fun but very frustrating gameplay, good story but contains much filler, good graphics but they get redundant...

User Rating: 6.5 | End of Eternity X360
STORY: Welcome to the world of Resonance of Fate!...and by world, I mean gigantic metal Tower called Basel, because the world itself is now post-apocalyptic and apparently not safe for humans anymore due to toxins in the air and other stuff, hence why they all now reside in this huge mysterious tower. The 3 main protagonists are Zephyr, Leanne, and Vashyron, a group of hunters. Vashyron is the oldest and leads the group, and seems to have a thing for beauty (whether it be art or the ladies). Leanna is the girl of the group and holds quite the secret. Zephyr is the youngest, and he's always up for some action, and seems to have had a troubled past.

You'd think the story would deal more with this stuff, though actually, a pretty big focus of the story at first seems to be random missions. In one chapter the main mission ends up being to go get some wine for a lady, and in another to go get a mannequin for a statue for an artist, for example. There are some deep moments in the cutscenes of these chapters, but don't really add much to the actual plot. Much of the beginning if pretty much filler with some cutscenes to foreshadow what's to come later for the actual plot.

I'm not a huge fan of filler, but it's not all bad, for this is a pretty quirky game. This game has some humorous moments and it makes me smile at times. While the story is quirky, the characters can be quite quirky as well, whether it be the child-like adult Pater, or Garglianno, a cardinal with a high sense of fashion, or there's also a bartender who is, for a lack of better terms, fabulous. While the sillyness could be entertaining, I still found myself wondering at times when the actual story would begin. Overall it's not bad, but not that great either.

GAMEPLAY: The gameplay is a bit of a mixed bag. It can be fun, and is quite action packed, but this game can also get frustrating...VERY frustrating, and at many times as well. I found myself cursing so much I could have made a 12 year old on Xbox Live blush! I'll get to that later though.

Like most other JRPG's, this game has a world map, but this game does it a bit differently. Instead of moving your characters on the map, you move via a cursor. And also, the map is made up of hexes, and many of them are closed off, and that's where you come in! You need to collect energy hexes via battles to make paths on the world map and to access many different locations. Also you might find treasure under these closed off hexes, which makes traveling the world map and uncovering more hexes enjoyable.This was a pretty neat spin on the world map and also it is much quicker to travel too.

There are of course towns on the world map where you can buy items and parts for your guns for customization, and there's a boutique in the main town where you can buy and change the clothes of your protagonists. and also there's your hunter's base in the main town where you get mail and can rest and where you finish a chapter.

When it comes to the battle system, this game is kind of like a mix between a turn based JRPG and an action based JRPG. You take turns and your turns have limits, but there is plenty of action going on, too. Each turn for your character has you start out with a full "activity gauge." Moving around the field reduces the gauge, as well as charging an attack; you have to "charge" bullets in this game, which probably sounds kinda silly. If you move around too much you won't be able too charge many bullets for an attack, meaning a weaker attack, but if you don't move around, you might be too far from an enemy, making it so you won't be able to charge an attack as quickly as you could have if you were closer. So simply moving around the field can sometimes require a tiny bit of strategy.

In this game there are two types of damage in this game, direct damage and scratch damage. Handguns and grenades deal direct damage, which is what depletes the enemy's health bar. Scratch damage is dealt by machine guns, and builds a blue bar on an enemy's health bar. When an enemy takes direct damage, any scratch damage it has built up becomes direct damage. For example, 20 direct damage + 80 scratch damage = 100 direct damage. And my cool little equation here isn't too far off, because direct damage is pretty miniscule in this game, so believe me, you will NEED to deal scratch damage.

A critical part of the battle system is the hero gauge, which allows you to do hero actions which is when you run from one designated point to another and can shoot enemies multiple times and jump up to hit multiple "body parts"to try to take down an enemy's body parts quicker. But don't get reckless with them, for if your hero gauge runs out, you get into "critical condition", where you are weaker, start losing your health bar, move slower, and cower and run like a sissy...I'm not even kidding or exaggerating at all. Once in this state, you're pretty much screwed, unless conditions in the battle are set up in your favor, which unfortunately doesn't seem to happen most of the time. So doing a hero action is nice, but is very risky. Though you can always regain a bezel when you take down an enemy or one of it's "body parts"(some enemies have body parts that have seperate health bars).

The hero gauge is made up of "bezels", and each bezel is made up 4 shards. you get a bezel shard when you beat a chapter boss, or sometimes when winning a battle in a red "dangerous" hex on the world map, or sometime uncovered treasures on the world map will give one. Everytime a character reaches 0 scratch damage, you'll lose a bezel for every 1,000 HP that character has, and all the resulting broken bezel shards fly in different directions, the character''s scratch damage goes fills up again (unless in critical condition), and to add salt to the already painful wound, enemies can pick up your bezel shards and regain health!

Those are the basics of the battle system, pretty much. As you can see there is alot of strategy involved, so much so that without checking out the battle tutorial at the battle arena, you'll probably have troubles defeating even the simplest enemies; this game can challenge you from the very beginning!

And the game continues to stay very challenging throughout pretty much the whole game. Sometimes you'll be able to blast through battles without too much difficulty, but plenty of other times you'll be struggling to take down a foe or foes. There's a retry option, but it costs some money. It isn't much at first; you might have 90,000, and it might cost maybe 1,000, but if you are really struggling, that 1,000 could build up to maybe 10,000 or maybe even worse, depending on how rough you're having it. Not only do they make this game very challenging, they make it so you lose money for having to retry just to learn an effective strategy against a strong foe or strong group. How much salt must they add on this agonizing wound!?

I feel as though Sega went out of their way to make this game extremely difficult and enraging.The whole "lose a bezel per every 1,000 HP" was unnecesary and only made the game more frustrating than it needed to be; because of this leveling up and gaining more health actually has a consequence, maybe not THAT big of a consequence, since more health means it takes more damage for you to reach zero scratch damage, but dammit, leveling up should always be completely positive. I should go from 3,000 HP to eventually 4,000 HP and be able to think "awesome! More Health!" not "great, now I'm going to start losing 4 bezels instead of 3...". Leveling up loses a sense of progress this way. Also, enemies don't have a critical condition like you. Some enemies might get weaker when you take down a specific body part, but they still have access to all their moves even if some are weaker (where you lose hero actions), and they don't become slower and run around like scared chickens, which means you have more to be cautious about. And then there are times where you may face a group of enemies that outnumber you, and are close to your level or equal to it, which means the odds are really stacked against you. All this makes winning some battles a real pain in the ass and turns it into a pretty big trial-and-error game (which is not my favorite kind of game), but when you FINALLY win that extremely hard battle, it does feel quite rewarding...usually anyways. If you're like me, you'll sometimes just be bitter and think "damn, about time that ***** goes down..."

Another thing that makes things difficult is that once you enter a dungeon, you cannot go to the main menu to change equipment, weapons, items, whatever, since each room in a dungeon is a battle screen. Which means if you get close to the dungeon's boss and realize there is a some other gear that would be more helpful that you don't have equipped, tough luck, either try to finish the dungeon as is, which could very well end up being difficult with your currently equipped gear, or just retry the WHOLE dungeon again with the different gear equipped (god that wound just stings SO BAD from all the salt right now!). This is just highly inconvenient.

PRESENATION: The graphics are very good in this game, but the problem is, it gets quite repetitive after a while. You're in a post-apocalyptic world and all the action takes place in a giant metal tower, so you better get used to the color gray, because you'll be seeing it alot! The game looks good at first, but it gets dull and redundant after a while.

The music is decent, not very memorable overall, but still decent overall.

OVERALL: overall, this game is not bad and is good, it's just some frustrating gameplay elements and frustrating trial-and-error gameplay held it back from being a truly amazing experience. It also would have helped if we got into the real story more in the first half of the game than we did the mostly random, non-plot related missions, and if the scenery didn't start to bore me after a while. But there is still some fun to be had and there were some neat ideas, and the frustration can lead to a nice rewarding feeling.