Resonance of Fate is one of those little games that fell into a black hole amidst a release of other high profile titles. With a release only a week after FFXIII, it was easy to ignore another JRPG, and it’s too bad since Resonance of Fate is a pretty decent game for fans of the genre. However, anyone else will likely see this as a convoluted mess.
The story is a bit of a mixed bag. The high points are the great moments injected with humour, where you see the main characters to interact with each other and learn more about them. The low points are when the game takes on a serious note and begins to get far too confusing, and the dialogue begin to sound cheesy. Most of the story updates come from the perspective of the villains during cut scenes in between chapters, and never really starts to take shape until well over half way through the game. Another downside to the way the story is told, is you’ll spend large amounts of time during the chapters doing non-story related stuff to power up your characters, so the fragmented presentation of the story is very hard to follow, and there didn’t appear to be any way to review what the heck was going on. Once I got the end, after all the time I spent I was treated to an incredibly disappointing and nonsensical ending that left me thinking why was I doing this all in the first place? Apparently a second playthrough garners a “true” ending, but the lead up isn’t anything special to make it worth it on a story level.
One big problem is the accessibility of RoF. You aren’t given a tutorial during your first battle, so unless you know to head to the arena for the tutorial content, your first battle will leave a bad taste in your mouth. If you don’t know what you are doing like I did initially then the combat system makes very little sense. However, once you do figure it all out it is a really clever and deep strategic system that rewards players who think before they act, and punishes those who don’t. There is a generous retry system as well that will let you play a fight again from the beginning for a small fee.
Another neat system is the way you unlock hexes to explore the tower of Basel. As you play you will acquire various shapes and colours of hexes that you will use to unlock areas of the map. Some areas will open new towns or dungeons, while others will provide items and costume pieces. It can be very rewarding to take some time and open up as many hexes as you can. There is also a system to provide buffs in an area by chaining “terminal effects” using coloured hexes. Although it required some grinding, it paid off to have terminals that boosted experience and item drops.
As typical with most JRPG type games, RoF will require you to spend most of your time grinding experience to progress. The game is profoundly difficult, and without proper grinding you’ll have an almost impossible time blitzing through the game. The grind can get particularly annoying as the enemy variety in the random encounters is minimal. You’ll see the same stuff over and over and it will get boring. The challenge can also be a little sporadic, with some chapters being much easier than others, so don’t be surprised if you play one easy chapter then hit a brick wall that requires you to grind for several hours to get strong enough.
Each of your characters will be able to use three different weapons (handgun, machine gun, and grenade). The machine gun deals what is called scratch damage, which is represented by the enemies health turning blue, and is recovered over time. The handguns and grenades will deal permanent damage (some grenades also inflict status ailments) which is what you use to actually finish off the enemy. The strategy in most situations is to fill the enemies health with scratch damage, as the machine gun can deal considerably more damage than the handguns, then turn that scratch damage into permanent damage with a handgun. Your characters also level up with each weapon, so you in order to properly level you’ll need each of your characters to swap weapon usage.
The visual style of RoF is very steampunky, with graphics that look decent but nothing overly impressive. The John Woo inspired attacks during the battles look awesome, but you’ll see the same stuff a million times over and it will lose its charm fairly quickly. Also the dungeons you’ll visit all look the same, and makes exploration nothing more than hunting for items. The voice acting was surprisingly good, with Nolan North (Nathan Drake of the Uncharted series) voicing the main character Vashyron. Unfortunately you’ll hear the same banter during combat far more often than you’d probably like.
With over 70 hours of gameplay, you will definitely get your money’s worth with this title. However, it really depends if you like the JRPG genre, as this is about as hardcore as it gets without being a sprite based strategy RPG. I definitely was addicted to this game, and enjoyed most of my time with it, however there are some big problems with it that keep it from being a hidden gem.