Final Fantasy Resonance Looks Amazing, Do Mobius Next

“…everyone here goes off baseless assumptions – no wonder this world seems so off.”

Final Fantasy Resonance was announced during the most recent Nintendo Direct; a narrative re-telling of the story of Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, and a mechanical re-imagining of that same game’s combat and exploration, bringing it in-line with a more traditional single-player console-based Final Fantasy experience than the live-service gacha of Brave Exvius.

This is exciting!

An optimistic precedent is being set by games like Resonance; once a mobile live-service title has outlived its perceived profitability as a little slot-machine in your pocket it can be reborn as a normal game for normal smart people who like seeing more-ethically-sourced numbers going up. Last year’s Octopath Traveller 0 from Square Enix, the completely-under-the-radar Egglia: Rebirth from studio Brownies in 2022, and the upcoming Blue Reflection Quartet from Gust are just some examples of this transposition of format over the past few years.

FF Resonance’s combination of pixel-art, pixelation filters, HD-2D, and FMV give it a wholly unique mixed-media feel

I am very excited about Final Fantasy Resonance. I played the first two seasons (out of five total) of Brave Exvius during its lifespan and enjoyed it quite a bit. Along with a likeable cast of characters, excellent soundtrack, and some gorgeous pixel-art, Brave Exvius tells a fun story. Enough JRPG tropes to feel like comfort food with a healthy dose of some wild swings and twists. But where Brave Exvius does “Final Fantasy story” competently, another mobile game uses Final Fantasy as a palette to paint a much more avante-garde portrait – one that, at least in its early hours, has as much in common with a Silent Hill than a Final Fantasy.

Mobius Final Fantasy released in 2015 for iOS and Android, and later PC. Produced by Yoshinori Kitase, directed by Motomu Toriyama, and written by Kazushige Nojima, Mobius was meant to be a “console-quality” RPG in the mobile sea of casual puzzle games. The staff, even beyond the three at the helm, was made up of FFXIII alumni and people working on FFVII Remake at the time. And it shows.

Enemy assets and UI elements are lifted from FFXIII wholesale, firmly planting Mobius in a time and place. Despite coming out at similar times as the pixel-art Brave Exvius and Record Keeper, Mobius looked towards mobile’s famous “real games” like Infinity Blade for its graphical inspiration; “Console quality” means “console-quality graphics” means “normal map these high-poly character models within an inch of their life, who cares if we can only have two on screen and a big muddy skybox”. I say this lovingly. I am a lover of the idiosyncrasies of any given platform – the mobile phones of the mid 2010s are no different. Mobius understands its graphical priorities and uses the hardware to invoke the presentational sleight-of-hand of home consoles of the 2000s. Low-resolution backgrounds, forced perspective backdrops, high-poly character models with waxy faces and unflattering lighting. It’s a treat to see the aesthetics old and new clashing to find purchase. I even believe that the sparsely-populated-environments (that hope you don’t notice how small they are despite all the visual tricks they’re trying to play on you) and the suffocating liminality of it all are key to Mobius’ greatest strength; it’s a horror game.

Wol isn’t your average amnesiac RPG protag, in that he is explicitly Your Average Amnesiac RPG Protag

Or at the very least it is a deeply unsettling, uncanny world that begs you to not peek behind any of its many many curtains. It’s a world that, like the stilted inhuman dialogue and facade-like environmental design, does not want you to look too deeply at what’s around you. “Don’t you like being the hero of prophecy? Don’t you like winning the princess? Don’t you think the people who *do* try to stray from the narrative should be removed from it?”

Any press release for Mobius reads like the back of the box of Final Fantasy 1 for NES and does it an extreme disservice. Superficially, yes, you are the Warrior of Light off to save the princess and protect the world from Chaos. Early on, however, you encounter a former knight named Garland, who encourages you to not be so trusting of the hero’s prophecy that the rest of the world wishes to bind you to. In conversation with the nature of “what it means to be a Final Fantasy protagonist” is the fact that you frequently encounter other characters like you; amnesiac would-be heroes, even dressed in the same default beginning gear as you, who willingly throws themselves into the battle with Chaos only for you to watch them be slaughtered over and over and over again. It brings to mind the scene in 2022’s Stranger of Paradise where the subtext of Final Fantasy 1 is realized in gory detail; that through the countless cycles of battle between Chaos and the Warriors of Light, the Warriors only one once. The rest was millenia of slaughter after slaughter at the hands of Chaos and his minions.

Princess Sarah is a disturbing character in Mobius. Ever-cheerful, she seeks out our player character in the crowd of samey protags and assures us that we are destined to be together, that the player is the most special one. When Wol trepidatiously arrives at the castle to finally meet face-to-face the woman he’s told he will marry someday he scans the plush bedchamber and mutters under his breath, “That smell… like rot.” What follows is a conversation about destiny that leaves us untrusting of Sarah, yet Wol concludes with a vow to protect her. The next chapter sees Sarah following Wol on his adventures as they periodically find letters on the ground seemingly written by a Sarah from the future longing for Wol in their shared old age. Garland says the letters aren’t to be trusted. He also says that women are always a man’s downfall so maybe he has other things he’s sorting out. At the very least he pops in enough to remind us that we should keep our head on a swivel.

I don’t trust her. But not for the reasons Garland doesn’t. Well, for some of the reasons Garland doesn’t, just not the sexist ones.

After winning a tournament that fulfills yet another part of the prophecy, Wol asks “What would have happened at this tournament if I hadn’t shown up?” Mog responds, “…there wouldn’t be a Warrior of Light… they would’ve had to start it all over again from the first round… Maybe they’ve just been holding that tournament over and over and over until someone came along and won by default.” Wol is trapped in the anthropic principle, Silent-Hill-protagonist-ing his way through a recursive solipsistic nightmare with only a sycophantic moogle at his side. For now.

The music in cutscenes and story-heavy segments is sparse and lacking the sorts of musical hooks one might expect from a Final Fantasy, but that just anchors us further into dream-like otherworldlyness. Combat is upbeat and bombards you with big numbers and flashy effects, menus pulling you from one battle to the next with no reason to think or explore other than to further enhance your gacha-obtained cards and abilities with beautiful illustrations and references to Finals Fantasy past. Then the uncomfortable waxy face of your betrothed asks you in a stilted cadence once again to press onward through the featureless expanse before you to go do… something, I’m sure. Go kill Chaos? Or is he coming to us? Does he *want* to kill us? I thought we were like an ant to him. Whatever, the menus only let us go forward anyway.

Like FFXIII, Mobius is a story about a divine charge that we are mechanically forced to adhere to due to the linearity of the game itself. In these cases, “not to play” is certainly *a* winning move but it might not be the only one. The allusions to Final Fantasy 1 and the name Mobius itself give us a pretty obvious idea of what kind of cycle we find Wol and ourselves locked into. Without spoiling too much, the end of Season 1 of Mobius and the beginning of Season 2 show us that it *is* possible to step beyond the prophecy. It’s unfortunate that Mobius never saw a third season because the format could lend itself well to a connected-yet-anthological series of peeks into different epochs, different nodes on the mobius strip as they fold back around into each other.

Mobius Final Fantasy joins Dissidia and Stranger of Paradise as part-companion-part-deconstruction of the Final Fantasy 1 template. It’s a shame it landed on the gacha side of Square’s mobile endevours; maybe if people hadn’t complained so much that Final Fantasy Dimensions was like twenty bucks or whatever we could have had a proper episodic Mobius free from the design principles of a tiny casino. Imagining each new season building on the last as gods are dethroned, different characters stepping outside the mobius strip, new permutations of the world are given form only to be reset.

Chaos’ scale varies from scene to scene; continuity oversight, limitation of the engine, or unsettling use of his unknowable, mercurial form to establish him as a force of nature. It’s terrifying when he sets his sights on you, even more so when his true form unfurls

It’s a shame that the aesthetic of games like Mobius are perceived to have “not aged well”. No doubt the workflow for HD-2D revivals and remakes makes them a priority for Square and the effort that would need to go into making Mobius visually appealing to the average person wouldn’t be worth the squeeze – considering we haven’t seen hide nor hair of an FFXIII collection proves that they’re not interested in leaving graphics of that vintage as-is.

My greatest hope is that while the Resonance pentalogy gets released over the next few years, a game as ambitious in its narrative as Mobius doesn’t get robbed of its chance to be reborn in the new world, unfettered by the cruel live-service cycle it was born into.