Don’t make mistakes. fantasy is an old-school game. The idea for this game came about when Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi was asked to replay Final Fantasy VI for some promotional livestream or something – and Sakaguchi realized “hey, this is actually pretty good”. A new project was born.
“At that moment, I felt like I was back to my roots,” Sakaguchi said of booting up the classic SNES game, whose story he designed and produced. “I wanted to design a game in a similar style.”
The result is Fantasian, a staunchly traditional RPG with a Sakaguchist (to coin a phrase) sense of swagger – while it’s traditional, it still wants to challenge the status quo and genre conventions. This time, however, it’s all about the art.
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When thinking about the genre for much of his career, Sakaguchi expounds on a belief that role-playing games have transformed to accommodate existing technology, becoming a narrative-driven genre. For example, the rise of action role-playing games, which he attributes to the mechanics changing to accommodate the visuals that modern technology can enable. This certainly ties in with Final Fantasy, which, in addition to Sakaguchi’s influence, has spent the last 20 years chasing the visuals of the battles of the spin-off film Advent Children.
But Sakaguchi had a different kind of revolution in mind with Fantasia. While the genre was heading in one direction, his still-remaining revolutionary spirit led him to charge in another direction—a new visual style that was deliberately more static. But no less immersive.
“From a very young age, I loved arts and crafts, and handmade elements,” Sakaguchi explains. “I think that love of handmade objects and dioramas is the foundation of a lot of what I do.”
With that as a starting point, the legendary creator began to think in detail about Gunpla, the small plastic models of Gundam mechas, and the artistry that goes into them. He made it so deliberate that it almost sounds rehearsed—though you can tell that’s not the case. It’s just passion deep down.
“For me, rather than seeing Gundam in CG or 2D animation… Gundam in its model form, or rather, Gundam’s interpretation and expression of Gundam in Gundam form, is what’s most exciting,” he continued. “I find highly detailed photos of Gundam models very appealing.
“So I think the feel and tactility of handmade things is something that I really enjoy myself. I want to bring that emotion and feeling into the world of video games.”
The result is Fantasian’s unique artistic flair. While the PS1-era Final Fantasy games used pre-rendered CG backgrounds to great effect, Fantasian puts a new spin on the idea: meticulously crafting real-world dioramas, then painstakingly photographing them, and then stitching together the real-life images to turn the intricate model railroad-style terrain built by the Mistwalker development team into an environment you can explore on screen.
The game is unique, beautiful, and eye-catching. Beyond that, the visual style of the game is deliberately slow and simple. Sakaguchi said he wanted this style to stick with people, so he gave up on elements like flashy camera moves and combat animations. I think the game is simplified to the point where it’s more akin to SNES-era Final Fantasy, but the background art settings are unique and mesmerizing.
That aside, Fantasia is a pretty damn good RPG. Avid iGamesNews readers and Donaldson stalkers will know that I’m the co-founder of RPG Site, a site dedicated to examining and celebrating the genre. Fantasia actually launched on Apple Arcade back in 2021 – a year when other outlets largely ignored it due to its exclusivity on the mobile subscription service, RPG Site gave it an excellent review and then went on to call it its Game of the Year. My point: it’s good.
This new console version, needlessly subtitled “Neo Dimension,” is essentially the same game that previously arrived on Apple Arcade in two parts — but it’s been tweaked for consoles, both obviously and not-so-obvious.
A publishing partnership with Square Enix, brokered by FF14 producer Naoki Yoshida (“a very dedicated and honest person,” says Sakaguchi), means the game is optimized for consoles and even has some Square Enix-inspired features, like the ability to switch out the new battle music piece Nobuo Uematsu composed for Fantasian for some classic tracks from Final Fantasy history. But perhaps the biggest change is in the difficulty.
The original version of Fantasian was balanced for true RPG system fanatics, which is probably why the bad guys on RPG Site loved it so much. This time around, the game comes with Normal and Hard modes – with Hard being the equivalent of the original, and Normal being balanced for more average folks.
“When I was making the game for Apple Arcade, I thought, well, it would be nice if Fantasian could be my last game. My last work. A retirement game if you will. So I made all the balance tweaks that I personally would like to see,” explained Sakaguchi, an RPG systems expert.
“Looking back now, though, the game had a very volatile difficulty curve,” he added, a cute term for how easily the game can piss you off enough in its later stages to make you smash your brand new, multi-thousand-dollar iPhone.
“When we started thinking about bringing Fantasian to a wider audience, for Neo Dimension, I thought back to the experience from FF4 to FF6 and even some of Chrono Trigger.
“I wouldn’t really say that this game is for normal, but I think that maybe there’s a different difficulty balance or difficulty curve that could better appeal to players who want to have fun and experience very satisfying encounters. So we’ve prepared for Neo Dimension by rebalancing, tweaking and customizing many of the encounters in Normal mode, rebalancing the entire game.”
The result should be a more accessible game – one that should help more people experience those lovely dioramas, the charming story, the beautiful music composed by the incomparable Nobuo Uematsu, and some good, polished, staunchly traditional RPG design.
After playing the game for about an hour on Nintendo Switch, memories of how much more fun it was on iOS came flooding back. Yes, it has the hallmarks of a game built for mobile, now compressed and crammed into a form factor that fits on a console. It’s also, no doubt, an acquired taste. But it’s lovely—a game full of personality, straight from the mind of one of the greatest RPG creators of all time. This game shouldn’t be stuck on some kind of phone-driven service, and I can’t wait for more people to play it.
Fantasian: Neo Dimension will be released on Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox Series, and PC via Steam later this year.
