Brave Exvius units in the FINAL FANTASY RESONANCE demo, three days in

The FINAL FANTASY RESONANCE demo went up on Steam on September 3. That evening, Esther and Tsukiko from Brave Exvius were standing in the Mitra item shop with their own sprites, their own stats and a Resonance. The first commit of this project is timestamped 18:15; the first working install landed at 19:51; the first build with their own Brave Exvius animations instead of borrowed art at 21:09. Three days later there is a Windows app, FFR Vision Studio, that lets anyone do the same with 1,541 Brave Exvius units and 3,932 looks, no tools to install and nothing to compile.

Download: ffbe.luminest.io

What it does

You pick a unit. The app downloads that unit's sprite pack, shows its animations (idle, attack, magic, limit burst, victory), and drops it into your mod.

You give it abilities and passives from the demo's own library by dragging them onto the four awakening tiers, set its stats (or copy a vision the game already has), and build its Resonance from one of the demo's cinematics with the unit's own limit-burst motion playing inside it.

Press GO. The app builds the mod, backs up whatever was in the game's mods folder, copies three files in, and the next time you start the demo the unit is sold in the Mitra item shop. "Restore the original game" puts everything back the way Steam installed it.

The Advanced studio, which opens in the browser from the app, is the modder's side: importing a unit's Brave Exvius kit, sprite settings, animation and effect edits.

Why this took a day and not a year

I want to be clear about where the speed came from, because it was not from me. Brave Exvius is a game that has ended, and the only reason its units could be lifted into a demo that released last week is that people kept the game's data and art alive and documented long after there was any reason to.

• The Exvius wiki and its datamine tools. The wiki community, and the datamine parsers written for its upkeep, are where every unit's kit, limit burst, stats and roles come from, including the file maps and keys that make the JP client's archives readable at all. When I needed a unit's numbers, the answer was already a JSON file someone had been maintaining for years.
• FFBE Equip. The equipment and unit database behind ffbeequipnext.com is the second data source, and it is what made GL and JP units reconcilable into one list with English names.
• The sprite tooling. The animator and sheet-assembler projects that decoded Brave Exvius's sprite format (the cgg part tables and cgs animation scripts) years ago meant I did not have to reverse a single sprite format on day one. My converter reads exactly what those tools documented and writes the demo's SpriteStudio 6 format instead.
• The preservation dumps and the archive tools. Complete exports of the JP client's unit archives, the CRI archive tooling, and the extractor fork that handles Brave Exvius's per-file encryption are why all 3,932 looks exist as files today, including the last units JP ever released. The English-patch groundwork on the JP memorial edition gave the JP-only units readable names.
• The Unreal modding community. UE4SS, UAssetAPI, retoc, repak and CUE4Parse are the reason a UE 5.6 game with unversioned properties could be read, edited and repacked on release day. The studio's engine is a thin layer on top of them.

If you worked on any of those, this mod is yours as much as mine. Thank you.

How it works, in one paragraph

Every Brave Exvius unit becomes a vision row in the demo's own data tables, cloned from a template vision so the level curve, the command list and the shop entry already fit. The sprite sheet is re-cut into the animations the demo's battle sequences call (idle, command, attack_A, LB1 and so on) and cooked as a SpriteStudio project. Abilities are the game's own; the studio only grants them. A Resonance is a copy of one of the demo's cinematics with the template unit's voice muted, the unit's own limit-burst motion in the LB1 slot, and a mechanics row you choose (physical or magical, element, targets, hit count) with the description written for you. The whole thing packs into three files under FFRS/Content/Paks/~mods.

Where it stands, honestly

• Of the demo's six Resonance cinematics, three actually play the unit's limit-burst motion (Tronn's, Leah's and Charlotte's). The other three belong to their owners' hand-made animations; picking them gives you the owner's cinematic with your unit standing in a cast pose. The app now says so next to each choice.
• Long limit bursts (some run six or seven seconds) are longer than the cinematic's window, and the automatic re-timing that makes room for them is still being checked against the game frame by frame.
• Brave Exvius's own skill effects are not in yet. The effect format (a particle-system tree, not sprite frames) is decoded and Firaga has been rebuilt from it, but it is paused until it looks right against a recording of the real thing.
• Launch day tripped the host's rate limit within hours: the unit picker was fetching an icon per row from the web. Icons now ship as one small pack and every download backs off and retries.

Roadmap

1. Fix a couple of issues with some visions. Sprite pairs (Brave Shift, Super Limit Break, Overdrive units) are now one unit with two looks, and a shifted look borrows its base form's victory pose. The JP-only units released after the last datamine, Rain and Lasswell among them, are in.
2. Make the Resonance animations look better. Verify the re-timing in the game, put the sequence timeline back in the app so the animation choice is not blind, and let each unit's limit burst run its full length.
3. Import Brave Exvius skill animations and icons. The effect pipeline exists end to end (effect file to SpriteStudio actor spawned from the battle sequence); what is left is fidelity, sounds and doing it for every ability instead of one.
4. An ability dictionary. A translation table from Brave Exvius skills to Resonance skills: damage type, element, targets, hit count, break power and effects, so a unit's kit comes over as the closest thing the demo can play, with the animation from step 3 on top.
5. Custom bosses. Dark Visions and Clash of Wills bosses first.
6. Custom NPCs for side quests and for handing out visions. This may become the default way to get a vision instead of the item shop. Think of returning to the Earth Shrine and finding a soldier who says "We found this on one of the fallen soldiers. Think you should have it, commander." Or a family friend in Mitra who gives you a vision of Sophia.

How to help

Simply enjoy the game. Whether you use the mod or not, FINAL FANTASY RESONANCE is the first HD-2D Final Fantasy game, and it returns to the series' turn-based JRPG roots while this mod offers a way for fans to bring the story and characters of FINAL FANTASY BRAVE EXVIUS along with them. If you do use the mod, feedback on the community forums is appreciated.

Fan project. Not affiliated with Square Enix. FINAL FANTASY, FINAL FANTASY RESONANCE and FINAL FANTASY BRAVE EXVIUS are trademarks of Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd. Game files stay on your machine; the app only downloads its own engine and data.