Final Fantasy Resonance doesnt hit as hard as the classics, but its still a fun throwback

My first exposure to a certain type of Final Fantasy fan occurred in 2006, when a friend of mine angrily insisted that a game can't be Final Fantasy if it doesn't have turn-based combat.

This was in response to the hybrid real-time combat of Final Fantasy XII , and series developer Square Enix has been forsaking that kind of guy in the two decades since.

There hasn't been a traditionally turn-based mainline Final Fantasy in 25 years, which makes Final Fantasy Resonance exciting.

A new title assembled using assets from the mobile title Brave Exvius , Resonance follows in the footsteps of last year's Octopath Traveler 0 in turning a phone game into a console experience that will live after its predecessor's servers are inevitably shut down.

Resonance is not as large or audacious as Octopath was, and its main story relies a bit too much on tropes and concepts from previous Final Fantasy stories to stand on its own.

Thanks to pleasurable combat that's wonderfully easy to bust wide open and a solid sense of exploration, this throwback RPG was worth the 40 or so hours it took me to finish.

SEE ALSO: 'Zelda: Ocarina of Time' is my favorite video game ever.

After playing the remake, I get the vision.

Final Fantasy Resonance is full of ideas you've heard before The best Final Fantasy games have some of the most emotionally affecting and thought-provoking stories you'll find in any big-budget RPG.

I often put Final Fantasy X , in particular, on a pedestal thanks to its compelling combination of gut-wrenching romance and an examination of how theocracy can take hold over a society.

All of that is to say that Resonance doesn't reach those heights.

Its story concerns a ragtag group of adventurers traveling around the world to stop some evil dudes in cool armor from destroying elementally attuned crystals, in hopes of preventing a global catastrophe.

Resonance occasionally hints at greater storytelling ambitions in some of the areas you travel to, such as the desert nation of Zoldaad, which is embroiled in a tense revolutionary fervor against a despotic king.

Generally, though, you don't spend enough time in these areas for their individual plotlines to carry much weight, and the game thematically falls back on basic ideas like "the power of the human spirit" too often.