Final Fantasy games have been rendered in 3D engines for far longer than they have in 2D, but the new trailer for Final Fantasy: Resonance wants you to imagine a world where Square Enix’s risky 1997 gambit never happened. What would Final Fantasy look like if it stuck to its 2D pixel-art guns? We’d probably have gotten the HD-2D aesthetic a lot sooner, but regardless, this reimagining of the mobile gacha game Fantasy Brave Exvius continues to look stunning:
While the new trailer doesn’t outright say it, it heavily suggests that viewers should use their imagination to dream up a world without a 3D Final Fantasy 7. It was the first game in the series to shift to 3D graphics, which were in their infancy back then. It was a high-stakes move for Square–which had not yet merged with Enix–and it required a shift to CD-ROM so that the idea of pre-rendered backgrounds and high-fidelity audio could be realized.
The budget was also enormous, and Square was essentially betting its entire future on a single project that required its developers to quickly learn how to operate in a 3D space and scale up to meet the demands of an ambitious game. Fortunately, Final Fantasy 7 made it across the finish line, and the wow factor of it made it an instant best-seller–a game whose legacy can still be felt to this day and has been the focus of a grand remake trilogy.
Final Fantasy 7 characters would also appear many years later in Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, provided you were lucky enough to summon them when you burned through tickets. One of the cool things about the mobile game was that these high-level pulls came with CG-rendered movies whenever they activated their Limit Break attacks, with Cloud and Sephiroth looking especially impressive in action. Final Fantasy Resonance won’t include characters from the Final Fantasy franchise, as all those free-to-play mechanics have been stripped out.
Instead, the focus is on the core cast of original characters–Rain, Lasswell, Fina, Lid, Nichol, and Jake–as they set out to protect the Crystals scattered across the world from the mysterious Sworn Eight of Paladia. It’ll be coming to PC and console on October 22, but if you’re planning to grab it for Switch, you’ll want to think carefully which Nintendo handheld you choose it for, given Square Enix’s lack of upgrade paths for its HD-2D games. It’s not the first time that Square Enix has resurrected one of its mobile games for new platforms, and we’d love to see the company bring more of its dead mobile projects back to life.