tend to see that much of them and most interaction are done during the mission battles with wise cracking quips or observations. Which means Zepher’s whiney emoness is there enough to identify his character but not enough to be a pain, Leanne’s sweet innocent girl routine doesn’t feel quite so cliché and Vashyron’s fatherly yet slightly perverted personality still makes him relatable to. The voice acting is pretty good too.
The combat takes place in a quasi-real time turn based mode where enemies only move or charge an attack when you do allowing you to cycle characters or plan an attack without getting screwed over. There are 3 forms of attack: a normal charged attack where you just stand and shoot at your foe, a Hero attack where you dart across the screen changing faster and filling your foe with more lead while back flipping, sliding and doing various other acrobatic moves and, if you arrange it between two of you allies you get a resonance point which you can use for a tri attack which uses all of your party circling each other and attack the foe at pretty much the same time. All these actions bar the normal attack uses up things called basil shards which you can replenish by destroying rings around your foes which help them defend against your attacks.
This all adds to a very cinematic fighting style which is easy to get into but hard to master, mixing scratch damage with direct damage for bigger combos and area attacks with longer powered attack to incapacitate your foes.
I’m just over 20 hours in and on chapter 5 and things are starting to get pretty tough. Surprisingly, you can actually easily dip in and out of ROF and its good to let off some steam and level up your characters, for a laugh! A fun grind! Yes it does exist! If you want to try a different RPG then I heartily recommend ROF, it make take about an hour to get your head around, but from there it’s great fun. Something FF13 should have looked into. 20 hours then it gets good, come on! But, I shall save that rant for another time. Bottom line, it’s a no nonsense (or just low nonsense) JRPG and I wish there were more games like it out there.
- That Bloke In The Beanie
