How Final Fantasy Went Old-School Again

Hello, One Take Schrier here, and today we're talking about my favorite video game series in the world, Final Fantasy. There's a new game in the series out this week. Um, I spoke to the developers behind it, the producer and the director, and I played a whole bunch of it, and I'm very excited to tell you the story behind the game and a little bit more about it. So, this is all attached to a Bloomberg column, as usual, that I wrote this week, published today, and you can find a free link to bypass the paywall in the show notes if you want to go check it out. As always, got those got those free gift links for you. As usual. So, Final Fantasy, I, like many people who are fans of RPGs around my age, I'm 39, grew up playing Final Fantasy and I've always loved the series despite its kind of ups and downs over the years. So, I was very excited to see, over the summer, I believe it was

that Summer Games Fest when Square Enix announced a brand new HD-2D Final Fantasy game called Final Fantasy Resonance, uh, which came out this week, and it turned out is actually a kind of I don't even want to say remake, an overhauled version of Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, which was a mobile game that 20 came out in 20 15. So, we'll start there. Our story starts there. When I'll I'll start off by tell telling the story behind this game and the development of this game, and then I'll talk a little bit about my impressions of the game and why I enjoy it so much. So, let's start in 2015. So, Final Fantasy Brave Exvius comes out. It's a mobile game, um, in the fashion of many free-to-play mobile games, especially as is the style at the time, and Square Enix was doubling down on them all over the place. It was a gacha game, and gacha, not g o t c h a, but g a c h a essentially means that you can spend

real money to buy these rewards within the game that are randomized and um it's kind of like a virtual slot machine. It's based on what are called gacha pon machines in Japan where it's a machine full of those little capsules and you put in some money and you get a capsule and you never know what you're going to get. Could be uh something very common and you're just like, "Oh, okay, another whatever one star something." Or it could be a super rare uh Boshin and Sephiroth, whatever, right? So, essentially you are participating in a virtual slot machine. Um and a lot of people liked Final Fantasy Brave Exvius cuz it had a lot of cool things going for it. It had a lot of Final Fantasy nostalgia, a lot of references to old games, it had a cool story, um interesting combat system, and a lot of people are into gacha games, but there are many more people, especially fans of traditional Final Fantasy games, who are not into gacha games. And um Keisuke Nakashima, who's an associate producer on Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, he starts thinking, "Hey, what if we were to take all the stuff that works really well in

Brave Exvius and um use it for a console port, make a PC console traditional RPG version of this game?" And his thoughts were kind of cemented by doing these global press tours where he would go around the world and meet with journalists and fans and whatnot. And he kept hearing that there were people who would be interested in checking out Final Fantasy Brave Exvius if not for all the gacha stuff, which I mean, I can certainly count myself as one of those. Um I try not to play free-to-play mobile gacha games, but would certainly be interested in a new 2D Final Fantasy game of some sort. So, um he starts pitching it to Square Enix, the executives come back to him, and again, this is all in my Bloomberg story, so check that out, but the executives come back to him and they say, um "Well, what if it's just like a straight port?" And he's like, "No, for this to work, it needs to be a proper just kind of reimagining of the game for PC and consoles where it's just like we really blow it out. So, like for example, there are a lot of parts of Brave Exvius where you don't get to move

around the map. You're just kind of automated look going from one combat encounter to another. For this version, it would have to feel like a traditional RPG where you can walk around the dungeon. You can move around it. You can go and and walk down different paths and look for treasure chests and go on side quests and all this other stuff. So, um they wanted to create a full-blown console gameplay experience, Nakashima was telling me when I when I interviewed him um earlier this year. So, he got Square Enix to approve the pitch uh even though it would cost more than like a straight-up console port. And then they started working on it. He put together this small team of developers who had worked on Final Fantasy Brave Exvius. Um and one of the first things they started doing was figuring out a new art style for the game. So, Brave Exvius is kind of traditional 2D game. Um doesn't need to look super high-res or anything because you play it on your phone. But for this, they wanted to blow it out and they actually wanted to take the HD-2D approach, which is a now common Square Enix art style that essentially takes 2D

sprites and puts them on 3D backgrounds to create this really cool-looking diorama effect that has been really popular. Um I've seen some people out there complain that they're getting sick of it. I personally am not. I could play a million of these games in HD-2D. I think they look great and I think it's a really cool art style that allows them to kind of feel I love the I love these games to feel modern but also capture a lot of the sensibilities of 2D games and what makes those great. So, um they spent a couple years putting together this art style. They also start figuring out like what are we going to keep, what are we going to ditch, what are we going to change. It was a whole big production, which is why it took uh six years between the pitch and now. They told me they weren't in production for those entire six years. A lot of that was just kind of early prototyping and pitching and stuff like that. But still, um he started pitching it in 2020, and now the game is out in 2026. Um, they went to Team Asano, uh, which is the Square Enix subsidiary that is responsible for HD-2D games, and obviously they worked with those guys,

and they got a lot of good advice for them. Um, Nakashima was telling me that like, for example, um, they said, "Write more backstory for the characters." The mobile game didn't really have that. You didn't really get to know the characters quite as well. Um, little details matter quite a bit. So, for example, there's a section of Final Fantasy Resonance that is set in this town of dwarves, and, uh, Team Asano is very particular about their world building, Nakashima was telling me, and they insisted that like, "Well, it's a dwarf town, they're all small, so you need to make all the furniture and all the tables shorter and smaller to account for that." It's a lot of little little aesthetic details. That you can see, if you play the game, you can see a lot of these details reflected in there. Um, revamp pretty much everything. They carried over some stuff, like the vision mechanics, um, which essentially allow each character to summon an an old-school Final Fantasy character to kind of stand by them, and, um, it's essentially a job system. I'll get into that in a little bit, but they carried that over. Although, one thing they ditched was Ariana Grande, who, uh, believe it or and Katy Perry, who were

in Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, made these kind of cameo appearances as summons. Um, I think that's the sort of thing that maybe mobile in a mobile game you can get away with just kind of going all out with weird collaborations, but in a traditional JRPG that is meant to evoke the past, uh, they might be out of place. So, uh, no Ariana Grande in Final Fantasy Resonance, no Katy Perry. Um, and yeah, uh, Hirota Furuiya, who's the director of the game, was telling me a little bit about how like they really needed to find a balance between like carrying over what worked, and also making it appeal to new players. Um, he was like saying that there were concerns within the company, like, "Is this going to actually be appealing to people who didn't play Brave Exvius?" Which I think they did a pretty good job of doing by overhauling the game. Um and uh yeah, I also I asked them a little bit a couple other things, a couple other fun notes that I'll share from the interview. Uh I asked them about the fact that the two of them, Nakashima and Furuya, so the producer and director of Final Fantasy Residents, grew up playing Final Fantasy games.

They're fans, they're younger. Um I don't know exactly how old they are, but younger than kind of the series veterans who have been there from the very beginning. And I said, "Between you guys and Naoki Hamaguchi, who is the director of the Final Fantasy VII trilogy, who's also in his early 40s and grew up playing Final Fantasy games, it feels like there is this kind of new vanguard, this new generation of um Final Fantasy fans at Square Enix." And so I asked them, like, "Do you feel like it's this kind of changing of the guard?" Um and Nakashima was telling me, "No, it actually feels like this kind of cross-collaboration because a lot of the people still working on these games you worked on the old ones, too." So, for example, he was telling me there are people who um worked on Final Fantasy Residents who worked on the story for Final Fantasy X way back in 2001, um for Final Fantasy XIII back in 2009. So, um it's more like a a cross-collaborated or cross-generation collaboration effect. Um and then the other thing I'll share is that I asked them, um "So Brave Exvius, which came out launched in 2015,

lasted for about 10 years and five seasons worth of content. This game, Final Fantasy Residents, is based on the first season." So, I asked Nakashima, "Hey, if this game does well, are you going to do sequels or expansions or whatever based on new season or other seasons in Brave Exvius?" Um and he he kind of dodged the question. He wouldn't comment to that, but it seems like yes. He said, quote, "We think there's a lot of great things from season 2 and beyond. We'll see how Residents goes first, look at user feedback. If we put out a good game, that's the first important step." So, okay, you might be wondering, "What is the deal with this game, Final Fantasy Resonance? Is it actually good? Um so, I will come I will tell you a little bit about it from my perspective as a fan of old school Final Fantasy games, as someone who grew up playing those games and has always loved Final Fantasy. Um four and six were kind of formative games for me. Uh uh without those game Really, Final Fantasy, the original on the NES, was kind of my first video game that I

remember playing. Um and without those games, I would probably not be not not have a career covering the video game industry. They were particularly special to me. So, um Yeah, so about this game. So, Final Fantasy Resonance. So, at its core, it's a kind of 2D old school style JRPG. You got your invisible random encounters. You got your turn-based combat system. It's got this stagger system that is not quite like Octopath Traveler because it's a damage-based stagger system as opposed to a number-based stagger system in the Octopath games. Uh an enemy might have, I don't know, four shields, and so you have to hit them with their weakness four times in order to stagger them. In this, it is more like, say, Final Fantasy 13, where you have to do a certain amount of damage to them to stagger them. And uh using whatever their weakness is does uh more to affect the stagger bar, and so it makes them get staggered more quickly. Once you stagger all the enemies on the screen, you get a bonus round of attacks where all of your party

members can can wallop them, and then you get this special vision-based attack. And visions are kind of core to the combat system here. So, visions, like I mentioned before, are essentially these kind of They're not summons. They're more like I would think of them as a job system. And it's funny because instead of traditional jobs, like your white mage and your knight or whatever, you have a bunch of old school Final Fantasy characters. And then some of them are also just kind of new generic characters, but a lot of them are um characters from each Final Fantasy game, from Noctis to Zidane to Terra to the Warrior of Light from the first Final Fantasy game. And the way it works is each of your main characters, your eight main characters, equips one of these visions, and they essentially give them access to a bunch of new skills based on the vision. And then you can upgrade that vision, and you can level up that vision for each character. And so each character will develop more of those skills over time, and then once a character switches to another vision,

they can equip some of those skills from the old vision based on this kind of AP system that's reminiscent of like Final Fantasy IX where you have a limited number of slots that you can use to equip other visions skills, right? And it could be everything anything from like active skills, like different spells and attack abilities to passive skills. Things that are like improve your steal enhancement or improve your healing ability or whatever else it is. So it's this cool system where you're just constantly playing around with these different visions, especially based on what kind of area you're in and what kind of elemental weaknesses you think the bosses of that area are going to have. So for example, if you are in a big old ice cavern, and you know all the enemies are weak to fire, you might want to equip visions with a whole bunch of fire skills on all of your parties so you can make it much easier to stagger and take out enemies. But then as things got a little harder, and I actually played on the hardest difficulty for a while, you have to think a little bit more about your strategy, and that's

when that's when buffs and debuffs start to play into it, and you have to start thinking about like synergizing the different visions. It's a cool system. And then once you stagger the enemy like I mentioned before, you get a special kind of bonus attack based on each of those visions that is like an ultra powerful attack. You have a bunch of other things in here, too. You have your limit breaks for each character. You have a summon monster system where one of your characters, Fina, can summon um of traditional espers, Ifrit, Shiva, etc. Shiva, um Ramuh, etc. etc. Leviathan. So, uh your classic stuff there. Um and then you go around the world, and it's the game is segmented into chapters, and for the most part each chapter takes place there in a different region, kind of your traditional old-school JRPG style, where you go around the world and you get to a new region, and you probably meet a new party member, you solve some problems for that region, you learn a bit more about the party member, and uh eventually at the end of it you fight some sort of big boss, and then you move

on. There's an ongoing story, of course, involving this kind of sinister group of armored knights who are trying to destroy the crystals of this world for some reason, and you have to stop them and figure out why, and you're chasing them around the world trying to save the crystals before they shatter them. Um and at the same time there's a bunch of other stuff going on beneath the surface. I wouldn't say the story rises to the heights of uh I don't know, Final Fantasy VI or anything like that, but I'm enjoying it. Um and I think the writing is just fine. I've seen a lot of people complaining about that. I'm not done with the game, but I'm pretty far in. I'm in the thick of chapter six. I'm not sure how many chapters there are. I think maybe seven, seven or eight, something like that. I could look it up. Um but uh how many chapters? Um oh, eight. Okay. Eight chapters. So, I'm in almost done with with chapter six. Um and I'm really enjoying it. At a certain point, of course, you get an airship, you can fly around this world. There is a ton of side stuff to do. There are a bunch of caves with like um

optional bosses you can fight. There are a bunch of side uh quests, some better than others. A lot of them are very fetchy and monotonous and a little tedious. Um but they do Some of them do have some good character lore for your side characters because um the cuz of the nature of the game um some of the characters play uh take a backseat role as you get further into the game, and so you can develop them more by doing this side stuff. And then just everything you'd expect from a traditional JRPG, every new town has a bunch of NPCs you can talk to, sometimes has mini games. There's like a jump rope mini game that again is a reference to Final Fantasy IX, where you just have to keep jumping rope and they add more and more challenges as the game goes on. There's a bunch of stuff like that. There's a good good kind of really good vibes in this game. It's got a good sensibility, it's got a good fun sense of humor. You fly around the airship, you can find a bunch of secret stuff, optional bosses, hidden bosses, stuff like that. It really captures a lot of the things that I think are missing from some other Final

Fantasy, notably Final Fantasy XVI I think is missing some of this stuff, especially the the the sense of humor. Um, and yeah, it's really cool. I'm really enjoying it. It's it's the rare game where even after finishing even after doing my coverage for it, this and Bloomberg and the game is already out, I'm still planning on playing more and hopefully finishing it, which I think is testament to how much I'm enjoying it. I would say that it doesn't it's not quite as transcendent as Octopath Traveler II, which I would say is the best game Square Enix has released in the last I don't know decade or so, but it is really good and the vibes are good and I'm just really enjoying playing it. It's also chock-full of Final Fantasy references, so your mileage may vary on how much you enjoy that. And I'm not just referring to the summoning characters like the visions in the game, which by the way each one when you find a new vision in like a little shrine across the world, you get like this cool little montage of old of of screenshots and videos from

that Final Fantasy game that the character is from and then you have to answer some quiz questions about like what would you do in this spot, which is which is a cute little thing. But no, I'm talking about other Final Fantasy references. For example, one of the like a dungeon you run into is called Mobius Shipyard named after Mobius from Final Fantasy 6. There is like a phantom train, there's a whole bunch of just kind of random references to old Final Fantasy games, which they're not like so prevalent that they ruin the experience or anything, but it's definitely like, "Hey, Final Fantasy fan, looking at you, wink wink. You love Final Fantasy, so do we." It definitely feels like it was made by people who like love old Final Fantasy games. Um but yeah, I mean this game makes me really hopeful about Square's future because obviously they have 3D big high-fidelity like super intense graphic Final Fantasy games culminating in the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy, which is their big project at the moment. Final Fantasy 7 Revelation, the third entry in the trilogy, comes out in April.

And then presumably, I think a lot of people believe and assume that that team will then go on to make Final Fantasy 17, and that'll be again just big big graphics, big high-fidelity graphics, super intense, lots of into like CGI cutscenes where you can see people's pores, stuff like that. And I think it would be pretty cool if at the same time we have this tracked this parallel tracked of 2D Final Fantasy games or HD-2D Final Fantasy games that aren't just remakes, but are new stuff like this game Final Fantasy Resonance. And maybe they'll do some sequels that carry on the Seasons of Brave Exvius. Maybe they'll start something else entirely and they they won't have that kind of baseline of Brave Exvius and they'll just tell new stories in the I think that could be pretty cool, and based on what we've seen so far from Resonance could be a really big success. Resonance has gotten pretty good reviews. I'm going to check, let's see how it's doing on Steam. Right now it's

got We don't have sales numbers just yet, but it's got 26,697 Steam concurrence as I record this, which is pretty solid. So yeah, this is good news all around. I think it's pretty cool. It's a good step for Square Enix, and I'm really enjoying the game. I'm going to play a bunch more. I think that if you are a fan of turn-based JRPGs, and especially old-school Final Fantasy games, you will like it, too. All right. See you next time.