Final Fantasy Resonance is just over a month away, and we had the chance to sit down with the game’s director, Hiroto Furuya, and producer, Keisuke Nakashima to discuss all things Resonance. We talked about Brave Exvius, design choices behind the game, and what they think are the essential components of a Final Fantasy game.
Check out our hands-on Final Fantasy Resonance preview for our thoughts on the game.
What Makes Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy?
With Resonance returning to the series’ roots, the question of just what makes a Final Fantasy game is an important one. It has evolved over time, but the core pillars were established decades ago.
Furuya said that the essence of Final Fantasy comes down to three things. First, a combat system that gives players a lot of choice and customizability. He cited things like the job system that has been used in various ways in several Final Fantasy games.
Second, the stakes of the story must be about saving the world. The story has to take players across an expansive world full of different characters. Later, we’ll talk about exploration and the world map where much of this idea comes through in the team’s approach to its design.
Third, cutting-edge presentation. Furuya said that Final Fantasy has always used the latest technology to push games and fidelity to their limits. Specifically, he noted that is true in cutscenes.
Producer Nakashima had more to add, stating that he thought of things for Resonance in terms of content or what players would expect:
There are a lot of things that appear in Final Fantasy, such as crystals and summons, but in every entry of the series, it’s been depicted differently. So really understanding that history and how it should be translated or interpreted in the world of Final Fantasy Resonance, these are things that we thoroughly thought through.
With that thought of history in mind, a big feature of Resonance is Visions. Visions are a mechanic that sees characters from previous Final Fantasy games (though some are unique characters to Resonance as well) appear as a sort of equipment every party member can equip, each with their own suite of abilities.
Visions are limited in how they are incorporated into the game, Nakashima said. Really, they serve a function in combat but otherwise the only interactions with them will come when you unlock them. Each of those moments will carry some bit of story and evoke something from their game as well.
And to that end, because these characters are so beloved, Nakashima said they took great care to make sure they didn’t mess them up. Each character got a pass through experts at the company, and Nakashima said that they made sure the Visions content team was rostered with a lot of Final Fantasy veterans that have deep ties to the franchise.
Taking Brave Exvius and Making Resonance
Essentially, Resonance is a remake of the mobile game Final Fantasy Brave Exvius. It’s a new game from the ground up based on the characters and story of Brave Exvius‘ first story arc.
Interestingly, Brave Exvius wasn’t the original idea for the project that became Resonance, according to Nakashima. “Initially, we had considered kind of like a compilation, essentially, of the mobile experience where it was closer to a direct port.”
That was scrapped fairly quickly when they thought more about what both Brave Exvius fans and Final Fantasy fans in general would want. Nakashima said they landed on the idea that they knew players would want a “powered-up” experience rather than a direct port. Because of that, the project changed in scope and took them longer than they initially planned.
One of the benefits of translating Brave Exvius into a more classic Final Fantasy experience is that the story and characters could be fleshed out quite a bit more. Nakashima said, “mobile games are rolled out with new content, the pace is quite fast … and through this experience of rebuilding the game from the ground up, we were able to kind of supplement and add depth to what the characters are thinking … and to give each of the characters more depth.”
Brave Exvius isn’t the only mobile game that has been remade by Square Enix either, as Octopath Traveler 0 was translated into a more classic JRPG style last year. We asked what sort of lessons that team may have passed on to them.
Nakashima said it emphasized that the ground-up, powered-up approach was correct. That team showed “the amount of effort and care that we need to pour into that experience … I think that’s one thing that really left an impression on us.”
Old-School Game Design in Resonance
Anyone who has played a JRPG, particularly an older one, has ended the game with a hoard of resources. Those elixirs? They are far too valuable to use. What if you need them later, right?
Many modern RPGs have just removed that idea as any kind of problem. Parties will automatically heal to full after every encounter, recover their mana, etc. So maybe the potions and other items are just for battle, or, really, just not used at all.
We heard Resonance was looking back at resource management in a more old-school way and wanted to know how they went about integrating the system.
Furuya said the resource management is tuned and designed around dungeons. For Resonance, he said they are treating a dungeon as one kind of level or stage to clear: “As you progress through the dungeon, we’ve ensured that the difficulty balance is set in a way where it will be difficult to clear the dungeon without utilizing all the resources.”
Resource management becomes about choice at that point, said Furuya. Do you use mana to heal up the party at that moment, or will it be needed in a fight still to come?
The tension between using resources in and out of battle, knowing they will be limited for the player, is central to the design. Because of that tension, each battle has the potential to be extremely important. How you use mana, like casually tossing spells at enemies to get things over with quicker, may cost you later.
This idea is not unique to the RPG genre. What may set Resonance apart is the attention this often overlooked aspect of RPGs is given. Here, the team has made managing consumables a challenge to complete a dungeon.
Beyond the focus on tackling that resource management problem, Furuya said they did a lot of experimentation with some old-school mechanics in JRPGs. There was a lot of trial and error around minutiae like whether a character should fully heal when they level up or whether a KO’d character should still get experience from the fight.
Exploration and the World Map in Resonance
Another old-school JRPG trope in Resonance is how it handles the overworld. Final Fantasy in particular was known for its wide, expansive worlds. When speaking on the topic in he past, Furuya said he wanted to ensure players felt they were going on a grand adventure when it comes to exploring the world. We asked where they looked for inspiration in crafting Resonance‘s world and what, if any, influence modern open-world games had on the game.
Furuya answered that “there weren’t any particular influences from modern day open world experiences.” Instead, they looked back at classic Final Fantasy games like Final Fantasy IV and VI for inspiration, where “you were walking the world on feet, and then you gain access to an airship and then suddenly the world just opens up.”
In further contrast to modern games, there are no icons on the map. Furuya said they designed for a more “intuitive expression” where you just have the look of the world to draw your eye, and it’s up to you to decide what you want to see.
Furuya said that the SNES era of JRPGs and Final Fantasy games were great at generating that curiosity in players, which is something they wanted to try to capture in Resonance.
Another guiding principle of the world design came from longtime Square Enix producer Tomoya Asano, who said that they should make sure there is always some kind of reward “where players might think there may be something, or players may want there to be something.”
Resonance as a Product of Square and Enix
As we got to the end of the interview, we had one question we just had to ask Furuya. Before our hands-on session, which took place prior to the interview, Furuya spoke about Resonance for a moment.
Growing up, he said he felt Square was his mom and Enix was his dad (Square and Enix were separate companies prior to their merger in 2003). We wanted to know what that meant when it came to Resonance. Furuya said:
“At the core, I believe it needs to be an adventure where you yourself are at the center of that experience. There have been various titles for both Square and Enix that really capture that essence … They question the players as to what they would do in a given situation … What choice they would make in a given situation. We wanted to ensure that we incorporated those moments within Resonance.”
Final Fantasy Resonance releases October 22nd on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, Nintendo Switch, and Nintendo Switch 2.
