Getting your enemies airborne is equally important. When airborne, you will sometimes have the opportunity to stop an arrow rotating around a circle; stop it in the right place and you get a bonus shot, which means you can fire repeatedly once your weapon is charged until the enemy hits the ground again. Timing is once again essential: wait until the enemy is just about to hit the ground so you have the maximum possible charging time, then let rip.

Airborne enemies are also susceptible to gauge breaking – where the enemy’s HP bar is split up into sections that can’t be recovered once depleted (much like some FPS games) – and smackdowns – which restore your bezels to full.

After all that, you may be relieved to know that you have infinite ammo except for special weapons, and there is no mana to worry about. The level of strategy cannot be adequately explained in text: you have to pay attention to many bars at the same time: your bezels, your party’s HP, your enemies’ HP, your enemies’ charge, your resonance points, your charge time, and the amount of turn you have left (moving and firing reduces a bar indicating when your turn will end). Placing your characters properly, using cover, skipping turns when appropriate, selecting the right weapons, using well-timed Hero Actions, deciding when to expend bezels, deciding which enemies to focus on, getting airborne at the right moments, deciding which body parts to go for, and even switching targets mid-action and maximising your resonance points by intersecting your Hero Actions with the other two characters’ locations are all absolutely essential to winning.

What this leads to is a situation where there are only a small number of mobs in each dungeon, but you must learn the best way to take them down over many, many attempts, perfecting your strategy bit by bit for each mob area individually. Going in with all guns blazing is nothing but certain death. The result is that defeating bosses in Resonance of Fate is simply one of the most rewarding feelings you’ll ever have playing a video game. It is truly exhilarating to take down a boss after an hour of trial runs and preparation, and gives a really, really satisfying sense of achievement that you will find in very few other games.

The game map is reasonably big, but as I had clocked up 14 hours after 3 chapters, and with 16 chapters to play through, Resonance of Fate is epically long and will keep you busy for absolutely ages, if you can get into it.

A word on save points. You can only save at your home or at station hexes you have constructed. Dungeons are split into areas and you can suspend the game after each area is complete and return to it later, but be prepared to spend 2-3 hours between saves at times. I really think the game should let you save during a battle, because once you’re half-way through a dungeon, you can’t get out and you can’t save until you’ve cleared the current area, which can take many attempts. Other than the graphics, this is one of the game’s only flaws.

As in Borderlands, weapons in this game can be customized and there are an insane number of options available. Each weapon has various module slots of different shapes, to which you can attach any item with a matching shape. Scopes, magazine expansions, fire rate tweaks, you name it, it’s here. There is a trophy for adding 10 customization modules to a single gun, to illustrate how much I’ve understated the potential here.

All the other things you would expect are here: status effects are present and correct, characters have attributes and although there are no classes, the way you equip your characters basically determines how they will perform. Plenty of special weapons like hand grenades and molotov cocktails are at your disposal. Once you hit chapter 6 you will have access to tinkering which will let you craft and melt down your own guns to your own specifications.

Pros:

• Brilliant combat system
• Endless weapon customization
• Very long with a good mixture of story missions and side quests
• Pretty but not amazing graphics and soundtrack

Cons:

• Extremely steep learning curve that will put off many players
• Very hard; dedication and perseverance will be required

Just as with White Knight Chronicles, I feel that this game is under-rated in the media and will probably slip past most people without being noticed. Resonance of Fate is definitely for hardcore RPG fans only, but at the same time the map and combat systems make it substantially different from anything you’ll have likely played before.

In my score I have rated the game as if you are an RPG fan and know what you’re getting into here. For the rest of you it’s worth a 7. You must have supreme patience, but if you can handle that, I thought it was bloody brilliant.

Score: 9/10

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