Final Fantasy Resonance went hands-on for press recently, and the early word is that this might be Square Enix's most concentrated nostalgia play yet. Game Rant's preview frames it as an RPG for what they call Final Fantasy sickos, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment, because I am exactly the audience they're describing.

The pitch, from everything in the preview, is an HD-2D RPG that treats Final Fantasy's history as one big toybox. If you've played Octopath Traveler, you know the visual language: pixel sprites set into diorama-style environments with lighting that makes everything feel handcrafted. Resonance leans into that same look, and the hook is how much of the series' DNA it pulls in, with callbacks and winks aimed at people who've been around the block.

This is the part that has me leaning forward. I've been raiding in FFXIV for years, and my co-worker TJ Jackson will tell you (loudly, in the Discord, unprompted) that the series' soul lives in the SNES era. He played FFV in Japanese in the 90s before any of us could read a word of it. We have a running argument about whether modern Final Fantasy still carries the torch or just references it. A game like Resonance feels built specifically to end that argument by refusing to pick a side, stirring the whole pot together instead.

What comes through in the hands-on is that the combat works as an actual game, with the nostalgia riding shotgun. The systems apparently reward you for knowing the series' history without locking out newcomers who don't catch every reference. That balance is hard. Most anniversary-style projects tip one way or the other, either a museum piece you admire from behind glass or a generic RPG with Chocobo stickers slapped on it. The preview suggests Resonance is trying to be a good game first and a tribute second, which is the only order that works.

The HD-2D style is well suited for the job, too. Those sprites carry decades of muscle memory. You see a pixelated Black Mage shuffle forward and your brain fills in every version of that character you've ever commanded. It's the same reason the Pixel Remasters landed so well for so many people. The format does half the emotional lifting before a single line of dialogue lands.

The open question, and Game Rant raises it too, is depth. Preview sessions only show so much. Whether Resonance's systems hold up across a full campaign, whether the callbacks keep feeling like love letters instead of busywork, none of that is fully answerable from a hands-on build. Square Enix has shown real care with its legacy lately, but Final Fantasy fans have also been burned by pretty things that went nowhere.

Still, I'm choosing optimism. A game that assumes its audience has been paying attention for decades is a bet on long-term community, and that's a bet I always respect. It says your history with this series matters, that the hours you poured into it were noticed somewhere. Community is the whole reason most of us stuck around this long anyway, so a game built on that assumption already speaks my language.

So, fellow sickos: what's the one callback Resonance has to include for you? Mine's a moogle shop with dialogue that's slightly too rude for its own good. Some things are sacred. TJ will say it's the FFV job system, and for once, he might be right.