Resonance of Fate Review

Resonance of Fate

Intro

Now before you even press the start button, sit back and enjoy two masterfully rendered videos, both will only play at this time and hold valuable plot that you will need to know. After watching both videos and starting a new game you will see another beautiful video which you will have to ignore one little thing about because it is never explained in the entire plotline.

Set in a steam punk styled earth, the game places you in the massive tower Chandelier and in control of Vashyron, Zephyr and Leanne. These three are mercenaries doing jobs for the highest bidder but they are mercenaries with morals too. Vashyron is the 36 year old cool calm and collected “leader” of the group but he does have a comedic side that you will see quite often in the earlier half of the game. Zephyr is the 17 year old emotional one of the group, easily angered, overprotective and a tragic past based around religion. Leanne is 18 and the mother/sister of the two boys, she is innocent and sweet, her past is what the story pivots upon. 

For most of the game your main goal will be to perform tasks that introduce you to the colorful characters of chandeliers upper class. Ranging from the insane artist to the wise man, they all give you tasks to fulfill although these are not the only tasks available. You will also be given side quests, I recommend doing these as you get rare items and equipment that will help you later on.

Map

When you first step onto the world map you will notice how restricted you are at first, don’t worry you are only on one of 9+ levels of hexagonal spaced fun. You are stopped from moving around at your leisure by downed sections of chandelier which can fixed with hexagons that can be gained from battling the various monsters that appear when walking on dangerous hexagons. There are safe sections that you can travel if you want to stay out of battle but usually you won’t bother unless you are almost dead.

Guns/Weapons

Your weaponry consists of handguns, machine guns and grenades. Machine guns deal scratch damage, scratch damage is temporary damage, Handguns are your direct damage dealers and also turn scratch damage into actual damage, and Grenades are the Tacticians weapons of choice. You will start with one machine gun and two handgun and a few grenades, ignore the grenades and go with a gun each.

Now Resonance of Fate has a nice little addition to its weapon system, customization. Now, the guns are the only ones subject to this new feature as they don’t seem to require ammo and won’t explode after use. Customization allows you to add extra barrels, hand grips, sights and larger clips making your guns faster and stronger.  This feature is by far the best part of Resonance of Fate usually taking up and hour or two of your time.

In the later stages of the game this feature will make a huge difference, usually between victory and defeat, especially if you want to defeat the last boss or the hardest boss in the game.

Combat

If you have ever played Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter then you’ll recognise elements of the same system used. Each character has a set distance they can move but as you move the enemies can move too, or attack. Now the tutorial for this game takes a long time and the instructions are hard to read, but it will teach you everything you need to know, and I mean everything. You will learn the basics as well as special moves, all in preparation for the challenging battles ahead. Now don’t get deterred by the tutorial, it is long and it is hard to understand but the game is so much better.

Now when you first enter a battle you’ll notice that there will be a collection of gem like objects at the base of your screen, these are your bezel. These gems are critical to your success at this game, they are used for an interesting ability that I like to call “Run and Gun”.  To use this, you first press the X button then you move the cursor to where you wish to move and press the X button again. Your character will start to run (and can even jump by pressing the X again) this will allow you to attack multiple times, instead of standing still and only being allowed to attack once, this move uses one bezel so don’t run out or you’ll enter critical mode.

You will find bezel shards in your travels that will increase the total amount of bezel you can hold but if you do run out of bezel in battle your characters will become helpless balls of fear and will be subject to constant direct damage instead of scratch damage. You can get more during battle by shooting off the enemies armour, for every piece of armour you shoot off you get a bezel.

The secret to winning is to level up, plan and conserve bezels.

Enemies

The enemies you fight will range from humans, goblins, towering fortresses monsters with trucks for masks to dolls with six arms loaded with weapons. All of these enemies are incapable fo dealing you direct damage but they do scratch damage this damage is not actual damage but if they manage to do enough scratch damage to you, you will drop almost all of your bezels.

Leveling up

When you look at your menu screen you will see that under each characters basic stats is three pictures, of a handgun, machine and a grenade and next to each one a level. This is how you level up, your final level is decided by the sum of these three levels. You get experience for the damage you deal to an enemy e.g. You deal 500 scratch damage to an enemy with your machinegun, your machine gun skill will get 500 experience. If a handgun then hits the enemy doing 500 damage (thanks to the scratch damage) it’s skill will get 500 experience as well and so on.

Good system, but the grenades will take some time to level it up and will be a royal pain to fins at the beginning.

Characterization

Without giving too much away, the characters are very well characterised. The three characters act like a group of friends instead of three people putting up with each other for the sake of something else. They react as a normal person would to any situation, someone they know well dies protecting one of them, they cry for them, instead of walking the other way without even giving a crap. Or someone tells them something they didn’t know about themself, they don’t curl up into a ball, or go crazy (eg. Sephiroth from FF7) they find them and make them answer all of their questions.

Really what would you do in those kinds of situations?

Extras

There is a dress up option available, with new clothes to be found all over Chandelier and to be bought in the clothes store. These, like most games are just to change the look of your character but be warned they don’t all look good.

The hardest dungeon that you will face will only be accessible after you have defeated the 2^nd and 3^rd final bosses. You will get the items required after defeating each one. Beware though I recommend being level 100 at least to take it on, even then being level 150 is still a challenge.

After you finish the game there is an option to play on a harder difficulty but why would you bother, there are no achievements for it. You’d be better starting again and keeping your levels and hard earned equipment.

Problems

The combat targeting system does need a little tweaking due to the ability to lose control of it at times. Some story plots were never explained but they were just an annoyance and some of the battles are almost impossible unless you are either overpowered or are very good at planning. The clothes needed to be better, most likely through a paint pallet that you could change the colours through.

Overview

All round it’s a well made game with a new and interesting combat system, characters that you can relate to, comedy and a range of enemies and customisation options for you to exploit. Although the end of the game does make you hope for sequel but also hope they don’t screw it up like so many other sequels.

Story: 8/10 (Well put together with only a few plot holes)

Characters: 8/10 (Understandable, believable and diverse in their personalities)

Battle: 8/10 (just try not to change targets as much during a “Run and Gun”)

Weapons: 9/10 (There is so much you can do with the customisation  feature that it’s what I easily spent an hour doing... per gun)

Levelling system: 9/10 (You have to be diverse to be strong)

Graphics: 10/10 (beautiful and stunning)

Extras: 6/10 (It really needed more)

Overall: 8/10 (worth it for the hundreds of hours you can put into it) 

Edit: Resonance of Fate is available on the PS3 and Xbox 360... not sure about computer though.