Let me paint you a picture. It’s the second day of Gamescom 2026, everyone is hot and sweaty, the schedule is rapidly deteriorating as previews run late, interviewees go over their allotted times, and dashing from booth to booth adds minutes onto every single journey. I get to the Square Enix booth, only to find that – thanks to some sort of communications snafu en route – my name is not down for the slot I had carved out to play Final Fantasy Resonance. “Don’t worry,” says a smiling PR trying to keep it together, “you can play on Switch 2 if you don’t mind standing up?”

No skin off my nose; I’m going to play Resonance on Switch 2 at home anyway. This is the best kind-of preview. Thing is, I’m crammed into a room with eight PS5 units chugging away, 10 sweaty bodies all sitting and standing in close proximity to each other, and my massive backpack slung over my shoulder as I hoist the Switch 2 as close to my face as possible to see what’s going on in the middle of all the washed-out overhead lights.

Yet, in the middle of all these adverse conditions, I completely lost myself in the world of Final Fantasy Resonance. It’s absolutely spectacular. Even squinting to make out the game, chirping its merry sounds to me through a set of fairly cheap headphones, I could just taste the production values of this unexpectedly lush game. The battle system is deep, rewarding, and hard, the visuals are absolutely gorgeous, and the cameo ‘summons’ of Final Fantasy characters past and present are so ‘hype’ that I didn’t skip a single animation. I can’t wait to get this full game in my hands.

Final Fantasy Resonance, in case you aren’t aware, is a sort-of retrofitted recompilation of Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, taking the now-dead mobile game’s first story arc – named ‘Lapis’ and realigning it as a single-player, traditional RPG experience. This is very similar to what Octopath Traveler 0 did with assets from Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent. The story of Resonance centers on Rain (keeping the whole weather-based protagonist vibe alive, naturally), and his companions Lasswell and Fina, who are tasked with protecting the crystals left in the world after the Veritas of the Dark destroys one.

Very traditional Final Fantasy fare, then, with even the story harkening back to the first three or so mainline titles. But this isn’t just a simple kitbash of a mobile game, thumbed into the shape of a console title – it’s far, far more than that. It’s really only the story and the idea of summoning and equipping ‘Visions’ the ghosts of “iconic characters from the Final Fantasy series” to gain additional abilities that have made it over from the original. The graphics, the battle system, and a lot of the music is brand new. Making this the first proper HD-2D Final Fantasy game ever.

And honestly, Resonance lives up to that esteemed privilege. The demo I played at Gamescom revolved around a single dungeon, culminating in a big, hard boss fight. In an hour’s slot, I’m going to say that about 20 minutes of that were dedicated to taking down the boss. This is a proper turn-based game – there’s no ATB anywhere to be seen in Resonance. That means there’s a lovely bit of UI at the top of the screen that denotes when you’re going to attack, and when the enemy will take their turns. The big gimmick in this game is a ‘stagger’ bar; all moves inflict both damage and stagger, and you’ll need to ‘stun’ enemies by depleting the latter bar in order to disrupt dangerous attacks and open up their defences. Understanding elements, buffs and debuffs is essential to victory, it seems – you can’t just use brute strength to force your way.

Those who fight will need to use supplementary abilities conferred by the ‘Visions’, then. The demo came with the Warrior of Light (FF1), Cloud (FF7), and two Resonance-original ‘Visions’ equipped. But Noctis was hidden away in the corner of a dungeon for intrepid explorers, and was a real boon in the boss fight at the end. I twigged pretty quickly that the best way to defeat the Wind dragoon I was fighting against was to shatter his stamina with ice moves (his weakness) before pelting him with any and all Resonance moves I could – these are very flashy, very pretty ‘Ultimate moves’ that dish out tons of damage and cast buffs at the same time. Some heal, some give you an attack or defense boost, some help to reduce stamina damage for your team… you’ll need to experiment to figure out the best set-up for your party.

So, once you understand the nuances of this system, it’s easy to enter a sort-of flow state. By doing enough stamina and health damage, you can earn bonus turns for your characters – allowing more debuffs to power up whilst your best attacks whittle down the very extensive health bar of the boss. It is a real credit to this game that I stood – hot, bothered, and exhausted – in the middle of a Gamescom booth, and felt utterly transported by the unlikely simplicity of this game. Your mileage may vary, but I can totally see myself gulping down this battle system greedily, figuring out the intricacies of it and how having effectively eight movesets between your four characters is going to be exploited by some gnarly encounter design.

I actually think this game reminds me more of Octopath Traveler than it does of any other Final Fantasy – this is complementary – whilst there are echoes of the ‘Press Turn’ system from the Shin Megami Tensei series in there, too. I was tempted to write this off as a cynical, fanservice cash-in when Resonance was first announced, but I actually think there is an interesting ‘I’ve not quite seen this before’ conceit hidden in the middle of all the admittedly beautiful call-backs to FFs gone by.

On my last night at Gamescom, someone asked which game I had seen at the show was my favourite. “Final Fantasy Resonance”, I replied, without thinking. Now, a week later – after sitting and writing up lots of my appointments – I still feel the same. FF moved away from pixel graphics and, largely, from turn-based battles in 1997. I think I’ve been craving something like this since. Will the final game make good on a promise three decades in the making? I really, really hope it will.