Final Fantasy Resonance Has Killer Combat But Goes Overboard on the Fan Service | Preview

Sep 03, 2026 - 19:13

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Final Fantasy Resonance Has Killer Combat But Goes Overboard on the Fan Service | Preview

Published Sep 3, 2026, 10:15 AM EDT

Square Enix’s revamped mobile hit has a full bushel of memberberries

A steadfast rule of the Final Fantasy series has been that the stories do not connect between each installment. Generally speaking, you do not need to have played Final Fantasy 6 to enjoy FF7, for instance. Each game has its own distinct world and unique cast, meaning you can jump into the series at any point. Final Fantasy Resonance does not stick to this rule, making past playable characters an integral part of its combat system and directly evoking the series’ history through location names, enemy designs, and plot beats. This one isn’t for newcomers. On the contrary, your enjoyment of it will likely be in direct proportion to your familiarity with the series as a whole.

I came away from a recent hour-long demo of Resonance feeling like I just guzzled a fistful of Pixy Stix: buzzing with excitement, yet wondering if that high was setting me up for a crash. The flashy turn-based combat is solid and satisfying, and Resonance takes Square Enix’s signature HD-2D art style in a bolder direction than ever before. That said, I wasn’t able to experience much of the story, which left me a little worried that this new cast of characters risks being overshadowed by all those cameos.

A familiar new world

My demo took place during the game’s second chapter. While I wasn’t able to glean a ton of details about how this adventure kicks off, here are the basics. Our protagonist, Rain, is the plucky commander of Grandshelt’s airship fleet. He’s accompanied by his childhood friend Laswell, who takes a bit of style inspiration from FF7’s Barret Wallace by having one of his arms replaced with a sword. Along with the white mage Fina and the inventor Lid, who uses a pretty spiffy mechanical chocobo for some of her attacks, they’re on a journey to protect the world’s crystals from a shadowy threat. It’s classic Final Fantasy fare, and I’m not mad about it.

Either on foot or astride a chocobo, you’ll traverse a colorful HD-2D world map that looks plucked from the pages of a pop-up book, stopping for a few random encounters along the way. When you reach a dungeon or other explorable area, you’ll see a pop-up indicating the recommended level for venturing further. My first stop was the Mobliz Shipyard, a gritty industrial facility with a long entry corridor spangled with portraits of illustrious men. From what I could tell, it didn’t bear any resemblance to the consequential town in FF6 that inspired its name, but I didn’t go all the way to the end. Instead, I spent most of my time in the Wind Temple, a straightforward ascent via a number of floating platforms activated by shimmering green crystals. These dungeons were perfectly fine early-game stuff, but they didn’t exactly rock my socks off or reveal much about the world.

Final Fantasy Resonance adapts the story of the free-to-play mobile game Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, which ran from 2016 to 2014 outside Japan. (In its home country, the game ran for a full decade, from 2015 to 2025.) This expanded console version entirely removes the paid gacha elements present in the mobile game, while retaining the unique combat gimmick it supported. In Resonance, each of your party members can equip a Vision to rely on in battle, which is essentially a tag-team partner with their own set of skills and spells that you can use at any time.

Some Visions are new characters unique to this world. The ones you’ll probably care most about are the heroes of Final Fantasy past, and all 16 mainline games are represented here. Instead of rolling on a gacha banner like in Brave Exvius, in Resonance you’ll visit one of the small, Breath of the Wild-esque shrines scattered around the world map to access that Vision. There, you’ll see a brief montage of that character’s story, and respond to a series of questions about how that character would react to specific scenarios. (If you answer incorrectly, it doesn’t prevent you from collecting that Vision — the questions are just for fun.)

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During my demo, I stopped by the shrine of Noctis, the princely protagonist of FF15, and was reminded of how much he loved his three best friends. Then I promptly forgot to use him, since my party members had already unlocked access to FF1’s Warrior of Light, FF6’s Terra, FF7’s Cloud, and FF9’s Zidane, among several others. Those are some big names for an early point in the game, so it seems like Square Enix isn’t hiding fan faves behind late-game challenges or optional dungeons. Each Vision levels up and unlocks new abilities, so even the most formidable warriors don’t start off super overpowered.

From what I’ve seen, Vision characters have no participation whatsoever in the story of Resonance outside combat. This isn’t a team-up adventure where Cloud pals around with Zidane and Noctis. In that respect, Resonance is much closer to something like Fire Emblem Engage than Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth. Both those games have nigh-incomprehensible stories with sprawling ensemble casts. Engage is a mostly surface-level celebration of characters you know and love. Infinite Wealth spends a lot more time figuring out how all those big personalities interact with one another, and it’s objectively a better game. But I’ve also replayed Engage far more than Infinite Wealth, because it’s reliably good dumb fun. They’re both nostalgia plays, but they scratch different itches.

The fiercest of battles

In addition to Visions, Resonance draws on combat mechanics from across the Final Fantasy series. Your characters have Limit Breaks, ultimate attacks charged by dealing and taking damage that are mostly worth saving for bosses. These are depicted in spiffy pixel-art cutscenes that feel unique to each character. Each party member can also equip an Esper, a summoned monster that will remain on the battlefield for three turns. These will also be recognizable names to longtime Final Fantasy fans, including Carbuncle, Odin, Leviathan, and Bahamut. (I didn’t actually use any Espers during the demo since I had plenty of other ways of doling out damage, but I assume they’ll come in handy as the challenge increases later on in the game.)

Each enemy has a stagger gauge located just beneath their HP bar. Some abilities deal increased stagger damage, while most enemies have a specific elemental weakness you’ll need to discover and exploit. Once an enemy is staggered, you’ll deal much more damage for a turn or two. If you manage to stagger all enemies on-screen (even if it’s just one), you’ll trigger a Resonance attack, where you can select one of your party’s Visions to use their ultimate ability for maximum damage. Each of these shows a brief rendered cutscene of a Final Fantasy hero looking pretty badass, in a distinct aesthetic departure from the Limit Breaks. The novelty of shifting between the visual languages of SNES and PS5-era Final Fantasy in a single battle is a major part of Resonance’s charm.

In that vein, the highlight of my demo was a lengthy showdown against Aether, the imposing knight waiting at the top floor of the Wind Temple. Whereas the random encounters up to this point had mostly been short and sweet, this was an old-school, turn-based slugfest in the best possible way. This roughly 20-minute encounter had me on the edge of my seat on several occasions, because Aether hits very hard and has a massive well of HP you’ll need to chip away little by little. After honing in on his weakness, I had to stagger him several times and unleash all my strongest attacks over and over before he finally went down. All the pyrotechnics of the Resonance attacks and Limit Breaks only added to the tension and excitement. While I haven’t been blown away by the game’s dungeons just yet, the setpiece battles are something to savor.

Final Fantasy Resonance gives you a lot of firepower right out the gate and trusts you to know how to use it, and I’m excited to see how the challenge amps up in future chapters. But while I’m already sold on the combat, I’m still iffy about the story. Will the popularity of Brave Exvius translate to a memorable and affecting console experience? Or is it going to be several dozen hours of “hey, remember this guy?” punctuated by fun fights? And really, would that be a bad thing? We don’t have to wait much longer to find out.

Final Fantasy Resonance will be released for Nintendo Switch, Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X on Oct. 22.