Earth is dead. Well, that might be a bit dramatic. Earth is dying. Basel, the giant machine humans built to sustain the planet, has become the last remaining city, and the few humans still remaining live on the construct, which is also slowly falling apart. In other words, the future kind of sucks. This is the setting for Resonance of Fate (or Edge of Eternity in Japan), tri-Ace's action RPG due for release in the spring of 2010.

Living on Basel isn't easy. Besides the end of humanity being an overwhelming concern, gangs and monsters wander the machine, attacking anyone who dares stray off the beaten path. In Resonance of Fate, you will stray off the beaten path. To do so, you need to unlock "Hexors", which grow the world map. It looked reminiscent of Final Fantasy X's leveling grid, but obviously serves a different purpose. As expected, there's some strategy in using the Hexors in different ways, and different items can be found in different spots. Wandering into a dangerous spot might begin combat, which is where Resonance of Fate looks to truly stand out.



At a glance, the combat looks very much like Valkyria Chronicles'. Everything is at a stand-still until the player moves, and when the player moves everything begins. It's about gunplay, and characters aren't going to be running around in tight shirts and wielding oversized swords. It's the future. People use guns. Different people use different guns, and different guns do different things. Some weapons, for instance, do an entirely different type of damage, called "Scratch Damage." Scratch damage shows up as blue, and usually depletes more of an opponent's health bar than regular damage. The difference, however, is that scratch damage doesn't actually do any damage until the character is hit with  a regular attack, and will heal over time. That means equipping an entire party (of up to three people) with scratch damage-dealing sub-machine guns isn't the best idea, since enemies will never actually succumb to their wounds.

Making the already appealing gunplay even better is the special meter, which fills up as combat continues. Once filled, players can unleash the meter for an Invincible Attack. After choosing a direction to run, the character acrobatically (and epically) charges, doing flips, splits, and slides, all the while shooting more ammunition than they possibly could hold at everything on screen. To put it in as plain of terms as possible, it looks like if John Woo were to direct a ballet of death while on on acid.

All of that is well and good, but there's a little more - a hook. The machine, Basel, might not be able to save the Earth, but it hasn't giving up on humanity. It wants to control our fate, and that's where the story gets very interesting. The game is still a ways away, but I'm already salivating at the thought of playing Resonance of Fate in spring of 2010. Everything we saw was fantastic, from the brilliant gameplay mechanics to the nearly unbelievable graphics. While I may not have been too impressed with tri-Ace's Infinite Undiscovery, I'm definitely anxiously awaiting this title's release.