Final Fantasy Resonance revives classic turn-based RPG exploration and combat

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Square Enix has shown off Final Fantasy Resonance, a new turn-based role-playing game that marks the series' first use of the studio's HD-2D visual style, pairing pixel-art characters and hand-drawn portraits with modern lighting and particle effects. The game began life as Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, a mobile title that launched in the mid-2010s and closed down in 2024, and Resonance reworks its opening story arc, known as Lapis, into a self-contained single-player adventure, echoing how Octopath Traveler 0 was built from assets in a mobile predecessor. Journalists who played hour-long demos at Gamescom 2026, on both PlayStation 5 and Switch 2 hardware, generally described the presentation as a striking and unexpectedly polished revival of the series' classic look and feel, even though Square Enix's own marketing has notably avoided mentioning the Brave Exvius connection.

The plot follows Rain, commander of the airship fleet belonging to the kingdom of Grandshelt, alongside his childhood friend Lasswell, whose arm has been replaced with a blade in a style reminiscent of Final Fantasy 7's Barret Wallace, the white mage Fina, and the inventor Lid, who fights alongside a mechanical chocobo. Together they set out to protect the world's crystals after a shadowy faction called the Veritas of the Dark destroys one of them, a premise several previewers likened to the tone of the earliest mainline Final Fantasy entries. Exploration takes place across a colourful overworld map, travelled on foot, by chocobo or eventually by airship, dotted with towns, side quests and dungeons that display a recommended level before entry, including areas such as the Mobliz Shipyard and the Wind Temple sampled in demo builds.

Combat remains turn-based, built around exploiting elemental weaknesses, buffing allies with effects like haste, and managing a mix of physical and magical specialists, while the returning stagger mechanic adds a further tactical layer familiar to veterans of the series. The standout addition is the Vision system, which lets characters equip the spirits of past Final Fantasy heroes, among them Cloud, Tidus, Zidane, Terra and the Warrior of Light, as swappable support that grants signature techniques such as Steal and Mug. Building up a gauge with a Vision equipped unlocks a powerful Limit Burst attack, which briefly switches from the HD-2D art style to a rendered cutscene styled after moves like Omnislash.

Coverage of the demos was broadly positive but not uniform. Some previewers were enthusiastic about the production values and combat depth despite testing the game amid noisy, crowded show-floor conditions, describing it as an unexpectedly lush and rewarding experience. Others were more measured, cautioning that the game leans so heavily on series lore, character cameos and callbacks that it may be poorly suited to newcomers, and voicing concern that new protagonists like Rain and Lasswell could be overshadowed by the guest appearances of fan-favourite heroes. One outlet found the early dungeons unremarkable and felt they revealed little about the wider world, while another remained ambivalent about whether the game felt genuinely fresh or too reliant on nostalgia, adding that the cinematic Vision cutscenes felt skippable rather than essential once their novelty wore off.

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