If the embed won’t play, the gameplay trailer is also here on YouTube.
For the best part of twenty years, Square Enix has been steering Final Fantasy away from the turn-based battles that made its name and towards the real-time spectacle of XV, XVI and the VII remakes. Then it released a pixel-art spin-off in which everyone politely waits their turn, and PC players turned up in force. Final Fantasy Resonance, out since 22 October, hit a peak of 38,182 concurrent players on Steam on Saturday morning, according to SteamDB.
That is the third-highest Steam peak for the franchise, behind the PC port of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (40,564) and the MMO Final Fantasy XIV, and ahead of every other single-player entry. Its first-day peak of 27,933 had already nudged past this year’s Dragon Quest VII Reimagined. User reviews are running at around 97 per cent positive, the best showing any Final Fantasy has yet managed on Valve’s storefront. Concurrent players are not sales, naturally, but they are a fair measure of how many people cancelled their Saturday plans.
It’s the first Final Fantasy in Square Enix’s HD-2D style, the diorama look of sprites wandering tilt-shifted 3D sets that made Octopath Traveler and the Dragon Quest III remake such handsome things. Square Enix’s Creative Studio 5 developed it with Lancarse, and the story is a retelling of the first major arc of Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, the free-to-play mobile game that launched in 2015 and whose English version was switched off in 2024. Not everyone is delighted that the series’ first HD-2D outing is a refurbished mobile story rather than something new, and that’s a fair grumble. Still, there’s a certain poetic justice in a gacha storyline being reborn as a proper boxed RPG, with the slot machines taken out and the turns left in.
The battles are turn-based with a modern twist, and the Visions system lets you resonate with famous faces from across the series, among them Cloud, Tidus, Lightning, Clive and the original Warrior of Light, while Sephiroth lurks as an optional challenge for anyone with spare Phoenix Downs. Chocobos, espers and airships are all present and correct, as are the elemental crystals, without which no self-respecting Final Fantasy world would get out of bed. It’s out now on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Switch, Switch 2 and PC via Steam, where it is Steam Deck Verified.
Anyone who grew up with a SNES pad in one hand and a cheat sheet for Final Fantasy VI in the other will recognise what’s going on here. The lesson Square Enix may take from all this is that a good many players never stopped wanting to queue. Here at SFcrowsnest, being British, we could have told them that for nothing.
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