Resonance of Fate — The Guns of Vashyron

Here is a game that got lost in the shuffle when Final Fantasy XIII came out.  Did Sega realize what they were doing when they decided they could compete with the biggest console JRPG series in North America?  Did they think that they could take Lightning down with a few anime caricatures with guns?  Really now.

It’s not like the two games are very different from each other.  Developers for both games decided that they had to come up with weird battle systems that take a while to get used to.  Both games suffer from a learning curve that requires about thirty or so hours to overcome, although in Final Fantasy XIII’s defence, players were given new things to learn every so often and were eased into the game.  Resonance of Fate gave the player everything right from the start.  It takes at least thirty hours or so to get used to the system, and I can guarantee, most players will die many times within those first thirty hours before they realize what’s going on.

Resonance of Fate can be best described as a search for miracles and a search for God.  (Perhaps Sega thought that they would search for a miracle in real life as well, because that’s what it takes to dethrone Final Fantasy in North America.)  The story is presented as a series of short events, most of which don’t seem to come together until the very end, and the ending seems like it was thrown in to give the game a final boss and a conclusion.  It’s not your typical epic showdown.  In fact, I wouldn’t say that there were really any bad guys in the game.  I wouldn’t be surprised if all the characters, even the final boss, sat down at Cafe Chesney the next day and shared a drink together.

The battle system might seem horrible if it takes thirty hours to get used to, but “horrible” isn’t the word I would use to describe it.  Needlessly complicated, maybe, but not horrible.  There are a lot of things to pay attention to in a battle.  You have bezels, which mainly determine how many Hero Actions you can perform in battle (more on those later).  You can be equipped with guns, items, grenades, or ammunition (pick any two), and you have to make sure you’re about to use the correct equipment before you start a Hero Action.  You also have to make sure that you haven’t run out of what you want to use: guns won’t run out of normal ammunition, but special ammunition, grenades, and items can run out.  Also, you have to pay attention to how much damage you’ve taken, and also what kind of damage it is.  Scratch damage won’t hurt you until you take real damage, and you’ll lose a lot of your bezels if you take a full HP bar of scratch damage.  Lose all your bezels, and you might as well restart the battle.  Desperation Mode might as well be called You’re Screwed Mode because by the time you find yourself in it, you’re screwed.  Desperation Mode comes about when you use up all your bezels, and during this mode, enemies suddenly become mighty.  Most of the time, when I found myself in such a mode, nothing I could do would salvage the battle and I was killed brutally.

A note about scratch damage: in this game, machine gun fire doesn’t really hurt you, it instead inflicts so-called “scratch damage”.  In other words, pretend damage.  Potential damage.  Imaginary damage.  Just like when you multiply imaginary numbers together to get real numbers, you can shoot an enemy with handguns to turn pretend damage into real damage.  Oh yeah, and all combat is pretty much done with guns.  You can go barehanded if you want, but you will barely do any damage, and your physical strength doesn’t level up.

Here’s where the game both sucks and is forgiving, at the same time.  When one party member is killed, the game is over.  This is another way that RoF mimics FF13, except RoF is a little more strict.  In FF13, you were at least able to continue the game as long as your main character stayed upright.  In RoF, any character dying is enough to end the game, for there aren’t any resurrection items in the game.  This sucks.

However: a game over in RoF doesn’t mean that you have to load from the last save point.  Just like in FF13, you can choose to retry the battle.  The big difference is that in RoF, it costs money to retry.  Yes, the very same money that your characters use in the game to buy ammunition and clothing and grenades can also be used to reset the battle.  It seems weird to use in game currency to turn back time, but at least money is easy to come by in the game.  At least, in my experience it was.

You see, enemies will sometimes drop items after a body part is destroyed or after they die, but there are certain things that you can do during battle to gain lots of gold and silver pieces that you can then sell for big bucks.  Rule of Cool comes into play here: the Hero Action is an action where you can run at the enemy with guns blazing while somehow dodging each and every bullet that comes your way.  You can run at the enemy, jump in the air, twirl around, et cetera, but nothing will hit you for the duration of your Hero Action.  If you’ve tricked your guns out enough, a Hero Action can last for quite a while and inflict a metric ton of damage on the enemy.  Sometimes you can even make an enemy go airborne, and when it does, it starts to leak gold and silver all over the place.  You can literally chip precious metals off of the enemy when it’s in the air.  I guess the prices of these metals haven’t been rising in the game like they have in real life, or else more people would be doing this.  Also, if you happen to be using grenades instead of bullets, characters will actually toss the grenades in the air and kick it with the back of their foot towards the enemy.  I really, seriously hope that no one uses this game as an example of proper weapon and explosives safety.

One thing I hated about the battle system was that you had the option to just straight out attack, and most of the time it was suicide to attempt it.  Guns charge far too slowly during a normal attack, and so it usually wasted a turn if you attempted it.  It’s like if a game came with a Kill Yourself option in battle, the developers knowing full well that if anyone used it, it would be an automatic game over, especially if the player wasn’t warned ahead of time and tried it out, thinking it was some kind of Persona 3 thing.  I can’t imagine why the developers of RoF decided to give the player an option that he or she would almost never use, yet looked like something he or she would need.

There are also Tri-actions, which during the 100 hours I spent playing the game, I never found much of an opportunity to do, nor did I ever find myself in a situation where they were both effective and possible.  Hero Actions and proper preparation seemed to be just as effective against bosses and the more powerful enemies as a Tri-action would’ve been, so such an option was just one more superfluous thing that over
complicated the battle system.

Outside of battle, the major driving point of the game is the restoration of Basel.  For some reason, the tower that everyone lives on has become unusable, to the point where no one can get anywhere.  It doesn’t make any sense, but apparently you’re the only ones who can lay down tiles to make Basel navigable again.  So your characters take tetris-like tiles and lay them down so that people can freely move around Basel again.  While you do this, you can find some items left behind, hidden on the restored tiles.  Clothing, grenades, ammunition, bezel shards, even more tiles can be found if you restore portions of Basel.  Some areas are inaccessible until you can collect the right kind of coloured tiles, so this acts as a way to keep you from going into areas you’re not supposed to get to until later in the game.  There’s also an area that’s inaccessible until you beat the game, in which case using New Game + will reward you with the special tile that makes that last area accessible.

There are a lot of things about the game that doesn’t make any sense.  For instance, from the start, you are introduced to Leanne when she tries to commit suicide.  Zephyr’s introduction comes when he comes to the rescue, Indiana Jones style.  Then they find themselves passing through a cloud and suddenly they’re far higher above the city than they were a moment ago and it makes no sense until you realize that Basel is a tower made up of different layers of city, and they passed through one to get to the next.  Then you realize they still have to find some way to land without going splat.  The writers realized this too and instead of showing how they managed to slow their descent, they shift events forward and suddenly everyone’s alright and hey, here’s another character to introduce.  Hey, wait, didn’t this character try to kill the other character in the opening?

Yeah, the story is one of those stories that you’ll probably have to play through twice to really understand.  But that’s alright.  While the first playthrough will take roughly 100 hours if you’re trying to do everything, the second playthrough should take no more than 10 to 20 hours, since you know what to do, where to go, and probably already have a full inventory of everything you need to complete the fetch quests, not to mention are already around level 80 to 90, with completely pimped guns.

Oh, there’s another thing that doesn’t make sense.  Guns can be modified so much that if you tried to mimic such a gun in real life, it would not only be too awkward to use, it would probably be too heavy, too.  You can have so many gun sights on it that they would probably obscure your vision rather than sharpen it.  You can attach so many different barrels that bullets wouldn’t know whether they’re coming or going, not to mention that most of the gun barrels wouldn’t work anyway.  Some configurations would even hinder the user’s ability to actually hold the gun.  But hey, this is Resonance of Fate we’re talking about.  Rule of Cool means that the best guns use ten gun sights and fifteen barrels and have a million-bullet magazine attached to the handle.

The story was generally enjoyable to watch.  It was silly and I liked watching the antics of three friends who worked and lived together.  Well, for the most part, I liked it.  There were certain scenes that I found far too ridiculous and painful to watch.  I won’t describe the worst scene here, except to say that Vashyron acts too much like a typical immature 16 year old male in one of the scenes, and he’s supposed to be the oldest one of the group!  I would’ve expected him to grow out of such a mentality, but I guess he must’ve led a sheltered life or something when he decided to become a gun-for-hire.  If you’re curious about the scene, all I’ll say about it is, “All we have are raisins”.

For all its problems and illogical elements, this game is fairly enjoyable.  It seemed like the early chapters were trying to get me sick and tired of the game so that I wouldn’t finish it, but I’m glad I did.  First, the battle system took a while to get used to, then the story itself took a turn for the worse.  But fortunately, after Vashyron got a hold of his hormones, he wasn’t that bad a character, and the game toned down the sexual themes quite a bit.  In fact, by the 40 hour mark, I was enjoying the game a lot.  The music helped somewhat.  In fact, the music helped to keep me interested in the game enough that I could master the battle system.

The music was rigged so that it would suddenly jazz up whenever a Hero Action or other special attack was initiated in battle.  Suddenly, things were rocking and your characters were kicking ass and taking names and the music reflected it.  I’ve played very few games where a dynamic soundtrack like this was even attempted.  After Resonance of Fate, I played Nier, which also featured dynamically changing music in places, layered so that various aspects of the music would fade in and out depending on where you were.  I remember that The Legend of Dragoon tried to make the battle system flow seamlessly into the victory theme and the attempt was clumsy at best, but it took this long for me to find two more games that cared enough about the music to make it a dynamic and layered experience for the player.  (Sure, there may have been others, but I can’t play each and every game that comes out.  I’m still trying to finish Dragon Quest IX, and it’s taken me at least 90 hours to get to where I am in that game.)

Nothing much needs to be said about the graphics except that they are awesome and that screen shots don’t do the game justice.

I would say that, aside from a few instances where gameplay trumps common sense, and that once scene where Vashyron showed that girls aren’t the only one who just want to have fun, things were enjoyable enough for me to recommend such a game, as long as gamers are patient and willing to learn the battle system.  Unfortunately, I doubt very many gamers will give this game a chance, considering that Final Fantasy XIII also required a long time to master and an even longer time to finish, and tw
o such games might be too much.  Plus, it’s been over a half a year since it was released, and by now everyone’s probably forgotten that this game exists.  Well, surprise!  Now go buy the game.