I have a…love hate relationship with RPGs. When I love them I will withdraw for days and never let go of them. If I hate them, I will try my hardest to beat them out of a twisted sense of spite. Then I sell it or give it away and try to forget it. The final fantasy series is perhaps teh best example of this: I Loved FFVII, I hated VIII, I Loved FFIX (the only one I completed), I hated X, I LOATHED X-2, but I will beat it! I Loved XII, despite the poor story. XIII…I just…didn’t care about. At all. I saw the trailers, read the previews and…I wasn’t sold. The character archetypes were old and tired and I’d become somewhat Jaded by the whole on again off again FF experience. I may pick it up at some point but not anytime soon. No, I want to talk about something more obscure perhaps a successor to Final Fantasy that I’m hoping to get my hands on later this month. Resonance of Fate or End of Eternity (yeah real subtle, using a thesaurus with Final Fantasy) in Japan.
This first came to my attention when checking the Spoonyone’s blog saying that he DIDN’T want to kill his characters out of annoyance. For a JRPG that’s high praise, the characters often end up pissing you off to no end with bad voice acting or stupid motivations within the story. So I went to have a gander at this RPG. The signs were…mixed.
On the plus hand it looks gorgeous; your players all use guns and fight in matrix style combat unloading clips into the energy in various back flips, cartwheels, handstands and other acrobatic moves.
On the meh side, they do look like archetypes from your typical JRPG and the voice acting for the English Dub seems a tad spotty.
The game utilises a turn based real time battle system allowing you to pull a Neo one step at a time. You get to run around and do a single attack in your turn time. A system I look forward to testing.
But what’s most interesting is the story, a mix of Final Fantasy and Fallout. A future earth where in order to combat a rise in toxins in the air a massive tower named Basil *cough* Babel!*cough*but now the air purifier has started to…malfunction.
You play as four character and hopefully 4 only. Two guys and gals: a manly ex-soldier called Vashyron, who appears to be doing a Vash the Stampede/Sepiroth look; the other is ‘the kid’ Zehpr who looks like that kid from Kingdom Hearts. The girls are Leanne, a cute but capable lass under Vash’s charge and subject 20, who I’m guessing is going to be integral to the plot and will probably end up dead in the end.
So while it may not reinvent the JRPG formula, it does seem to be moving in a better direction.
