Original thread hereBut it sucked, so I'm making one worth a damn because I recently picked this game back up.
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The story revolves around the city of Besel, a very steampunk environment that exists on a pillar far above earth's surface. The rich live in a platform known as "Chandelier", far above the rest of the populace, and seem pretty detached from the going ons below.
The purpose of Besel isn't quite explained until later, but humanity has been living there so long... They've forgotten why. Within Besel, however, there is a machine that acts as God - One that the public doesn't know of. On it's will, people live and die.
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Resonance of Fate, (End of Eternity for the Japanese players) is a mixture of FPS and RTS combat that results in every fight essentially playing out as one of the most over-the-top cutscenes you will ever experience.
The story follows Vashyron, Zephyr and Leanne; each of them have their own backstory and factors that tie them together, and the game explores this in a manner of story telling which often raises questions from the player rather than answer them outright.
Unlike many RPGs, the story is not force-fed to you. Most of the exposition is actually learned by talking to the NPCs in town, and through interpretation of conversations that refer back to things unexplained to the player. It is literally like watching a movie of someone's life half way through the game - They all know the plot, but you must figure it out on your own if you want to stay in the loop.
Other interesting factors of RoF is your equipment. Most games have you buying new weapons and armor as time goes on, but RoF almost entirely subverts this. You have a few weapons to choose from, but you can purchase and create special parts and accessories that literally allow you to customize the weapons.
Adding extra magazines, scopes, barrels, guards, you name it to your gun to increase or focus it's performance. In particularly hilarious examples, it's entirely possible to stack 3 sniper rifle scopes
on top of each other.
You can attach a barrel to a barrel to a barrel. Just because "lol, barrels."
The customization is pretty fantastic, and keeping your weapons properly upgraded is often a sidequest in and of itself. I find myself actively enjoying the time I spend customizing them for no other reason than it's fun to build them.
Aside from the weapons, the game also is very aware that the fights are essentially magnificent cut-scenes. There is an entire store devoted to hundreds of combinations of clothes, accessories, hair colors and what not just to make your characters look as stylish or goofy as you want them to.
Their outfits even carry over into legitimate cutscenes that involve storyline. But out of all this, the single most amazing aspect of this game to me is the combat. I cannot explain enough why RoF's combat system fills me with such joy.
At first, it feels complicated and awkward. Enemies will often knock you out of your attacks, you'll have some trouble getting used to distance and charge rates, etc... But once you get a hold of it, there is nothing more fulfilling.
Every battle becomes an interactive cutscene that you can plan out - And you often do need to plan them out, as each enemy type has their own special characteristics. You end up needing to come up with specific methods of effectively dispatching targets, then adjusting them on the fly to take into account terrain and enemy placement/grouping.
The dual-pronged damage system of Scratch Damage and Direct Damage lends an extra level of strategy as the player must balance dealing Scratch Damage (non-lethal damage which inflicts far more HP than Direct Damage) and when to use their Direct Damage (Lethal damage that deals extremely small amounts of HP, comparatively).
As an example:
A machine gun deals scratch damage, roughly 60-100HP worth of it. But even full scratch damage can't kill anything.
A handgun deals direct damage, roughly 5-20hp worth. It kills things.
But if you hit something with direct damage that has scratch damage on it, then it gets converted! So 100hp of scratch damage + 1hp of direct damage becomes 101hp of Direct Damage.
However there are other factors too - Such as stuns, gauge breaking, shield/body part breaking, ailments that affect accuracy, charge time, health, etc.
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So, I recently picked this game back up and have been re-enjoying the hell out of it. Are there any other Dollars out there who play/have heard of it?
Besides Reltair :V
