Preview: Final Fantasy Resonance - Everything Nostalgic Fans Ever Wanted

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Final Fantasy Resonance's demo, the franchise's first HD-2D title, showcases a game steeped in nostalgia and tailored to fans who miss the series' roots.

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Final Fantasy Resonance feels like a direct response to the segment of fans who have spent years asking Square Enix to make an “old-school Final Fantasy” again. Its HD-2D visuals, turn-based combat, and even the way players explore its maps evoke a more romanticized era of the series, while Visions turn characters from the numbered titles into a core part of the progression system.

At times, playing the demo feels like imagining what a new Final Fantasy might have looked like if the franchise had continued to build on the ideas of IV, V and VI instead of undergoing the successive transformations that began on PlayStation. At others, it is so heavily filtered through nostalgia that it becomes difficult to tell what exactly it wants to be beyond that. After all, Resonance grew out of the now-defunct gacha War of the Visions, which used nostalgia as a central monetization tool—not unlike what Square Enix does today with Final Fantasy Dissidia Duellum.

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A demo was released for PlayStation 5 last week. My experience was very positive, because Resonance feels comfortable for anyone who has lived with the franchise for decades. It is streamlined, easy to grasp, and brisk enough to keep ordinary encounters from becoming unnecessary obstacles, while still offering enough complexity to avoid making every battle trivial.

Characters — still limited in the demo — can be built in different ways despite having natural leanings toward specific roles. One of the tutorials explicitly says that this freedom to build them is up to the player. Enemies also demand different approaches and varied builds or advanced preparation for unexpectedly tougher encounters, much like those that occasionally appeared in the SNES titles.

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It is still too early to know how far that variety will go. A demo lets players test systems for a few hours without necessarily revealing the issues that emerge after dozens more, once players discover the most efficient combinations and certain resources begin to overshadow the rest. The demo even caps the player's level and the number of resources they can accumulate, as if it anticipated someone spending hundreds of hours grinding enemies before the full game releases to trivialize the rest of the adventure.

But the experience fulfills its purpose: it tests abilities, offers a taste of the premise, and introduces noticeable changes to combat that make it a little more than simply an attempt to sell classic nostalgia.

HD-2D Is a Perfect Fit for Final Fantasy

Resonance is the first Final Fantasy title in HD-2D, a formula Square Enix has already used in other games. After just a few minutes of exploring the map, it becomes clear how this choice channels the visual language of the early sprite-based titles while modernizing it without breaking from what we immediately recognize as a fundamental part of the classics: character design, map exploration, environmental design, and (not quite) random encounters.

The demo’s strongest showing is its world map. There are plenty of paths to explore and areas where straying from the main route is rewarded with challenges and unexpected enemies or treasure. The biome variety is not especially broad, but the available map showcases different regions with distinct looks and climates that should make the game world feel more alive in the final release.

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On the other hand, the HD-2D visuals fall short in one aesthetic area that even SNES games handled: greater visual variety in equipment. Different weapons could have their own sprites and effects, and if we are in an era where graphical advancements are in vogue, a wider range of visible armor would also help further customize the characters. Equipment design has always been one of Final Fantasy’s strengths, and it feels almost sinful that Resonance settled for using the same sword sprite for both a character’s starting weapon and one acquired at the end of the game.

Is that a minor visual nitpick? Probably. But it is also one of those choices that helps an RPG sell the feeling of progression, especially when much of its visual identity relies on relatively small details.

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Resonance’s developers know the audience they are making this game for. Visions are most likely the clearest expression of that: characters from the numbered Final Fantasy games appear through them, creating a huge number of callbacks that turn part of the experience into recognizing where each reference came from and how it was incorporated into the new game while also allowing players to choose their “favorite hero or heroine” for each character in the final game.

For longtime followers of the franchise, it works. There is an almost automatic satisfaction in seeing Cloud Strife attack an enemy, or the Warrior of Light’s sprite behind another character, and the game’s story tries to make this “integration” fit logically into the overall narrative.

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The callbacks continue elsewhere: enemy sprites, the names of towns and characters, and even some narrative tropes. They are so abundant that they become a concern. Looking at the entire demo through the lens of nostalgia goes a long way toward making a strong first impression because it brings that sense of familiarity and of being “home.”

Again, this is a game made for people who miss “old-school Final Fantasy.” But romanticizing the past usually works better as an entry point than as a way to sustain an entire campaign. Recognizing characters, enemies, sprites, and themes helps, but once the “old” is no longer new, what new things will Resonance bring to make it an unforgettable experience?

The story is still where I have the greatest doubts about the game’s identity. Its opening cast includes a hero with a giant sword, his wiser childhood friend, and a mysterious girl with amnesia — almost a checklist of stereotypical JRPG archetypes. The plot and its potential villains also feature some predictable clichés. That does not mean the narrative is doomed to be tedious, but my interest in the title will depend on when these characters stop being pieces occupying roles shaped for them.

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Final Fantasy has always worked with archetypes: Cecil begins IV as a knight tormented by his king’s orders; Bartz is an adventurer traveling the world when the events of V catch up with him; Terra fills a role in VI that likewise revolves around mystery and memory loss, much like her successors Cloud, Squall and Zidane. What set them apart was how the games built on those premises to create stories worth remembering decades later—if Resonance wants to mark the beginning of a new line of spin-offs, it will need to find its own path and succeed as its predecessors did.

Perhaps Final Fantasy Doesn't Need to Remake Everything From Scratch

One interesting aspect of the way Final Fantasy has finally embraced HD-2D is how Resonance made me consider that this project may help demonstrate a different path for revisiting the franchise’s catalog.

The episodic Final Fantasy VII remake established the most epic blueprint for remaking an older title, but every director who has addressed the subject in relation to other games has described making new remakes with that level of ambition as an unprecedented challenge. Resonance shows how HD-2D can preserve the structure of older games without making the result feel like a “Remaster.” Maps, combat, sprites, dialogue and narrative direction, lighting, settings, interface, and animations can all be revived with a contemporary presentation on a much smaller scale—yet one that may be far more appealing to the audience a Remake ultimately attracts: longtime fans.

It is also possible to imagine Square Enix experimenting in the opposite direction. HD-2D can modernize the language of the oldest titles, but it could also be used to scale down a modern game into that same language. A “Demake” of Final Fantasy XVI, for example, would require reinterpreting Valisthea on another scale and rediscovering which elements of a more action-driven game could fit into a less ambitious, more turn-based project without so much reliance on visual spectacle and cinematics.

This idea should not be treated as a “nostalgia exercise,” but as a different way of looking at games and worlds we already know and reinterpreting them. Consider Final Fantasy XV, a title with a troubled development cycle whose final release feels slight compared with the richness of Eos’s details, to the point that it ended its run with three canceled expansions. Reworking it along these lines could revive its story, lore, and exploration, while even making use of cut content without requiring such an extensive budget.

Resonance does not need to carry that responsibility. What matters to it is something much more immediate: performing as well over the dozens of hours that follow as it does in its demo. So far, there are good reasons to believe it can. It is an enjoyable and satisfying title, but it still needs to show how far it can go and whether its abundance of callbacks is its greatest strength or whether its characters and story have enough presence to occupy that space.

Final Fantasy Resonance releases on October 22, 2026 and has every chance of being one of the year’s best RPGs, both for longtime fans of the franchise and for a new generation of players looking for a fresh adventure.

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