Is there any RPG vision of the future where earth is still a good place to live?
It seems these days, the J in JRPG stands for Jaded. Well, 2010 is a good year for you – Squeenix have been tinkering with the traditional Final Fantasy formula to appeal to a wider audience, and now Tri-Ace have taken their turn and the result is an amazing achievement that deserves your attention, no matter how jaded you are.
Yeah ok, the premise is familiar. Thanks to environmental havoc on earth, it’s no longer inhabitable, and humanity is at the brink of extinction. Shame on you! You should have used rechargeable batteries in your controller. Meanwhile, those that survived have built a huge clockwork tower called Basel, capable of housing the remaining humans, purifying the conditions for the inhabitants, and also cleaning up the earth. Pretty efficient really, except that of course it’s all falling apart. Things are breaking down, energy sources are dwindling and entire sections of the tower are unusable. Add to that a top-heavy hierarchy (literally, in this case), and the evolution of monsters, and you have a setting worthy of almost any RPG.
- The Tower of Basel
Life is reasonably simple. You have the upper class at the top of the tower, pontificating and ruling, the lower class at the bottom, suffering. The middle class has given rise to hunter groups, who do all the running around for pretty much everyone. Your team, as members of the middle class, do all the work (naturally). You control a trio of characters who seem to be standard RPG fare on first glance: Vashyron – the macho confident leader with a mild chauvinist bent, Zephyr – the younger man with a sometimes angst-y view of the world, and Leanne (Reanbell in the Japanese version) – the kooky female character with deep secrets that you just KNOW are going to be responsible for destroying something major during the game. You’ll find though that your team are anything but the stereotypes they first appear to be. They’re actually quite likeable from the start, and as an oddball group you can really feel the chemistry and interaction between them, and it’s quite believable and charming. The people in your world all have their own interesting quirks too.
So this is your lot – running around doing seemingly unconnected jobs for the residents of Basel to make ends meet. It’s the usual “Go here, find this, kill that, deliver this” quest structure, but the missions are eclectic and varied, so it rarely gets boring.
- Even the world map is a Puzzle.
Only a small section of the tower is accessible to begin with – the tower’s 12 floors are each laid out in a hex-grid pattern, and you have to unlock them in a puzzle-cum-Tetris mechanic by finding or earning correct shapes and colours of energy hexes. It’s their way of stopping you from reaching areas of the game ahead of schedule, and it’s more fun and effective than just an invisible wall or a broken bridge, instead turning it into a game mechanic. However much fun it is, the setting, the characters, and even the story, all take a back seat to the real star of this game – the combat.
I’ll try and explain it as best I can – it’s ridiculously complicated to think about, but it works very intuitively when you’re actually playing. Firstly, everything is guns and grenades – this game is serious gun porn, and the number of upgrades and customisations you can find and purchase for your weapons are insane. You control your three heroes in real time, but can also queue up waypoint-runs (charges) through the battlefield, during which you can pick your targets, and attack or perform “hero moves”. Using these charge moves will cost you a hero point, shown as gems at the bottom of the screen.
There is strategy in these Charges – staying low will enable you to target specific parts of the enemy, or launch them into the air, which gives you a chance to trigger a “bonus shot” mechanic, or even jump over them in mid-air and “smack down” the enemy back to the ground, which earns you more items. Jumping over them on the ground will let you attack all parts of their body at once, which can get past some of their defenses. This is a must with one enemy that has an explosive barrel on its back – blow up the barrel early with a well-timed jump and it becomes much less of a threat, as well as causing splash damage to the enemies around it. However, item boxes or a badly placed hero nearby will also cop the explosion – there’s even an achievement for accidentally causing an explosion that hurts one of your group!
- The blue bar (top left) is scratch damage, not permanent, but one shot from a direct weapon will finish him off.
Your damage can either be grenade-based, scratch damage (machine guns) or direct damage (handguns). Scratch damage is only temporary damage, it recovers, but it also weakens the enemy. Follow it with direct damage to make the scratch-damage permanent – if you’ve witnessed the Final Fantasy 13 combat mechanic of using spells for fast damage, and commando attacks for lasting damage, it’s just like that. But where FF13 uses that and role-changing to completely define battle tactics, in Resonance of Fate it’s merely the starting point.
If your waypoint run passes between your comrades, you earn a resonance point – cue up 3 or more of these in a row and you can launch a “Tri-attack”, running in a triangle formed by your characters. Plan this well, with a few enemies inside the triangle, and use the scratch-then-direct mechanic to your advantage and you‚Äôll create a sliding, whirling, jumping dance of death around you. And it will look GOOD. The scratch damage mechanic affects you too, and if your character loses all their scratch damage, you lose a hero gem. These recharge in a few ways, including damaging or defeating enemies. Lose all of them though, and you enter a critical condition where you do less damage, and are so scared you can barely run. If you end up in this mode and you have more than one enemy left with full health, you can just about kiss any chance of victory goodbye.
You win your battles by defeating all the enemies, although some groups will have one or more “Leaders” who, if you defeat them, defeats everyone. They can be harder to kill though, so it becomes another consideration for your tactics. Losing is easy – there no such thing as resurrection in this game. If one of your three characters dies during battle, it’s game over. No “phoenix down” here. Add environmental concerns such as explosive barrels, and walls and platforms you can use for cover and elevation, and elemental weaknesses and resistances for all your enemies, and you have a massive toolset of strategy and a deeply complex combat system.
- Two hero points left – do I use one to charge or save them for finishing enemies?
And you will need all of these tools, and a great deal of cunning to get past this game. The battles are punishing – there’s no easy way to win in any case, no cheesy tactics. The game never cheats either, but you will lose, and lose often. The tutorial, which isn’t forced on you but you have to go and discover, only scratches the bare mechanics of battle – it would have been good to see it fleshed out with some basic tactics. At least you can retry any battle for a small amount of your hard earned Rubies (the game’s currency), so you can retry with new tactics as often as you can afford, which is probably the best way to learn in this game, alongside a gaming arena which lets you practice your battle tactics without fear of a Game Over, and will help you level your characters and earn you money and items. Don’t worry; I haven’t spoiled the combat for you. Knowing all of this is the only way to begin truly playing the game; I just wish I’d had all this more clearly explained to ME before I’d started.
Overall, the combat is spectacularly stylish – your characters will run and jump, flip, perform multiple mid-air attacks with ease, and land like cats; it’s a rush to play, and feels like being in The Matrix, but directed by John Woo. Anyway, let’s move on. Graphically, I’m going to be controversial – I’ve seen lots of negative press on the graphics, but I loved the way it looked and felt. When I started, I thought they’d used 3-D models on pre-rendered screens… until I moved my character and the entire world moved with the camera. Most impressive – there is a “grainy” feel to the textures that, combined with newer graphics techniques, makes the world feel more believable – things are moving, people are going about their day. It’s technological, industrial and clockwork, but it still feels alive. It reminds me of the game Anachronox – if you don’t remember it go and check it out, it’s one of the best games no-one played.
The audio, to my ears, is perfect because I didn’t notice it. The background sounds of the various locations around Basel are subtle and beautifully integrated; they really help bring the world to life. The music doesn’t get in the way but accentuates the action perfectly, especially when you want to feel like a badass, and I have to admit I’ve been listening to the soundtrack on my PMP a fair bit. They’ve also seen fit to include both English and Japanese dialogue, with optional subtitles – I wish more Japanese games would do this. Oh, one other point of interest – I’ve never seen an RPG offer so much customisation of your character – you can change their clothes their hair colour, even the colour of their eyes through dye kits and so on that you can either purchase, or randomly find by defeating what I assume are the more fashion-conscious enemies. It all affects the in-game models, and some of the outfits are beautifully detailed.
- “How Cool am I”
The combat is fantastic and deep and never gets old, the characters are fun and believable thanks to stellar voice acting, and the audio is seamlessly integrated and complimentary. That said it has a steep learning curve. The tutorials will help you with basic functions, but really should have been fleshed-out more. Also, the “dungeons” rarely stray from the same linear setup, a few deviations for treasure but mostly a straight run.
Tri-Ace have done something interesting here – created a JRPG that feels decidedly less “J”, with generous helpings of style, humour and emotion. Sure, there is Japanese sensibility to the design and the story, but the grind, which is still in there sometimes, just doesn’t get old – it’s seriously fun. You will feel like a badass in a Hong Kong Gun-Fu movie. And every time you beat a particularly tricky group of enemies, you’ll feel like you’ve earned it. Okay, so the battle environments and dungeons get a bit “samey” but you’ll be having so much fun, you just won’t care.
Resonance Of Fate – Game Detail Page
*Originally written by David Alexandrou (aka Ohverture)
