TGS 2026 Preview: Final Fantasy Resonance Is Square Enix Firing on All Cylinders

Ben Veress is a Contributing Features Writer at DualShockers based in Melbourne, Australia. He has been covering games professionally since 2021, with experience writing features, lists, reviews, and news across gaming, tech, culture, and entertainment.

Before joining DualShockers, Ben wrote for Kotaku AU, Gizmodo AU, Vice AU, Pedestrian.TV, Quest Daily, Blunt Magazine, Impulse Gamer, and Inkl. At Pedestrian.TV, he served as the publication’s sole tech and gaming writer, leading coverage of major gaming releases and events for one of Australia’s major youth publications. He holds a Bachelor of Communications in Media from RMIT University and was nominated for Best Branded Content Journalist at the Australian Samsung IT Awards in 2025.

We're on the cusp of Final Fantasy Resonance's release, which is slated to release on October 22, 2026. So it shouldn't come as a surprise to see Square Enix pull out the big guns at Tokyo Game Show this year. Not only did the company show off a fancy Château Mercian Rouge wine collab for the game, they also gave the public yet another demo to try out ahead of its launch.

After having completed the public demo while flying to Japan from Australia, I was beyond eager to sink back into the game and see what else waited in store for the game. In short, quite a bit! If the demo hadn't convinced me already that Resonance is Square doing what it does best, then the preview at TGS was the cherry on top.

Fans have been yearning for the esteemed JRPG developer to return the Final Fantasy franchise to its roots, pivoting away from its focus on action-combat to return to its beloved turn-based origins. With new IPs like Octopath Traveler and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 emerging to prove that there's still a keen interest in turn-based combat, it only added fuel to fans' desire to see Final Fantasy step back into this style of game.

From what I've played so far, it's an absolute delight. If the level of quality shown off in these demos stays consistent for the entire game, then all that time waiting for the series to return to its roots would well and truly be worth it.

For Tokyo Game Show, we were given the option to play one of two chapters: the first being a dungeon in the earlier stages of the game (around level 20), or to fight endless mobs of enemies in a Colosseum. I opted for the story dungeon, given that I had just beat the demo on the flight and was all too eager to see where the story was heading next.

This chapter drops us right in the middle of a new dungeon ascending a tower to locate the air crystal. The design of this dungeon was grandiose, and felt ripped out of Final Fantasy 12. My only regret here was that I completely missed speeding up animations to clear out the random encounters faster. We only had 20 minutes of time to play, and boy was I eager to make the most out of that time.