Now Playing: Resonance of Fate

I played Resonance of Fate when it was originally released in 2010 and a friend of mine was kind enough to gift me this PC remaster over Christmas. I got pretty hooked on RoF on its original release, playing through the game twice and completing all of the content and achievements. Returning to the game today, it’s not hard to see why.

The real strength of RoF is its unique combat system. It’s semi-turned based, in the sense that your three party members each take their turn to move, attack or use an item, but enemies can also move and potentially attack when you do. The combat isn’t based around swords and magic, but guns and grenades. On each character turn you can initiate a simple attack by charging your weapon, with each successive charge delivering a more powerful shot.

You can also spend a ‘bezel’ (a segment of a special power bar which you can expand over the course of the game) to initiate a ‘hero’ move which allows you to plot a path across the combat map and attack on the go. This allows you to reposition your party, dodge incoming enemy attacks, or trigger special moves such as a ‘smackdown’ whereby you flip an enemy into the air and repeatedly slam them into the ground.

 

By carefully positioning your characters during these hero moves you’ll gain ‘resonance points’ which you can use to initiate a ‘tri-attack’ whereby all three party members follow a set, triangular path from point to point and attack in turn. But you have to be careful not to waste bezel shards, because if you run out of these you’ll enter a critical state in which you’re unable to perform hero moves.

 

Is everyone still with me? Damage in RoF comes in two forms – scratch and direct. Handguns and grenades do direct damage whilst machine-guns do scratch. Scratch damage doesn’t actually kill an enemy, but severely weakens their health bar which remains ‘scratched’ following the attack. A direct damage attack against the scratched enemy will then reduce their health bar to the level of scratch inflicted.

Direct damage in RoF is very weak and unlikely to destroy enemies on its own unless they’re at a significantly lower level than you. Typically, you’ll approach fights by doing as much scratch damage as you can to an enemy and then following it up with a direct strike to wipe the scratch. That’s not to say that direct damage doesn’t have its uses beyond clearing scratch, as a heavy direct strike against an enemy can also ‘break’ their health bar, temporarily stunning them, or even destroying individual ‘parts’ such as the cannon on a robot, preventing it from using that attack.

 

Every hero move in the game is accompanied by a stylish animation as your character runs, flips and jumps into combat whilst firing their guns or tossing grenades. And the combat maps must also be considered when planning your attack strategy, as some may feature walls, ramps, explosive barrels, or switches that activate defensive bunkers – although I do wish the game did a greater job of mixing up and expanding upon the variety of battle maps and their environmental components.

Every battle in RoF is about planning the most effective and efficient strategy to win. Most enemies have shields to deflect scratch damage, but those shields may not be as strong from one angle to another, so it’s important to look for weaknesses and openings through which to maximise your attack. Enemies can also be weak to various grenade and ammunition types – such as fire, electrical or poison. And there’s a great variety of enemy types to fight ranging from human, robots and monsters.

I’ve written a lot about the combat because it really is the heart of the game and it’s where you’ll spend 90% of your time in RoF. But what about the others aspects? The world? The characters? The story?

The world of RoF is certainly interesting – a clockwork city created to save humanity, but resulting in an oppressive, class based society in which people’s lives and deaths are determined by an automated system. The problem is, the game does a shit job of explaining the world and the plot. Even playing it for the third time, I sill didn’t have much of a clue as to what exactly was going on or why I was fighting certain people.

 

The story aspects of RoF aren’t well presented and honestly, I’d probably just skip them if it wasn’t for the fun character banter. The three heroes of RoF – Vashyron, Zephyr and Leanne – make for a fun little dysfunctional family, and it’s their bond and banter that sees you through a rather poorly presented and not terribly exciting tale.

As you progress through the game you’ll unlock new levels of the city to explore. It’s a hex grid map, and fighting various enemies will grant you new hex pieces in order to unlock new sections. Every chapter will give you a primary mission to complete, but there are also side missions to work through, and by the end of the game these missions will have taken you to every area of the city. There are random encounters on the map, but also dungeons to complete – although these are basically just several combat maps strung together by a common theme.

You can earn money and ‘hunter points’ by completing missions, but you only level your characters by improving their individual weapon stats, so it’s important to rotate weapon types between your characters for maximum effect. And in one of the best features of the game, your weapons can be customised with a variety of crafted attachments.

You can also customise your characters with a lot of different clothing to purchase, but these are purely cosmetic, so unless you really love to play dress-up, it’s not something you really need to bother with.

 

Okay, so the characters are good, the world is interesting but the story is weak. The gameplay is very fun, but it does get quite repetitive as you progress, especially if you intend to clear the optional Arena content, which is a series of fights against increasingly tough groups of enemies – there’s something like 500 of these to clear.

The game can also be a bit of a grind, especially if you intend to clear the final, optional dungeon, which will require a level of at least 120 or so, but you probably won’t be more than level 80 or so by the end of the game, not unless you’ve gone out of your way to grind extra levels as you’ve progressed. I cleared all of this content on the original release, but I’m not sure I have the patience these days to bother.

Overall, Resonance of Fate remains a very unique, interesting and fun game to play. The story is weak, but the characters and world are good. And the combat, once you get the hang of it, is the real star of the show. But it can be a bit of a tedious grind at times, the random battles can get kind of annoying, and it can be pretty repetitive if you intend to work your way through the Arena. It certainly has its flaws, but the good far outweighs the bad, and I’d recommend checking it out.

7/10