Resonance of Fate: Review

Familiar with the Star Ocean series? Star Ocean 4: International must have caught your attention recently, I bet. tri-Ace, known for their uniqueness and awesome battle systems, are of course, the guys who brought Star Ocean and Radiata Stories into your lives, have now paired up with Sega as their publisher for their new RPG, Resonance of Fate (known in Japan as End of Eternity)!

In the distant future, Earth is in peril due to drastic environment change. Poisonous gases of unknown source have cloaked the planet and it resulted in the near extinction of mankind because they could not adapt to the change. The surviving humans built a gigantic device called Basel, an environment purifier buried deep in the ground, which cleanses the air in the surrounding land.

The protagonists, Vashryon, Leanne and Zephyr are Hunters – hired mercenaries willing to do whatever it takes to earn more cash for a living. The story revolves around these Hunters and their adventures…

Loved

Lolstory: A good thing about the game’s story is that it moves in a different “direction” than most other game stories. It starts out with a dramatically epic moment where Zephyr, a hunter, saves a girl, Leanne, who was destined to die.
Why did it happen? What happens next?

You wouldn’t find out until later (and I really mean later) in the game. The game really starts in Vashryon’s house, where he lives with Leanne and Zephyr. The opening cutscene event was Leanne and Zephyr’s first encounter and when the game starts, they’re living together?  What gives?!

The first half of the game is just a load of unserious, “get-to-know-the-characters” kind of thing. You would definitely be full of questions but don’t worry about them just yet, they will be answered in due course. Of course, there are some story elements that contribute to the “big picture” but apart from those little things, you’d mainly be getting used to each protagonist’s personality and such. Fortunately, it gets a whole lot more serious after the halfway mark and you finally get to know why the introductory cutscene happened and each protagonist’s past and stuff.

It’s pretty refreshing to experience a different way of storytelling rather than the usual linear story telling in the recent games. Though I like the setting of the story, there really isn’t much to say about it other than it being “different” While the whole story is pretty unique; its execution is typical of a JRPG, although it does have its own strong points. The humour, paired with the seriousness pulls your attention and leaves you wanting to know more.

One great thing about the story is also that it isn’t all about “saving the world” like every single RPG we see nowadays. The focus of it is more on characters’ personal goals. This game’s story requires a fair amount of brain power to process and understand so prepare yourself!

Oh, and just a heads up, once you’re on the game’s MAIN MENU (where you can continue/load etc), wait a little and a cutscene will play. Note that this scene is different from the one that shows when you first run the game. It’ll help answer some things you might be wondering.

Beauty-FULL: As compared to the most recent graphic monster FFXIII, Resonance of Fate doesn’t even come close to being as gorgeous but nonetheless, the graphics are pretty awesome. Character designs are not too shabby and from what I’ve read, a whole load of effort was put into making characters’ hair, especially Leanne’s, which looks stunning. Other designs like the world of Basel and its monsters are also stunning.

Have I mentioned that battles are cinematic? You’d be watching your characters’ fancy shooting throughout the battle. Matrix-like actions occasionally come by (although not as awesome as the “real” thing) but you get my drift.

Let’s play dress-up: Don’t like Leanne’s hair colour? Sick of ugly default clothes? Fear not!

One of the best things about this game is that you can buy clothes and accessories for your characters! Anything changed will be immediately reflected in the game. Although things like gloves, hair bands and other small accessories are not really noticeable, they do change. These changes apply in every cutscene as well so that’s definitely a plus. Spending “cash” on clothes would actually be worth it if you get to see what you bought all the time.

Fortunately for us guys playing the game, we get to dress Leanne up.
You’re in for a treat if you like p______, guys! Keep in mind to pay more!
So yeah, who cares about Vashryon and Zephyr, right?

Weapons, levels, equipments: Resonance of Fate’s levelling system is loosely based on statistics. The level system itself is very different from your typical RPG. There are 3 types of weapons, Handgun, Machine Gun and Throwing Weapon (grenades…). As you use each type of weapon, the level of that weapon type will increase. A character’s total level is the addition of all 3 weapon type’s levels. With each level gained, your character gets more HP and more “weight capacity”. Weight capacity is how much weight a character can carry around with him. Each piece of equipment has a weight value and a character can only carry weights of up to the character’s weight capacity. Oh, this also means that…

THE GAME HAS NEITHER MAGIC NOR SWORDS.

This brings us to equipments. Your main stats are highly based on the weapon(s) you have equipped. You can also equip additional accessories which gives you more resistance to physical damage, status immunity and the likes. Your weapons are the key to your SURVIVAL.

You can customize your weapons by adding scopes, bullet magazines and such. These customization parts adds more weight to the gun they’re attached to while improving them. This is a great feature to the game as you’ll find yourself customizing your gun for at least a half hour each time; trying to find better combinations, getting a suitable weight for your weapon and such which can be really fun! Characters can also dual-wield weapon but keep the weight capacity in mind! You don’t want to spend so much cash on another gun and not be able to use it!

Confuzzle puzzle: The world map of Resonance of Fate is basically Basel as a whole. Elevators take you to different levels of Basel where there are other towns and locations of interest. Your path to these places however, is blocked. You have to create your own path to these places. The world map has some sort of a puzzle-like system where the World Map needs to be filled in with energy hexes. You can rotate these hexes and place them down on “locked” hexagons, unlocking them, so you can move on that hexagon. Thinking that it’s pretty simple?

Well, not when the hexes you get have different colours, shapes and sizes! Coloured hexes are your “barriers” that stop you from going somewhere you aren’t supposed to (yet). As you progress through the story, monsters you meet might drop coloured hexes but your means of going past “a certain coloured barrier” are the people who hired you for a mission, be it story or optional. Non-coloured hexes are easily, and mostly, obtainable from various (almost every) monster you randomly meet.

Neutral

Battle system: The greatest pro and the greatest con of the game is definitely the battle system.
This is by far the most epic battle system I’ve come across in my gaming life.
It’s also a really original system when compared to the typical RPG battle system.

The learning curve of the system is pretty steep but in-game tutorials and guides will get you through it with no problems, hopefully. I won’t be going into a detailed explanation of the whole battle system because it is one hell of a complicated system.

Although complicated, with the help of the tutorials and guides and maybe the Internet, you’ll get used to the system and realize that it isn’t really that complicated. Also, when you lose a battle, you get a game over screen BUT you have the choice to retry the battle at the cost of some money or load from a previously saved file. This is pretty cool since you wouldn’t have to go through the dungeon again or whatever as you usually do for other games.

As good as it sounds, you might find yourself stuck retrying a battle for a long, long time. Up till the point where you have no more money to spare and have to quit/re-load the game. So, be sure to save your game if your gut tells you that the next battle will be a tough one!

One thing I don’t really like about the system is how you change targets. It’s really hard to get the right target and not lose any charge time at all.

Another is that after say, your two hundredth battle, you’ll come to realize that the cinematics during battle are actually limited to a few fancy moves. You’re bound to notice the repetition of certain moves.

Finally, the party’s critical condition. This is when your party loses their cool and start panicking in battle when things go bad. Everything changes when you get into critical mode so avoid it! It’s almost always a sure-lose situation the moment you get into critical mode. I mean, why even have implement the mode if the chances of making a spectacular comeback is next to none?

Oh yeah, don’t go into your first battle without going through the tutorial.
It will not go well, trust me on this.

At your own pace, sir: The game progresses at any speed you want it to. You have the choice of when you want to proceed to the next chapter to advance the story. How useful is that? Well, each chapter in the game has the story mission and a couple of optional missions. If you decide to finish off the story mission early, you can choose to not proceed with the story to clear the optional ones.

The game tries to be time-friendly with a suspend save function implemented. This is so you don’t have to search for a save point to take a break. You can save almost anywhere, except during battles. Suspend saves are deleted when loaded though. Great for RPGs as us healthy men who do not have all the time in the world.

Unfortunately, as I said, the game tries to be time-friendly. Sure, the suspend function is great and all but you can’t save during battles and some battles can take quite some time to finish. This is especially so for the boss battles which could take you up to an hour (or more) to finish off.

Soundtrack: I liked it but really, there isn’t much to say about it.
Wasn’t spectacular or breath-taking or whatever but it didn’t suck either so…

Not so loved

Optional missions: As mentioned above, the game offers optional missions which can change the pace of the game and the player can gain more rewards doing the extra work. However, these optional missions are posted on a mission board by “a NPC” with a picture on it. Why, you ask?

After finding out the mission exists, you’ll have to  find the person in the picture to accept or finish the mission. Seriously, come on! At one point I was searching for some old fart for almost an hour before I gave up and just went on with the story.
I find the whole “find your mission” thing a real drag. Not to mention frustrating too.

Interactivity: NPC interactivity with the player is very minimal. Apart from the optional missions where they tell you what to do and all, NPCs are really insignificant. You can get through the game without talking to a single NPC at in your leisure time. Sure, they give you information about where things are and all but the interaction just isn’t there.

The upside is that NPCs literally talk when you initiate a conversation with them. What they say, however, has barely or no relation to whatever that appears on the textbox. For example, the NPC would be saying “Good morning!” but the text box would display something totally different! That’s pretty odd and funny if you ask me.

Rubies please: The currency of Basel is Rubies. It’s really, really hard to earn Rubies so every Ruby counts. Don’t go spending rubies on nonsense you don’t need. This beats the point of having a boutique that sells nice clothes and such because clothes cost a bomb! Believe it or not, a skirt costs more than a freaking gun.

Upgrading your weapon with more parts would be a smarter investment because clothes you buy  changes ONLY your appearance. You don’t get bonus defense points or anything else.

Biased

Translation: Weird wordings here and there and very liberal translations but if you’re playing with English voices (or in Japanese but have no knowledge of it) then it shouldn’t be a problem at all.

Gorgeous voice acting (Japanese): The voice acting is real convincing and I can’t help but go: “Hey, I’ve heard this voice before!” Some research has led me to results I was already expecting.

Voices are from several voice actors from the anime industry ; few of the more prominent ones being Ken Narita (Jeremiah Gottwald – Code Geass), Keiji Fujiwara(Takeshi – Sola) and Ai Orikasa (Ayame – Sakura Wars).

tl;dr

Resonance of Fate is unique and truly something original from the usual RPGs you see coming out from Japan. If you’re looking for something new, unrelated and different from the usual RPGs you’ve been seeing lately or if you really love GUNS, then this is just for you!

However, this game is not for the faint-hearted. The battle system is a very steep learning curve and the battles themselves can be real hard. Optional quests also require you to have some patience. The story although quite cliché, is pretty complicated and requires some thinking to make sense of it. These factors could lead to some frustration, followed by anger and finally, dropping the game. We wouldn’t want that now, would we?

Resonance of Fate steps so far out of the traditional RPG field that even the most experienced gamers will have to take a step out of their comfort zone and learn something new. I highly doubt casual or average gamers have what it takes to play this well but well, prove me wrong!

This is certainly a fine addition to the new generation RPG collection with its crisp graphics, soothing soundtrack, a unique and original battle system, and an interesting story and I’d recommend it to anyone who enjoys RPGs, wants to try something new and looking for a challenge.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 30th, 2010 at 9:46 pm and is categorised in Game Reviews.