Resonance of Fate

This is where things get complex. Different weapons have different effects on the enemies. Handguns and grenades will cause direct damage, which slowly chips away at an opponent's health, while machineguns rapidly deal out scratch damage, which races through the health bar at a much faster rate but won't actually harm the enemy unless converted into direct damage. The idea, in other words, is to get in some heavy scratch damage early on in a turn, then transform it into the direct variety with a couple of slower revolver shots before your enemy's gauge has recharged.

On top of that, once the meter along the bottom of the screen starts to fill characters can perform Hero Actions, balletic on-rails manoeuvres in which you use a cursor to draw a straight path on the map for the character to follow, and then move them along the route, shooting as you go, and pulling off elaborately beautiful moves.

Again, there's more to think about than just selecting a channel that will move you past the maximum number of enemies. By choosing a line that sends a team-member in between his two allies, you earn Resonance Points, which allow you to pull off Tri-Attacks.

Deep breath. For Tri-Attacks, the game locks down the starting positions of the three team-members and allows them to jog around from one point of the triangle to the next, pulling off massive damage as they go. It's rounders with ballistic weaponry, essentially, and setting up the perfect triangle formation for a Tri-Attack means that, when you're performing individual Hero Actions, you'll always be keeping an eye on where your team member ends up, as well as how they get there.

It sounds needlessly complicated, but the system is actually fairly easy to get to grips with once there's a controller in your hands, and it's a pleasure to explore. Flipping between team members and switching weapons and items is a seamless process, enemies have clear recharge bars that tell you how close they are to shooting back at you, and by the time the game is throwing in complications like multiple body-parts to take out, over-charge attacks, health gauge-breaking, and Smackdown aerial moves, you'll be more than ready to deal with it all.

The result, aided by some genuinely lovely animation and punchy weapon audio, is something that feels both traditional and fresh: the random battles and general structure of levelling, dungeon-crawling, and item upgrading couldn't be more familiar, but the details always have something new to show you.

Resonance of Fate is rather beautiful, too, its towns riddled with clockwork and red-brick factories, while its overworld's floating arrangements of hexes sit on huge cogs, with massive skyscrapers rising up from them. Characters can be extensively - and insanely - customised, with everything from cat-ear Alice bands to ripped-leather jeans, and the general approach to the art style seems to be mid-nineties boyband with delusions of hard rock credibility and stylings by Liberace. It's not what you'd want to wear on a night out in Colchester, but it's hilarious to mess around with all the same.

The most worrying thing about Resonance of Fate at the moment is that name - a forgettable slice of empty grandeur that may be hard to bring to mind when you're scanning store shelves for something a bit different to play. For a game as intriguing as this to disappear at retail simply because it sounds too much like a dozen other RPGs would be something of a tragedy.