Final Fantasy Resonance Review

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Michael McWhertor is a New York-based journalist and editor with more than 20 years of experience covering games, industry events, technology, movies, and TV. Project Helix might have an eye-watering price when it launches in 2028

A couple of posts back in Guiding Key, Kotaku’s year-long Kingdom Hearts replay book club, I said that Kingdom Hearts was my first foray into Final Fantasy. I was young enough at the time that I didn’t even realize this series was meant to be a crossover between Disney and Final Fantasy until I opened up Jiminy Cricket’s journal and saw those characters listed as having originated from an RPG series I only really knew from the Final Fantasy X commercial that would play on the TV sometimes. Now that I’m an adult and have played a great deal of Final Fantasy games, it’s fascinating watching Kingdom Hearts’ opening hours with full knowledge of who these characters are as they interact with Donald, Goofy, and of course our hero Sora, who exists in between Disney’s light-hearted, family friendly vibes and Final Fantasy’s emotional highs and lows. The opening segments set in Sora’s home on Destiny Islands and in Traverse Town, the place that has essentially become a safe haven for people whose worlds are disappearing, probably best reflect what Final Fantasy fans were hoping the series would be in terms of its crossover potential.

Love And Deepspace, the mobile game that serves players sweet, romantic, and sometimes horny fantasies featuring five hunks of grade-A quality man, hasn’t wholly recovered from the social and economic battering it took when the developers released, then un-released its sixth love-interest, Valko. His fiercely loyal cadre of fans have dug in their heels, remaining committed to not spending a dime on the gacha game until he is re-released. Each new event brings hope it will be The One and while that hasn’t happened yet, this latest event seems to be actively making things worse. New in Love and Deepspace is a crossover event with Blade Runner 2049, Denis Villenueve’s 2017 follow-up to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. I can’t really tell why LADS is featuring an event tied to a Totally Fine But Otherwise Didn’t Really Need To Be Made sequel to one of the greatest sci-fi movies ever made, unless maybe this is some circuitous attempt to remind people there’s an Amazon TV show set in the Blade Runner universe coming next month. But some of the game’s messaging around the event is rubbing Valko fans the wrong way. What you touch—is it real?

Earlier this year, I embarked on a pivotal journey, one that I'm sure upon finishing will change me for good: I started watching Haikyu!! It's my first sports anime (when you're a chubby little muffin like I was, you take more interest in Not Moving over Sports), an abscess in the lexicon of genres I've dipped my toes into, one I'm rectifying after all these years. And friends, it's good eatin'. I even, incredibly briefly, floated the idea of taking up volleyball. Yet now I don't have to, and it's all thanks to a delightful, incredibly Wii Sports coded game called just volleyball. just volleyball [sic] is a sports game that is exactly what it says on the tin. You are immediately greeted, in its demo, with an avatar customising screen not too dissimilar to the Mii Channel of Wii days gone by. There's lots of hair options, some charmingly skewy face designs, you can set how your voice sounds, choose the number on your jersey, it's all good stuff. And then comes the volleyball.