I went into Fantasian wanting to love it. It’s the latest game from Mistwalker, the studio founded by Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, and as a Final Fantasy fan, I’m always curious what they’ll do. I enjoyed The Last Story for Wii, which they made, but I hadn’t played any of their other titles, so when I heard about a new Final Fantasy spiritual successor, I had to check it out. After getting a free trial of Apple Arcade, it was finally time.
While I haven’t played every Final Fantasy, I’ve played enough to understand how the series was changing by the time Sakaguchi left Square. His last FF game was IX, so it makes sense to think of Fantasian as a sort of “What if Sakaguchi got to make Final Fantasy X?”
And wow, where to start? Fantasian’s got what I’ll call a “modern retro” aesthetic, where, while it doesn’t have that crappy, janky feel of a typical low-budget mobile game, it’s also not a high-quality console experience by today’s standards. It’s polished, but it looks and plays more like a PS1 game that happened to get released in 2021 — and in high resolution. It’s a throwback to a time when JRPGs were simpler and more focused, and that goes beyond the visuals. There’s no super complicated menuing, no screen clutter, no simulation mechanics or complicated sidequests — no, the main ways it distinguishes itself from PS1-era JRPGs is in its visuals and battle mechanics.
For the most part, the game looks great. The dev team built all the environments as real-life models, which helps keep the budget down while giving players something they’ve probably never seen before in a JRPG. (At least, I can’t think of any others that were made like this.) Generally, it’s beautiful, but not always — a few of the areas look a little barren, blurry, or rushed. As a whole though, I appreciate this graphical style, and there’s plenty of scenic views that left me stunned. I wouldn’t complain if more JRPGs tried out this “diorama” thing.
The music’s also solid, with Nobuo Uematsu, legendary composer of early Final Fantasy games, returning for what he’s claimed is his final soundtrack. I doubt that’ll be the case, but we’ll see. At any rate, the tunes here show a marked change in style. Uematsu experiments with a lot of electronic and ambient sounds, and most of his new creations fit the game’s “scary alien technology” vibe well. I found a few of the tracks not so catchy or interesting, including, unfortunately, the main battle theme, but there’s other battle tracks that are stellar, and there’s enough good songs period that I can’t complain much. Each new area gets its own theme, and the OST as a total package is a confident evolution for Uematsu.
Fantasian controls like a PC dungeon crawler or adventure game, where you click the spot you want to move to instead of controlling your character directly. That’s good for when you’re playing on a phone, since virtual d-pads suck, but it also works well on a laptop, which I used. It’s fun sitting back, using one hand to play at your own pace — it’s almost like an interactive story book, at least when you’re not in combat.
The battle system, while obviously designed for phones, works even better on larger screens, and I’d highly recommend playing on a monitor or TV to get the best experience. It takes further advantage of touch screens by letting you line up shots by sliding your finger around, but this works just as well with a mouse. Some attacks have an area of effect, while others can be curved around enemies to hit the ones behind them. Even better, Fantasian lets you maximize via its innovative Dimengeon system.
See, Fantasian’s got random battles, but the main character, Leo, gets the Dimengeon early on, a device that lets you lets you skip random battles by capturing the monsters you would have encountered and storing them up for later. Once you hit the maximum amount of monsters, you’ll have to fight them all in one battle, and that’s when the game’s combat mechanics truly shine. Using powerful AOE attacks will get you through these battles with ease, and most players will appreciate being able to control exactly when they want to fight. It’s also optional — you can turn off the Dimengeon and play like a traditional JRPG if you want.
Beyond that, each character has a myriad of skills that are useful against certain types of enemies. There’s the standard Final Fantasy magic types, like ice, fire, and holy, but also plenty of more tech-based abilities, like force field barriers to protect your party from attacks. Party members serve unique roles in battle, and almost any combination will work for most fights. On the other hand, bosses tend to force you to figure out one of a few specific strategies that will work, like a puzzle. Brute force rarely works here — more on that later.
All the characters are fun to use, especially Ez, the game’s alchemist, who uses the various items you find to buff your party in battle. Unlike in most JRPGs with this kind of character paradigm, Fantasian impresses by actually making every item you find able to be used effectively in battle. Even late in the game, I was constantly low on materials Ez needed for his skills since I was using him so often. Thankfully, both Ez and Leo are able to steal items from enemies, which is easy to do in Dimengeon battles, since you’re eventually able to steal from multiple enemies at once. A JRPG where items and stealing don’t feel useless? It’s shocking, I know, and I’d like to see more games with this kind of effort put into their item economy.
Fantasian was released in two parts, but now that both parts are out, it’s one download and one continuous game. If you didn’t know about that, you wouldn’t be able to tell that it originally had 2 parts when playing the game now. That said, I did look up where part 1 originally ended, which is around 20 to 25 hours in. By that point, I was loving the game so far, but it pains me to say that part 1 is much stronger than what comes after.
Fantasian suffers from a serious case of bloat, and it loves to waste your time. Part 1 is fast-paced, with plot revelations coming every hour or so. It had me interested in the characters and finding out their backstories, the combat was super fun with some nice challenge, and by the time I reached part 1’s climax, I was ready to call it the Final Fantasy X I wish we’d gotten back in the day.
But, and this is a big “but”, part 2 is very long and doesn’t come close to justifying its length. It’s easily another 50 hours on its own if you like to do sidequests, and there’s not enough variety to keep things interesting. Every main quest involves going to a new area, traversing a few screens until your Dimengeon fills up, having a long, boring Dimengeon battle, then fighting a boss. This happens over and over and over and over and over and… you get the point. On top of this, once you hit level 35, experience gained from enemies below your level gets reduced drastically, to the point where Dimengeon battles are a waste of time unless you’re doing a story quest. You CAN still gain levels from these fights — technically — since there’s up to 50 enemies in each, but the game loves to waste your time with slow, unskippable battle animations that looked cool during the first few hours but feel aggravating once you’ve seen them hundreds of times. Plus, it’ll take several of these long fights just to gain one level.
Sidequests, on the other hand, usually involve trekking back through areas you’ve already been, most of which quickly fill up your Dimengeon with trash mobs that give barely any XP yet take a long time to get through. This isn’t a problem during the first part, which was mostly linear and had a nice, snappy pace, but part 2 is wide open, with several quests available at once, and the tedium of combat wears you down once you hit hours 30, 40, and beyond. It wouldn’t be so bad if your XP gains weren’t cut after level 35, but this is padding, plain and simple. It’s the same thing over and over again, except when it comes to boss battles.
Oh boy, I’ve never flipped my opinion so hard about a single aspect of a game like I did with Fantasian’s boss battles. For all of part 1 and most of part 2, each boss provides a unique challenge, where you have to pay careful attention to what kind of attacks a boss uses, how much damage they do, what their weaknesses are, and how to best damage them. They’re tough and can deal a lot of damage, but they’re fair in the respect that they give you just enough warning to deal with most attacks. Even still, I died during several boss fights when trying to figure out what strategy to use, but I was usually able to beat them on my second try. That’s a perfect amount of difficulty. It’s also cool that you can switch out party members at any time, a la Final Fantasy X, and I had a blast for most of the game.
Deep into part 2, however, the bosses become ridiculous wastes of time. Seemingly every boss gets party wipe attacks that will absolutely steamroll you unless you’re using a very precise and particular strategy. You no longer get any freedom to experiment: for the majority of bosses, only one or maybe two party setups are even capable of defeating the boss, and usually only by the skin of your teeth. I don’t see the fun in that. Having a super tough boss that you can barely scrape through every once in a while is fine, but that’s how every boss in the late game works. Each battle feels like it could be a final boss battle, and these make up practically all of the game’s content. Again, all of part 2 consists of walking through a few screens, watching a cutscene, and fighting a boss… Then you repeat that, dozens of times.
Compare this to, say, the Romancing SaGa games, which are known for their difficulty, yet I love them. Most of those games’ bosses are capable of wiping your party, too, but you get plenty of ways to mitigate this, whether by using different formations, armor, or. In Fantasian, if a late game boss uses Holy attacks, you MUST use Holy-resistant gems on all of your party members; otherwise, you’re dead. No amount of strategy will allow you to tank their hits, so you’re effectively working with one less accessory slot per character. There’s no way to avoid this, since you can’t grind due to the experience cut.
Worse, each of these boss battles is super long. You’ll spend a half an hour minimum on each attempt due to all the cutscenes before battling, long combat animations, and the slow pace of battle. Even after looking up strategies, I was struggling with these fights after the 50-hour mark, and after trying one boss four times in a row, I couldn’t take it. I had to put Fantasian down, as I wasn’t having fun anymore. As someone who can put up with a lot of bullshit in games and has never dropped a JRPG before, that’s saying something. This is the first JRPG I’ve started and don’t plan to finish, and I don’t even mind. I got all the way to the final area of the game, then read up on how many bosses and battles were left — it’s a lot — and I say, “no, thank you.” This game is probably around 70 hours if you want to do everything, but I don’t see why you would.
Besides the boss battles wasting your time, the story is practically non-existent in part 2. What started as an interesting, albeit somewhat generic tale of lost identity, friendship, and destiny ends up sputtering out once part 2 begins. It’s as if the devs told the story they wanted to tell in part 1, then had no idea how to fill a full-length game. It’s a shame, because you don’t gain the ability to unlock new skills until the very end of part 1, and the game doesn’t open up at all until part 2, so I don’t even recommend playing just the first part. It’s fun but not satisfying on its own.
Part 2 is filled with flashbacks that flesh out each party member, but there’s not enough forward momentum to make me care about these backstories. Only Leo and the first two characters you meet after the prologue, Kina and Cheryl, were interesting, and Fantasian makes the mistake of many Final Fantasy games before it by having a huge cast for no good reason. I would have preferred the game focus on the core three and expand their skills even further, rather than trying to be like JRPGs of old with eight party members, most of which are shallow. On top of that, most characters share about half their combat skills with another character, so there’s not as much variety as you’d assume from a first glance. For example, Kina’s a great healer, but so is Prickle, and they use the exact same healing skills. Ez is great at buffing, but so is Tan. Cheryl is a strong Ice attacker, but Valrika is, too. It is nice to have a second option you can swap in to fill the same role when a character dies, but that’s not enough to justify the size of the cast.
Fantasian might be worth checking out if you’ve got dozens of hours to spend, or if you want to play through part 1’s content, but beyond that, it’s hard to recommend. It’s just not worth the time it asks from you.
That’s all for this month. See you at the end of the year, when I’ll discuss Ever Oasis for the 3DS.
