Noted RPG developer tri-Ace continue their work of creating excellent role-playing games with Resonance of Fate (RoF). In Japan, this game is also called End of Eternity. Not only does RoF follow the traditional RPG formula in many key ways, but it also reinvents how it is presented with a unique story and complex battle system. Unlike new arrivals, such as Final Fantasy XIII, RoF does not try to appeal to the mainstream. Instead, it is an RPG, not unlike Demon's Souls, in that the game appeals to the more hardcore gamer.
Story: The main story of Resonance of Fate centers on three characters, Vashyron, Zephyr, and Leanne. The game doesn't really do anything too innovative in the story content itself, but the presentation is unique among most role-playing games. Unlike most RPG's where the story is doled out bit by bit over the course of a chapter or act, RoF's core story only occurs at the beginning or end of a chapter, and following a major boss battle. Thus, you can finish chapters at your own pace without the feeling of being dragged along by the story. This method of storytelling does have the benefit of allowing the gamer to pace themselves, but with several hours between story sequences, it feels a little disjointed and difficult to remember previous events. The story content itself is largely unremarkable, and to avoid spoiling it, I'm not going to mention it, but RoF does diverge from standard RPG fare in one respect: Humor. Like all Japanese RPG's, RoF can be a touch melodramatic and over-the-top at times, however, there were several moments where I couldn't help but laugh out loud at some of the (Intentionally) funny moments. This is a major shift from RPG's that take themselves very seriously. Each of the characters have an important role to play and the story would unravel if their backgrounds were not reasonably fleshed out.
Gameplay: Resonance of Fate is meant for the more hardcore RPG players and it shows in how the game is played. The giant tower-world of Basel, think of the Tower of Babel only larger and steam punk, is where all of the game takes place and is split into 12 levels. Each level is a map covered in hexes. Initially, you are restricted to certain levels and cannot access the lower, and more dangerous, levels. From the beginning, not every energy hex on the map is open for exploration, you must use white hexes to open up the area, which can be obtained from battles. Some towns and dungeons are also locked using special colored hexes which are rarer. All energy hexes are specially shaped and you can only place them on the map in areas where the whole hex will cover an area and not fall outside the map. This adds a whole puzzle element to map exploration. If you unlock every hex on a level, you get the ability to warp back to your main base on level four from any station hex you construct on that level. Station hexes are bought using five colored hexes in guilds and allow you to save your game, rest, and head back to base. On the map, you will also find terminals which bestow special benefits on the party, such as being able to cause extra fire damage or increased experience. These terminals can only be activated using colored hexes and require a certain number of colored hexes to activate. As you lay down these colored hexes to activate the terminals, they can be chained with other terminals to increase the benefits but also over dungeons. If you enter a dungeon or have a random encounter on a colored hex which has activated terminals connected to it, you gain the benefit in battle. Terminals play a vital role in many battles and make or break some boss encounters. Towns and dungeons are similar in that you access them from the main level map, but how they are presented differ. Towns have NPC's you can interact with and purchase items from, along with a static camera, while dungeons have rotatable cameras and are like mini-hex maps, similar to the world map but on a smaller scale. RoF is entirely mission-based. The story and side missions are all lumped together in one screen so you know what is needed. Side, or guild missions, are obtained from the Hunter's Guild which releases up to three missions at once on a bulletin board for hunters, you, to perform. These missions can start out very easy, such as a standard delivery request, and can range to very difficult battles with boosted mini-bosses. Completing these guild missions gets you in-game currency and items, but also increases your hunter rank. For every one hundred levels of rank, you get a special item from the guild. RoF also does not have a deep economy even though you do have shops that provide basic equipment. The vast majority of your equipment comes from crafting, whose parts come from quests, broken down loot, or loot itself. You can customize your weapons any way you desire, though, the in-game weapon does not change in appearance, only the blueprint does. By themselves, the weapons don't do much damage, requiring you to customize them. This means that acquiring new weapons is more about the connection points and possible upgrades, rather than raw damage potential. You cannot simply add whatever part you desire to a gun since they have connection points which can restrict you to certain add-ons. Initially, you must take into consideration a weapon's weight as your characters can only equip so much, but this becomes less important as the game progresses. Another interesting, and somewhat superfluous, aspect is the degree in which you can customize your character's appearance. Each character has a wardrobe, which can be expanded at a boutique or exploring, each outfit style, called "A" and "B", has eight or so sections with items you can customize, from shirts, to pants, to holsters, to boots, even hair and eye color can be customized. So, if you want Leanne to run around Basel wearing a French maid's outfit, you can do it. If you want Zephyr to wear a reindeer costume, you've got it, too. If you want Vashyron to look like a gun slinging biker with all leather, black hair, and futuristic sunglasses, you've got that as well. Costumes don't impart any gameplay advantages, but watching Leanne dressed up as one of Santa's helpers tossing Molotov Cocktails in battle, is priceless.
Combat System: Normally, I would include this in the gameplay section, but, due to the complexity, this warrants its own section. Random encounters, compressed dungeon maps (These are dungeon's without any hexes but interconnected battle arenas), and standard dungeon encounters are where battles take place. For the majority of the game, you have all three characters active at once and the battle occurs in an arena environment. Anyone who has played Valkyria Chronicles would get the system very quickly as it shares many of the same elements. Each character is equipped with some sort of gun, either a hand gun or machine gun, along with an equipment case, such as a grenade box or first aid kit. Machine guns cause massive scratch damage in many situations, but cannot outright kill an enemy. Hand guns cause minor direct damage while converting scratch damage into direct damage. Scratch damage heals over time but direct damage is permanent. Therefore, in most battles, you should send a machinegun holder out to cause scratch damage on an enemy one turn, followed by a handgun holder the next. A magazine case is available for the machine gun and can cause status effects on an enemy. This becomes increasingly irrelevant as your characters are able to dual wield later in the game. Both grenades and handguns can cause gauge breakage to an enemy, more on that later. During battle, enemies can only perform actions when you do, thus you can go slow and plan out an attack. To perform an action, your character must "charge" their attack. The speed at which a charge happens is determined by the weapon, it's add-ons, and distance from an enemy. As the weapon charges, the damage potential increases exponentially and the possibility of combat skills activating increases, which are obtained during level up, while a timer decreases. The timer indicates the amount of time a character has during a given turn, if they aren't doing anything or stop charging a weapon, the timer, and all other battlefield activity stops. The enemy can interrupt your charge by firing at you, and you can do the same, however, it seems as though you stopping an enemy from charging their weapon is more rare. At the bottom of the screen, you have the hero gauge, which can be expanded by defeating bosses or exploring the map. The hero gauge is vital, it allows you to perform hero actions and recover if your character is overwhelmed by scratch damage. Hero actions are similar to standard attacks with a few exceptions. First, you are entirely invincible and uninterruptable. Second, time slows down while the charge rate increases. You do have a maximum amount of charge you can have, which is tied to your level in a given weapon, but it is very possible to have two or more attacks that are fully maxed out on charge. Third, you can jump over an enemy or run past them. Some enemies have protective body armor that protects their main hit point (HP) gauge, firing from the ground hits only the armor facing the character while airborne attacks hit all armor equally. From the ground, it is also possible to launch the enemy into the air and juggle them, canceling their turn but also opening up the possibility of a bonus shot which removes the restriction on the amount of charge you can have and vastly increases the amount of loot an enemy drops. While the enemy is in the air, you can jump up from the ground and join them. If you fire your weapon from a higher altitude, you can cause a "Smackdown" which is similar to spiking an American football. Performing a smackdown increases the amount of loot they drop and dazes them for a few moments. The hero gauge will also "revive" a character that has taken too much scratch damage. If one of your characters is saturated with this type of damage, the hero gauge breaks in half, you lose half of the remaining colored bezels on the gauge, and fragments of it scatter on the battlefield. Those fragments can be reacquired after the battle or during the battle. However, if the enemy obtains a bezel shard, they recover hit points. If you really mess up and the hero gauge breaks again, or you don't have any colored bezels remaining, you enter a critical condition. During this state all damage done to your squad increases, the charge rate decreases, and all damage is direct HP damage. If you lose all your HP (Hit points), it is game over. You can escape from battle or pay a fee and retry, but if you escape, you leave the battlefield and remain in the condition in which you left it until you arrive at your base or an energy station. If you choose to retry, you pay a fee and you restart the battle from the beginning in the same exact condition in which you entered it originally. This is important to remember since you cannot simply leave a compressed dungeon map without using a special item. This means that if you are deep in a dungeon without an escape hex, heavily damaged, and try to leave, you are going to have problems returning to the entrance since most enemies respawn.
Not all enemy units are equal in importance during battle. In some fights, there is also an enemy leader. If you take out this leader, you win the battle, however, some battles have no leader, necessitating an enemy-by-enemy elimination. Boss fights can also be tricky in that some are leaders with support units. These units can not only cause you harm, but automatically respawn. Hero actions are vital, you can cause an immense amount of damage in a very short time, ending the battle that much sooner. To recover hero gauge bezels expended from hero actions or a broken gauge, you can eliminate enemies or their armor. Each time you do this, a bezel is filled back in. Breaking an enemy's gauge causes their body, or their armor's, hit point gauge to fracture. To the game, a fractured gauge is treated like a full gauge. Therefore, if you fracture an enemy's gauge into four parts, you not only stun the enemy, but increase the number of bezels you can fill to four or potentially more. If your machine gunner completely loads the fractured HP gauge with scratch damage and a handgun or grenade causes the gauge to fully deplete, breaking the armor or defeating the enemy, you now have four filled bezels returned instead of just one. Hero actions can are plotted in straight lines, as you race to the end point, you are able to perform actions. You can also perform "tri-attacks", using resonance points obtained during hero actions. These resonance points are gathered by plotting, and completing, at least to the point of the intersection, a hero action passing between two other characters. During a hero action, a triangular pattern is displayed on the battlefield showing you the path each character will take. While performing a tri-attack, each character will perform an attack, in sequence, while running around the triangle. Like all attacks, you have to charge a tri-attack, however, the charging process for each character happens simultaneously. Most battlefields have walls and bunkers you can hide behind, along with exploding barrels and treasure containers. The leveling system in this game is also unique. You gain one point of experience for every point of damage you cause with a weapon. Each weapon class has an amount of experience it can obtain and the overall level of a character is determined by adding all three weapon class levels together. Therefore, if you have a level 30 in handguns, 30 in machine guns, and 30 in grenades, you have a level 90 character. After every four or five levels in a given weapon, you are granted a skill associated with that weapon. That skill compounds on top of any other skill you might have with that weapon and there is a chance for the skill to activate when you charge an attack during battle. Due to the leveling system, you should switch around weapons to ensure your characters have as many levels as possible. If this sounds complex, it is. This is one of the most complex battle systems I have ever encountered with an RPG. You must learn its nuances or you will become frustrated very quickly.
Misc.: Having finished Final Fantasy XIII, I started looking for a new RPG to play, and found Resonance of Fate. This game may not appeal to all players or sale very well, especially since it is cursed with the worst release date in history, between Final Fantasy XIII and God of War 3, but it is certainly worth a look for gamers who love RPG's or a very complex battle mechanic. At first, I was put off by the complexity, and thus, the perceived difficulty, of the game, but as I spent more time with it, I began to appreciate the title more and more. Sure, the game is brutal, but fair, and the story is jarringly split, but the way it pulls everything together is fascinating. The graphics are very nice, though, after playing Final Fantasy XIII on the PS3 in 1080p glory (That's what it says on the back of the box) and Resonance of Fate in 720p, this game doesn't look as good, but it has an interesting and highly detailed steam punk art style. The story is a little generic and presented in a series of vignettes, but the humor and quirkiness of it make it a joy to watch. Audio is also fantastic. The voice acting, with the main characters anyway, is top-notch with Nathan Drake, Desmond Miles, err... Nolan North providing the voice of Vashyron. Musically, the game is all orchestral with the exception of some dungeons using rock. I intend to by the soundtrack as the music really is that good. There are a few stumbling points with Resonance of Fate. For one, collision detection isn't great in some battlefields. For instance, if I plot a hero action over a mechanical enemy and I jump, I may have several feet of clearance between the top of the enemy and my character, but I will still end up hitting an invisible wall, in mid air and falling, stunned, in front of the enemy. I may even plot a hero action all the way to the other side of the battlefield and hit the wall on the other side, even though the path indicated I would not be going over the wall at all. Same thing with bunkers, you need quite a bit of clearance to get over them. If you miss and fall, your hero action is terminated and you're stunned, totally vulnerable. During battles, you and the enemy have audio sprites and sayings, but there were a limited number recorded so it is commonplace to hear the same line spoken over and over again in the same battle. Some of these lines from the enemies are very irritating, like the 1920's sounding gangster saying how dangerous he is or the gang member who says a line about how strong he is but in a valley boy accent (Think valley girl but from a guy) or the overly synthesized deep bass of a mechanical enemy saying he's going to kick my a**. While doing random encounters trying to get a certain number of green colored hexes, this became maddening and I muted the television. This is a multiplatform title developed mainly for the Xbox 360, as denoted by the 720p on the box, so much of the PS3's power isn't utilized though the game runs well. In terms of trophies, this game favors completion more than repetition with the trophies being easier than Final Fantasy XIII's. The vast majority of trophies are earned through simply playing the game or exploring every nook of Basel, but there are some that are repetitive. The trophy that comes to mind is the one where you have to gain stars in all 50 arena ranks. Each rank has ten battles, so you must fight 500 battles to earn that trophy, which is very labor intensive and moderately aggravating if you wait until just before the final boss to do it. Think about it, if you play the game through twice, which is necessary to earn a trophy, and most of the enemies in the arena are much weaker than you, the process can become tedious, fast. If you are going for platinum, go up to level 25 in the arena during your first play though doing one or two ranks per chapter, then finish it off during your next playthrough. Overall, this was a great game, but it is not a Final Fantasy killer with story, nor is it a Grandia with a battle system. This game took about 60 hours to complete the first time and I project about the same for the second playthrough as the arena and the high-level map of Neverland will take a while to get through. Resonance of Fate is an excellent choice for patient gamers who thrive on stats and strategy over fast reflex action.Get more detail about
Resonance of Fate.
