Resonance of Fate (End of Eternity in Japan) is a pseudo real-time
action RPG created by tri-Ace, one of my favorite developers out there. A
guy by the username "Taxonomic" got it, he always wanted it, but he
hated it because he didn't know how to play. Until I made him go berserk
and play the game to beat the first boss, he didn't like it. Even then,
I still didn't pick up this game, and I don't even know why anymore. It
took two more months for me to make up my mind, and by gods is it one
of the greatest purchases I have ever made.
There were two initial reasons I was driven to pick up this game, One is
that you can actually play your own music from the PS3 play list. I
don't even think there are any other games on the PS3 that let you do
this, which is a shame since the X360 you can do it, but the 360 makes
it all monotonish and unintelligible.
The second reason is that I am the overlord of Valkyria Chronicles and
am a heavy fan of the game and I'm still waiting on the sequel. I just
had to see what the big deal is about. Also the fact the game came out
in limited quantities due to SEGA thinking it would flop, I had no time
to decide anymore.
The gameplay is simply fantastic, there is no other like it. In his own
words, this game is a blueprint for change. Personally, I think the
problem with JRPGs is that you can't make your own character that leads
the story, fully detailed and voiced. Not only that, the combat is, most
of the time, never that addicting enough to keep you intrigued in it
while you grind to reach the next part of the game.
RoF, however, avoids most of the gripes I have with the JRPG.
Starting out in this game is extremely difficult. Many people have
complained about a "steep learning curve", but I think it's just
bulls***, to be honest. When I started this game, the first destination I
had was the Arena, where they offered only training courses in the
beginning. I took them all and finished in no time. Many people also
complain about Tri-Attacks, but they aren't hard to pull off. This game
has no learning curve for me.
I think it's just that I've played too many games and no matter what control scheme I'm offered, I always adapt to it.
Digressing aside, the first place to start is with the meat of the game,
the combat and the game play. It's very fluid, and it might actually
give you the illusion that you're very good at this game when there's
nothing to it. Most of the combat is done by watching your characters
run, hop, skip, jump, and flip around like a bunch of jackasses while
pulling off physically impossible stunts in the air and firing hundreds
upon thousands of shots each day without ever needing to reload.
Oh yes.
But, ahem, Vashyron seems to toss his magazine out of the gun BEFORE he
fires if he is equipped with a handgun and does a hero action.
When you first start the game, you only have three full "Bezel Shards",
which allow you to do Hero Actions. Performing a "Hero Action" costs one
Bezel, so you have to make it count. It's very tough in the beginning.
To regain Bezel, either destroy a piece of the enemy's armor, or kill an
enemy. Hero Actions allow you to plot a course through the battlefield,
and your character will make a mad dash through enemy ranks and enemy
gunfire, and you're free to attack whoever you want for as long as it
goes on. However, colliding into certain enemies or any obstacles will
end it prematurely.
Outside of hero actions, you can move around much like in Valkyria
Chronicles, you have an action bar over the character you're
controlling. If you try to attack this way, it will use up that gauge as
well. You usually can't charge fast enough until late game to attack
this way, though.
To defeat an enemy, plugging them with thousands of handgun bullets
won't do the trick. You need to "Scratch" them first with Machine Gun
damage. There are three types of weapons in the game:
Handgun
Sub-Machine Gun
Thrown Weapons
Each can be leveled to 100, and your characters can, if it is all 100,
be a total of level 300. Levels don't do anything but give you HP. If
you were Level 100 and fought a level 258 enemy, you're not at a
disadvantage for the most part.
You start with uncustomized guns, so your charge rate and acceleration
will be poor for a while. The customization in this game is simply
amazing. Lets put it this way, who WOULDN'T want about 6 SIGHTS, 10
BARRELS, and 5 GRIPS on their handgun?
Indeed, the customization is marvelous. You can attach a plethora of
sights, barrels, and grips all in the goal of making your attack gauge
charge faster so that you can do more damage and activate special skills
that might stun an enemy or break their health. And of course, to hit
more than one enemy in your Hero Action.
With each level in a certain weapons category, you gain one more charge,
and obviously, when you reach level 100 you can charge up to 100. At
Level 100 machine gun, if you can charge to 100, you can always stun and
fully scratch your opponent thanks to 100% rate skills.
To gain a level, simply inflict damage. The damage you do to the main
body of an enemy (Hitting their armor does not count towards your
experience) will be transformed into experience for the weapon you used.
The only way SMG users can get experience is to scratch an enemy.
One thing you HAVE to understand is that if an enemy is fully scratched,
doing more damage than they have health anymore does not give you any
experience. You can't torture one enemy constantly to gain infinite
experience. Finding enemies that have lots of hit points is a good
tactic for leveling.
Handguns and Thrown Weapons all deal "Direct Damage", which is damage
that hurts enemies and converts scratch damage to full damage. Thrown
Weapons can also have many types of Status Ailment effects, such as
freezing or poison.
You also have a First Aid Kit and a Magazine case. In the magazine case,
you should only use this for SMG users by the way, you can equip all
types of ammunition that will deal bonus damage towards certain enemies.
Unfortunately, these three items, the First Aid Kit, Magazine Case, and
Grenade Box will take up one equipped slot, so you can't dual wield
firearms and still have these.
The first aid kit lets you use healing items to restore scratch damage done to your party, and other defense boosting items.
You can only equip accessories, and there are many with different types of effects.
There is no way to gain actual money from fighting. You can't gain money
from fighting, but you do get items that you can sell, and other items
to use in synthesis to make gun customization parts or accessories. This
might infuriate some, but it DOES work out well. Hell, if you want
money, just do the money glitch.
Adding the combat, there are two more things you can do. If you manage
to knock an enemy into the air while doing a Hero Run (Without jumping),
you have a chance of performing this thing called a "Bonus Shot". It's a
"blink and you miss it" mini game, but the more times you hit the
enemy, the bigger the yellow bar gets so you can get it easier.
If you succeed in that tiny mini game, you will get the chance to charge
up to high levels regardless of your level with the weapon. When you
unload on the airborne enemy, he will drop tons of silver and gold chips
like a pinata, and you can sell these for money. For the most part,
though, bonus hits are unfortunately not very useful as just jumping
over enemies is more fun and it's more efficient.
If you manage to make an enemy go airborne, you can jump over him and
attack him in the air, and cause him to smack down in the ground in a
"Smackdown" attack. It makes them drop chips, but not as much, and it
doesn't do much damage I've found, it's kind of pointless really.
It has this very "western" feel to it, like the game was meant to
capture the American market. We all know Americans are the kind who like
these violent gunplay films and such, right..?? Well, if there is any
combat nerd out there, this game is for them. It's a wet dream come true
for many hoping for something fresh, new, and revolutionary.
My friend put it properly, these hero actions you use to in 99% of the
combat look like they came from 1980's Hong Kong films. They simply
perform all of these dazzling acrobatics to please your eyes.
The enemies do not move unless you do. If you're hero running, they will
move and charge their attack against someone. There IS a way to exploit
this, however, and make them waste their turns. If the character you
control is being targeted, you can have them charge fully and wait until
they open fire, and immediately burst into a hero run and avoid all of
it. It's a good way to prevent return fire if you can't stun them with a
good rate early on.
Oh, funnily enough, I have to say this to spite my friend. There was a
red hex battle that involved 3 Level 73 monsters called "Mad Goliaths",
enemies too wide to run around, too big to jump over, and they kept
dealing poison damage and direct damage which would annihilate you. He
had to go through a lot of trouble to beat them, but there's something I
did before this.
I went to Level 12 (The lowest level on Basel) and into the Gran Idee
Mines to explore, and I fought one of them. I was getting my ass kicked
HARD and had to retry about 20 times until I learned how to exploit the
AI like I mentioned above. There was a tank of Liquid Nitrogen right
next to him, so I decided to shoot it out of desperation, and it
instantly killed this behemoth in something called a "Direct Kill",
which I don't know how it works exactly, but it must be an instant kill
if you use a certain attack against certain enemies.
Also because I had opened up almost ALL of Basel's hexes at the time, I
had a bunch of Freezer Grenade EXs, the most powerful of it's type. It
only took three, and I eliminated all three of those Mad Goliaths in one
hit. Mwa hahaha. I know he's going to rip into me for saying this
later.
Ahem...
There is a very good pacing to this game. Nothing is ever too hard.
tri-Ace has invented a brilliant thing with how levels and combat works.
Since you are forced to buy, maintain, and constantly customize your
guns to stay competitive in combat, you always feel like nothing is ever
too hard or too easy for you. It's really enjoyable to spend about
thirty minutes grinding, and then you feel like you're fairly matched
with things that you haven't even encountered yet. Definitely a breath
of fresh air from all this level scaling (Final Fantasy VIII) that
developers pull because they can't make anything challenging without
being cheap and unfair (The Last Remnant)
There is something tri-Ace does that nobody else does better. The banter.
During battles, your characters will often have conversations with each other, and a rather infamous one now is this:
Leanne: You want me on offense or defense?
Vashyron: Leanne goes both ways? Good to know.
Zephyr: Hey, save it why dont'cha?
Also, after eveyr fight, the camera always does these cool little
closeups and mugshots of the person who did the most damage (It's
actually random in this game unlike SO4), and they do little dances and
gestures with another quotable remark.
"That even left me wanting more!"
The localization was taken very seriously, all the time during your
quest they will often time make snide, and sometimes perverted, comments
towards each other. It's borderline silly that they never take their
job seriously most of the time.
I'll try not to get caught up in the combat. I can spend all day talking
about it too, because I took my party to the highest levels. That's how
much I love it.
Another very interesting addition that tri-Ace used in this game is that
they roped in some highly skilled, professional voice actors and
actresses. Guess who Vashyron is voiced by in the English language?
Nolan North.
a.k.a., Uncharted's Nathan Drake. The man is just amazing. He also
voiced characters in White Knight Chronicles and Valkyria Chronicles
(Damn!)
His voice is just perfect for the "do-anything-for-cash guy" Vashyron.
It also adds that extra, subtle touch of crude humor you've come to
like his voice for. The beginning of Chapter 2 was very good. Chapter 5
also had an amazing introduction. Hahaha! If anybody else were doing it,
we'd just cover our faces and look away, but his acting just makes a
lot of things very enjoyable.
Zephyr and Leanne are also voiced very well. It's a colorful cast of
protagonists that easily elevates this game above almost everything that
Japan sends westwards.
Talking about the graphics, the colors are mostly drab, but it should be
expected in a steampunk setting. The bright clothes you can add on to
your characters makes them stand out, though, and adds more palette to
the game. Since I beat Neverland, I have these power ranger-esque
outfits for my characters, this awesome bright blue quartz-colored
outfit for Leanne, a bright yellow outfit for Vashyron, and an
orange-red one for Zephyr. Leanne is just cute, they tailor made her to
be innocent, very skilled, and very cute at the same time. That's not
easy to do.
The music is nothing special, which makes it a necessity to bring your
own music. There are only a few tracks worth listening to. This game
seems to have it's own "resume", so to speak, with music. tri-Ace has
this style of doing soundtracks that are all very similar, and very
boorish. Star Ocean 4 was guilty of this with it's combat music, which
sounds very similar to this game's.
Also, I notice that your characters seem to mature as the game goes on
in the story. Though still, oddly enough, they still treat Leanne like a
newb despite her being a master with most forms of weaponry, she says
many different things now. She's much more "ballsy" and gutsy than
before, wanting to jump into the fight first and take on the enemy. It's
impressive.
The game world is so intricate and well-designed, there's so much
attention to detail that people like me feel engrossed heavily into the
environment. Though it does feel very lonely from time to time, with
only pockets of residential places you can actually go to and very
little people to talk to, you feel like it's just you wandering around
this giant, abandoned tower nobody cares about anymore. Though that
wouldn't be TOO much of a bad thing, mind you.
Models and animations fit perfectly and are all very fluid. I've encountered a few frame drops before, but nothing too drastic.
Moving onto the story.
It is not as good as it could be. It's hard to follow, but as a writer
myself, I can see what they were intending. You're just following a
group of mercenaries who each have a past that intertwines with Zenith,
and the rest of the world around them.
For the first few chapters, you're just doing jobs for people who make
more than you do, all of their little grunt work that they could easily
do by themselves since they have a highly trained army at their beck and
call. From busty women who dress provocatively while wining and dining,
to a man who has severe mental and physical deficiencies, you will do
errands all for the sake of cash. It is only about halfway through the
game that you start getting fed bits of the character's pasts.
As it goes on, it's like you're opening a book you never read before,
and starting from near the end. That's what it feels like, you're not
exactly told who anybody is until the plot exposition deems you worthy
of it, and until you reach the ending, you don't get a clear idea of
what goes on. The ending itself doesn't make much sense in itself
either, but it did leave open a TON of possibilities that could be an
RoF 2, but if you looked at the sales figures, that might not happen.
It's so sad, too. The story is very deep, and the characters are all
fleshed out by the end. You just wanted to see more of this awkward
pair, but nothing, even in the end, is hinted at between them or the
world they live in.
Basel is a 4,000-year old tower that was built by the ancestors of the
current inhabitants, it was intended to purify the surroundings, but it
didn't, and only serves as the only safe haven on the planet from the,
apparently, deadly outside world. Some people were left outside, and
they mutated into something very dangerous and powerful (I don't think
magic was completely thrown out...) and they all hate Basel because they
were left to die.
If it wasn't for the groundbreaking combat system and ruthlessly awesome
voice acting, this game might have started collecting dust on your
shelf before you even beat it. The story is too vague, and the ending
made no sense whatsoever. It probably didn't help that I beat Neverland
before I actually beat the game, but no matter anymore.
We can only hope for something to be improved upon even with this
incredible experimentation. If not improved, I wouldn't mind minor
adjustments and a totally different combat setting with this same
system. It's too enioyable not to like, and you may just forget the
story sadly, getting caught up in all the gun smoke.
