A game met with much anticipation as it's been hinted to be their final game project, Fantasian sees Hironobu Sakaguchi return to write and produce and Nobuo Uematsu to compose the soundtrack. But does it serve as a high note to go out on for two legendary names of the industry, or does this final fantasy just not bring the magic?
Mistwalker of course was founded by Hironobu Sakaguchi after his departure from Square Enix in 2003, and while they did produce a few decently-received games for the XBox 360 and Wii, they hadn't really done a high-profile release since 2011, mostly relegating their output to lower-stakes mobile releases. Fantasian seemed to mark a return to form as a narrative-driven cinematic RPG reminiscent of the old Final Fantasy games, and despite being exclusive to Apple Arcade managed to amass a decent following - enough for Square Enix themselves to codevelop a port with Arzest and give it a wider release on consoles, in effect bringing Sakaguchi and Uematsu's careers full-circle.
Fantasian was also a unique turn for Mistwalker in many respects. The game was developed in Unity, and rather than simply using CGI backgrounds they actually built dioramas and digitized photos of them for the game, giving them a more realistic yet slightly surreal touch compared to the Playstation-era Final Fantasies. That said all the characters in the game are still CGI models, so there is a definite and slightly awkward contrast there. The Neo Dimension port adds voiceover in both English and Japanese, and it's well done in spite of the often-clunky dialog. The game also invokes Lost Odyssey's Memories with its amnesiac protagonist and frequent flashback scenes told in a sparse, very wordy style with scrolling text effects and voiceover, which are easily the best part of the storytelling.
In terms of design it's a fairly streamlined turn-based RPG experience, with turn-based combat, a small handful of abilities per character, and items to inflict one-off elemental damage or restore HP or MP. A bit like Chrono Trigger is the fact that most abilities have given ranges - a radius around the cursor or a straight line - and will hit any enemies in their path. Spells can be angled into curved shots to hit multiple enemies - a useful tactic in many battles, and particularly battles with dozens of enemies. Exploration is also fairly standard fare, having you wander through the labyrinthine environments in search of hidden treasures, which are often locked behind chests that require specific types of single-use keys. The sudden camera shifts, paired with the fact you keep moving in the same direction after one unless you completely take your thumb off the stick and then move again, can get a bit jarring, but there is a convenient minimap in the menu to prevent it from becoming disorienting.
Yes, dozens. There are frequent battles where you'll fight many enemies at once. Sometimes these are boss battles, but more often they tie into another mechanic called the Dimengion Machine. Essentially, what this does is store up to 30 (later 40 or 50) enemies you'd normally fight in random encounters, which you can then fight in one big marathon at any time you choose; typically about 10 will be on the field at time, with enemies replacing defeated ones until you've cleared them all. They do go surprisingly quickly with line and area-clearing skills, though, and one can even tag small crystals that appear on the field with their attacks to get temporary buffs or bonus turns.
The game is fairly basic (and very linear) for its first half, but jarringly adds many new mechanics in the second. Suddenly you have skill points to unlock character-specific ability trees, not unlike Final Fantasy XII's license boards or Dragon Quest XI's skill panels, equipment crafting, a tension meter as a new combat mechanic that operates somewhat like a Limit Break, and the ability to swap characters mid-battle a la Final Fantasy X. My guess is that the first half of the game (initially released standalone on Apple Arcade) was criticized for its basic design, so they added many new mechanics to the second half in an attempt to punch it up. It would have been nice to see them be integrated a bit more smoothly into the Neo Dimension port, but they opted to keep it as originally presented. But worse than that is that the pacing takes a nosedive, with enemies barely giving a pittance of XP and the player having to slog through fights with 40+ enemies on a frequent basis owing to the absurd encounter rate.
Fantasian, for both good and ill, resembles an early '90s era Final Fantasy game more than any other Mistwalker effort I've played - it's got a familiar but enjoyable (to a point) gameplay loop, an archetypal story with a lot of goofy dialog and contrived plot points, a visual style that blends 2D and 3D elements reminiscent of the early PS1 era, and relatively brisk pacing with enough mechanical intricacies to keep you interested for the entirety of its ~40 hour runtime. It doesn't hold a candle to the best of the Final Fantasy games, but it is much better than Mistwalker's previous overproduced and poorly-paced fare and frequently invokes the crisp, satisfying design that made the Final Fantasy franchise a classic to begin with; something so many other lame copycats have tried and repeatedly failed to do. I should probably mention as well that I always felt Sakaguchi role in making FF such a legendary series was heavily overstated; yes he pitched the first game, wrote the scenarios of many of its classic entries and even directed the first five, but he was never its sole creative force; he'd always worked alongside several other writers and designers to flesh out their ideas and have them meld together in a satisfying way. VI, VII and IX - easily the most popular Final Fantasies where he served creatively - were all especially large collaborative projects, and while he was their scenario writer and producer, other big names at Square like Masato Kato, Yoshinori Kitase, Takashi Tokita, Hirohiko Ito, Tetsuya Takahashi, Tetsuya Nomura and of course Nobuo Uematsu also played major roles in giving them their identities. Sakaguchi can certainly make a project come together, but without all those other big talents there to help putty up the cracks, the shortcomings in his writing and design become all the more prominent; they've only become more obvious with the rise of so many other other fantastic players in the field since his heyday too. Fantasian has some hints of old Final Fantasy's ingenuity, but they're sandwiched between a lot of baffling design decisions and some really bad character dialog and plot points. As a possible capstone to two legendary gaming careers, it's better than Sakaguchi's last couple efforts, but still leaves much to be desired.
