Final Fantasy Resonance PS5 Review. Square Enix has found something special. They’re not only working on great, fully fledged titles. They’ve found a great way to bring back and remaster older titles or disconnected mobile games. Final Fantasy Resonance is a single-player restoration of Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius, a mobile Final Fantasy Gacha game with no gacha, plus a streamlined story and presentation that makes it feel like a brand-new Final Fantasy game for everyone to enjoy.
Final Fantasy Resonance PS5 Review
A Familiar Story
Resonance tells the story of Rain and Lasswell, two knights of the Kingdom of Grandshelt. The King orders Rain and Lasswell to investigate disturbances at the Earth Crystal Shrine. They discover a powerful enemy who calls himself Umbra, leader of the Sworn Six of Paladia. Umbra easily overpowers Rain and Lasswell, then sets out to destroy the Earth Crystal and lay siege to the Castle of Grandshelt.
Rain and Lasswell are then sent on a quest to protect the Water, Wind, and Fire crystals before the Sworn Six destroys them. The game’s story is presented much like the SNES and NES Final Fantasy games, in the sense an evil group is looking to destroy the world, and a band of heroes takes it upon themselves to stop them.
The difference with Resonance is that something more is going on in the background. The Sworn Six aren’t just destroying the crystals to destroy the world; their reasoning remains a mystery for most of the game, but it drops hints that everything Rain and Laswell know about the world is a lie.
Great and Meaningful Side-Quests
The overall story has a good mystery, but those main points are few and far between. You spend a lot of time solving problems on each continent and in each region you visit. The good news is that almost all the issues link to the Sworn Six and their plans.
One of the best aspect of the game’s storytelling are its side quests. Every side quest is meaningful, well thought out, and well written. One quest has you searching for a Robin Hood-like figure who steals from the rich and gives to an orphanage. Another quest has you trying to figure out a mystery about a Phantom Train that appears at an abandoned train station.
Completing these quests is almost always rewarding, as you can earn new Summons for battle, or even new character Visions.
Plenty of Nostalgia
Visions are what the main attraction some players may notice about Resonance. You can acquire heroes from past Final Fantasy games and use them in battle. Cloud, Noctis, and Tidus are just a few, but you can expect to recruit the main hero from every mainline Final Fantasy title.
Earlier in the game, you acquire these characters at a breakneck speed by simply visiting Vision Shrines on the world map to acquire them. Later on, you find out some require a little more effort, like defeating them in challenging boss fights or completing specific side quests.
Each party member can equip a Vision. Each Vision provides unique attacks, spells, and passive bonuses. Each Vision is also attached to a Role: Commando, Medic, Breaker, Sentinel, Saboteur, and Synergist. Each role determines the kind of abilities that Vision will have.
A Medic focuses on healing spells and keeping the party alive, while a Commando focuses on DPS and high-damage skills. Your active party also has a permanent role assigned to them. The strategy comes in when you mix and match characters with Visions. A Commando like Rain can have a Medic Vision, turning him into a DPS healer. Or equip another Commando Vision and have Rain become an absolute DPS berserker.
Lots of Abilities And Tactics To Consider
The Visions come with a set of abilities and have their own leveling system. When they reach level 9, that Vision is maxed out for the character they were assigned to and can be used to level up again on another character. This matters because you want to unlock as many Ability Points and Skills as possible.
When a Vision levels up, they unlock AP abilities and stat boosts. The more AP points you earn from maxing a Vision assigned to you, the more you can spend on abilities from that Vision. These range from new attacks to helpful passive abilities, like counterattacking an enemy when a magic attack hits you.
Each ability costs a different number of points, so you can’t equip them all; you have to choose the ones that work best for the character.
Strategic and Exciting Combat
Combat is a blast. The game focuses on staggering your opponent and then unleashing powerful Vision attacks. Enemies have a stagger gauge and a health bar. You can chip away at their health or focus on staggering them, leaving them wide open to attacks while negating their defensive stats. Enemies also have weaknesses and strengths. Exploiting an enemy’s weakness makes it much easier to stagger them.
Each attack you perform has bars that show how much health damage and stagger damage it deals. You can even increase your stagger damage with spells and equipment.
The game encourages you to switch targets once you stagger one. This is because the character who staggers an enemy gets an extra turn after everyone else’s rotation. If all enemies are staggered, everyone automatically gets a second attack and an ultimate Vision attack.
Once you pull off all secondary attacks, you can unleash a cool Vision attack using one of the four Visions attached to a party member. These unique animations feature some pretty impressive CG FMVs.
Lots To Explore In Small Bites
Exploration is also quite enjoyable, though short-lived. The world map looks small at first glance, but I found myself exploring it for a long time. Plenty of dungeons and Vision temples are worth finding, but you don’t spend much time in them.
The Dungeons are very short, and most of them can be cleared in about five minutes. Chests are easy to find, and there aren’t many hidden paths or rooms to discover. It’s a shame, as dungeon exploration has always been a big part of Final Fantasy. Almost all objectives appear on the map, and side quests are easy to track down.
Once you’ve discovered a location, you can fast travel there, which helps tremendously when a side quest leads you back to content you’ve already explored.
The game’s battles are also random, but they appear very frequently. The game’s minimap also pulses when you are getting close to an encounter, giving you plenty of time to prepare if you need to.
Fantastic HD-2D Visuals With Great Voice Work
Visually, the game is a treat. The Brave Exvius pixel art style faithfully captures the mobile game and instantly takes me back to the SNES days of Final Fantasy, or even the HD-2D look of the Dragon Quest I-III Remakes.
The pixel art packs plenty of detail into the environments and towns, and the characters boast fantastic cutscene animations. Cutscenes blend CG and pixel art; it’s a unique take to see a big airship battle with pixelated airships against a fully CG background.
The game’s soundtrack isn’t as memorable as past Final Fantasy titles, but it still has all the catch tunes you would expect. The chocobo theme, the victory song, and even the battle music echo past titles. Nothing truly stands out. On the plus side, the voice acting is fantastic, and it appears throughout the game’s forty-hour playtime.
Final Fantasy Resonence is a spin-off, but it feels like a numbered title. It borrows a lot from past entries in the franchise but has refreshing mechanics that keep you engaged. Its story is familiar but well told, and its combat is entertaining. It’s a shame that exploration and dungeon crawling are so limited and short, and the soundtrack doesn’t draw you in as much as the fantastic voice cast.
Final Fantasy Resonance releases on October 22, 2026, on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.
Review Code kindly provided by PR.