At first I found it difficult to even want to try out Resonance of Fate. The reviews of the game weren't exactly glowing. The combat, being praised and maligned at the same time, just looked awful on various YouTube videos I had seen. I wasn't seeing the comparisons to Valkyria Chronicles or the "amazing" depth, all I saw was a disjointed, undecipherable mess. Despite this, a couple of reviews piqued my interest, and I traded in a couple games I enjoyed, but will never play again. For a grand total of 63 cents, Resonance of Fate found its way into my PS3.
The combat is all that's advertised. It's just outstanding. This may be one of the better if not best JRPG combat systems I've played. It's tactical and unforgiving. There are no training wheels and no tutorial unless you go find it (it's in the arena). Even then, all you're given is a screen or two of hard to understand text and dropped into a battle to try it out. It's a combination of turn based and real time, with a sort-of bullet time system. If you chose to manually move, your enemies move at the same time. It's like Valkyria Chronicles except that the enemy is having their same turn while you do yours. Or you can layout a hero attack, which is laying out a line of movement on the battle area. Commencing the hero attack, you'll charge in your laid out path firing and jumping in a Matrix/Equilibrium bullet ballet. The catch is that you have a gauge that determines how often you can do the hero actions, which is replenished through kills and other battle field successes and depleted with each hero action or when your HP is reduced to zero. If your hero gauge is reduced to zero, you're going to likely get killed and get a game over screen (this will happen a lot). This is a terribly difficult system to describe and I haven't even touched upon cover, scratch v. direct damage, location damage, boss fights, tri-attacks, etc etc.
There's a lot more that could be said about various other systems present in this game, including the upgrade system, leveling, and world map. In order to keep this short, I'll just say they're somewhat unique or borrow in interesting ways from other games.
As much as the combat drops you in with no parachute, so does the plot. I'm at the end of chapter 2 and I really still can't understand the point of what I'm doing. You're some sort of Scooby team doing various good deeds all over a charming dystopian tower system, where the rich live up at the top so they can presumably live happy knowing their excrement literally falls on the poor. A big future reveal seems to be telegraphed at this point, but we'll see. Your team is composed of a bad ass with mysterious church ties; a pretty, brooding, heroic, cliché teenage boy; and a finally your token looks-kind-of-Asian-and-white-at-the-same-time (see FFXIII's Lightning) girl who was saved by emo boy during the opening cinematic. The interplay between the party during various cut scenes is very charming and well done, not at all lacking warmth or soul like FFXIII. The whole presentation so far seems to be a little close to the Shadow Hearts series where you can see bits of Japanese and anime influences popping up but not overwhelmingly so. In the same vein, it's serious, but doesn't take it self seriously at all and from bits I've seen around the internet, it'll get a bit silly in parts.
The game doesn't look great. Some parts look pretty decent, but various animations seem rather low quality and more at home on last generation's platforms (the stock running animation is just BAD). This is somewhat vexing because the hero action animations are so fluid. The biggest contributor to the visual malaise is the setting, which comes in the standard dystopian color palette of brown/grey. There is, however, a robust dress-up system.
Despite it's quirks and budget presentation, this is a truly engrossing game. I find it difficult to pull myself away for long. There's been a string of misses when it comes to JRPGs on the PS3/360, so it's finally nice to have FFXIII and Resonance of Fate come out so close together.
If you like JRPGs, you owe it to yourself to pick this up. Those that don't like or are unfamiliar to the genre should probably avoid. This one's for not for you.
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