LogFAQs > #986456251

Good guesses, but not quite obscure enough!

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Game #16 - Resonance of Fate (aka End of Eternity)

Its a common refrain among hardcore JRPG fans to wish for games in the genre to try doing things a little more differently sometimes. Smaller casts with characters that dont even approach an anime aesthetic, a plot that doesnt revolve around saving the world, show-dont-tell writing that respects players intelligence and ability to figure things out, and innovative combat that requires some thought even in standard mob fights.

Well, Tri-Ace did all that a decade and a half ago, and nobody cared.

Granted, there's some context there. Resonance of Fate (later retitled to End of Eternity for some reason, as that names somehow even less creative and evocative) came out at nearly the exact same time as Final Fantasy XIII, and though it's sometimes easy to forget given how harshly opinions later turned against it, that was a hotly anticipated release. This weird gun RPG had no chance, and it's a damn shame. Even among folks who have played it, though, it's got a well-earned polarizing reputation, so Im not going to try and claim it wouldve been some smash hit with better timing.

Anyway, RoF takes you to a steampunkified Earth in the distant future, where pollution has done what pollution does and forced the small amount of leftovers of the human race onto a giant mechanism called Basel. The core of this mechanism, referred to as Zenith, has essentially managed to purify itself such that Basels residents arent affected by the toxic atmosphere while within its walls, but in turn, this system has gained complete control over peoples lives and can, in a literal deus ex machina, intervene in any and all goings-on to decide who survives and who dies. This is immediately established in the opening cutscene, where a boy named Zephyr has had a psychotic break resulting in a murderous rampage. Vashyron, a bounty hunter contracted to eliminate him, defeats him after a brief battle, sticks a pistol in his mouth, fires twice And nothing happens. Zenith has declared that Zephyr lives on, for reasons unknown.

Vash, having been similarly chosen in the past, takes the kid under his wing, who later pays the favor forward in a sense by saving a girl named Leanne from a long walk off a high bridge. Player control picks up two years after that, the triumvirate having become a mercenary band of some renown that will take on any odd job brought to them, whether its a kid looking for their missing dolly or one of Basels ruling Cardinals enlisting them to take out a troublesome gang. Living in their appropriately named Sweet Home corner of the city, they are something like a family, but they dont talk about much other than their work.

My opening paragraph hardly does justice for the lack of regard this game seems to have for standard JRPG conventions. Those three Hunters you start the game with, for example? Theyre all youll ever get. No more party members to make our merry band even more merry or to provide an easy target for exposition - the first indication of RoFs minimalist approach to storytelling. The plot is similarly offbeat. It borders on slice-of-life for half the runtime or more; our main characters only ever gain a vague idea of what the antagonists are doing, and they barely care. When they do inevitably get pulled into the grand plans later, the conflict really boils down to the trio just wanting to be left the hell alone. Nothing they do makes any material difference to society or the world, and the plot mostly happens around them as they take on their various missions to simply survive, and big beats only happen when circumstances periodically lead the antagonists (who are, by the way, a huge distance away from being objectively evil in any way) to come after them.

The battle system, as is often the case with Tri-Aces creations, is another highlight, both for being fun for the entirety of the games 50ish-hour runtime and for being completely unlike anything else youll see in JRPGs. Fights in Resonance of Fate place you into fully 3D battlefields operating under a mix of turn-based and real-time components - basically, take as much time to plan as you want, but as soon as you start moving or preparing an attack, all bets are off, and your foes will start blasting. Thats not a figurative term, either. As a result of Westerners being one of the primary target audiences, everything revolves around guns here. Besides that, the main gimmick is that machineguns deal sky-high damage, but thats automatically healed over time and cant deal killing blows. It has to be converted into Direct Damage by subsequent hits from a handgun or grenades, which will otherwise only tickle. Both types of weapons have to be charged before each attack as well; the closer you are to your target, the faster the charge, and the more charge completed, the more damage dealt, but you will very often be interrupted if you try to employ this method regularly.

Therefore, most of the time, the only reliable way to make real headway in a fight is to use Hero Actions, which allows one of your combatants to run across the environment from one set point to another. During these movements, theyre effectively invincible unless they run into an obstacle, they can leap high into the air to access different weak points or reach a better tactical position, and guns charge more quickly and can be fired multiple times. If your positioning is precise enough, you can even build up ultra-powerful Tri-Attacks, which let all three characters unleash on their opponents at once. The drawback is that these actions consume a limited resource (Bezels) that A) also effectively acts as a shared health bar and B) is only restored by killing an enemy or at least destroying one of their body parts. A skilled player, then, is one who is using a Hero Action on almost every available turn and ensuring theyre able to regain a Bezel, on average, with each one. Its an esoteric design with too many additional intricacies to go over here, but suffice it to say that the in-game tutorial is a necessity despite technically being optional. Its rare that RoFs main story will throw a truly difficult fight at you, and even the toughest optional encounters (aside from the post-game dungeon) wont often take more than a few tries, but they will all seem impossible if you dont start with a firm grasp of the mechanics.

(cont'd in next post)