Final Fantasy Resonance, the series’ first HD-2D game and its first turn-based entry in years, has found its audience fast. Market analysts at Alinea Analytics estimate that it sold through 400,000 copies in under five days from its October 22 launch, split almost evenly between PS5 at 48.8 percent and Steam at 48.6 percent, with Xbox at 2.6 percent. That adds up to about $20 million in revenue, 55.3 percent of it on PlayStation, 41.6 percent on Steam and 3.1 percent on Xbox. The figures are Alinea’s estimates, not Square Enix’s, and they leave out the Switch and Switch 2 versions entirely, so the real total is higher.
The reception is the other half of the story. Alinea puts the game’s user reviews at 4.8 out of 5 on PlayStation and Xbox, and its Steam user score at 97 percent positive, with Chinese-language reviews at 95 percent. On Monday afternoon, five days after launch, Steam showed 23,390 people playing at once.
A quarter of the 650,000 demo players bought the game
Square Enix put out a demo on September 3, and Alinea credits it with much of the launch. The demo reached more than 650,000 players, 342,000 on PlayStation and 311,000 on Steam, and about one in four of them went on to buy the full game. Most demos convert in the low teens. Around 45 percent of the people playing Resonance now had played the demo first, and the demo is still pulling new players in after release: about 100,000 Steam users downloaded it for the first time after the game had already launched, and 62,700 played it for the first time in that window, in the middle of a Steam Next Fest full of competing demos.
Resonance is a Brave Exvius story told in Octopath’s art style
Resonance is a reimagining of the first story arc of Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, the 2015 mobile game, rebuilt in the HD-2D style Square Enix introduced with Octopath Traveler: pixel-art sprites on 3D environments with depth of field and dynamic lighting. It is developed by Square Enix with Lancarse and sells for $49.99 on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Switch and Switch 2. Combat is classic turn-based Final Fantasy, with an Attack, Defend, Items and Escape menu, a stagger system and a party of four. The cast includes Rain, Lasswell and Fina from Brave Exvius alongside guest characters from across the series, including Cloud and Gilgamesh.
Alinea’s sentiment analysis says players consistently praise the return to turn-based combat and describe the game as a love letter to the series’ roots. Most buyers so far have played a Final Fantasy game before, especially on PlayStation, which the analysts read as a core audience that had been waiting for exactly this kind of release.
The numbers make a case for more turn-based Final Fantasy
The analysts’ conclusion is the one Final Fantasy fans have been making for a while: Square Enix left a large group of JRPG players behind when the mainline series moved toward action, and Resonance’s launch, alongside the success of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, shows that audience is still there and still buying. Square Enix has already said it is taking Final Fantasy fully multiplatform. Alinea expects the company to balance its MMO, high-fidelity remakes and big-budget mainline games with more HD-2D originals and remakes, and reads the signals as pointing toward a big-budget turn-based Final Fantasy eventually.
For now, Resonance is a modest launch by mainline standards and a very healthy one for a $49.99 spin-off built from a mobile game’s story. Square Enix has not published its own sales figure. Its next quarterly results, due in November, are the first place one could appear.
