I was excited. My key had come in for Fantasian Neo Dimension. It’s a game I could’ve easily played by borrowing someone’s iPad over the past 3 years. I don’t have a great track record of playing non-gacha games on my phone though. Dragon Quest V remains installed despite not having played it for over a year. So I waited and was rewarded with a Playstation 5 key for Fantasian Neo Dimension. Who wouldn’t be excited to play the latest from Hironobu Sakaguchi and his team at Mistwalker? Lost Odyssey was such a delight and Sakagcuhi’s pedigree is outstanding. I was excited. I was diving in and exploring the mechanics, the story, and the characters for hours and I was a little overwhelmed. After about fifteen hours of playing it, I realized something awful. I hated it.
Fantasian Neo Dimension
Developer: MISTWALKER Corporation
Price: $50
Platforms: PS5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and PC
MonsterVine was provided with a PlayStation 5 code for review
Fantasian Neo Dimension is an interesting game. Hironobu Sakaguchi, Final Fantasy’s dad, isn’t one to shy away from systems, but some things about Fantasian are by the book. Sakaguchi’s book. There are a bunch of different status effects and individual items to cure you of each ailment. The main character has amnesia and everyone has a dark past. I’ve been to the optometrist twice now because I hurt myself rolling my eyes at every trope, twist, and turn that was expected and delivered. But then I hit a certain story beat around 20 hours and it dawned on me that I actually love this game. I spent the first third of the game clashing with what I was expecting and fighting it at every turn only to realize that the game kind of expected that from me. I went in expecting to love it, hated it, and came out the other end having my expectations met.
Leo is very average as far as your JRPG protagonist is concerned. He has amnesia, looks like brother Nier, and uses a sword. His father passed recently and was working on a way to save the world. At the other end of playing this game, I’m actually more annoyed that Mistwalker did such a bad job with the initial hook. I was so bored for the first few hours of Fantasian, I might have skipped over the game had I not been tasked to review it. Fantasian doesn’t take flight until Leo teams up with a few companions. And again even later when team composition, the growth map, and equipment upgrading become part of the game. Fantasian Neo Dimension starts out so shallow you’re almost not expecting it to throw you in the deep end at any point.
Fantasian is a slow burn and does a stellar job of introducing companions and allowing you to forget about the character before recruiting them. Leo starts with no clue where he is or why he’s there but there are two robots with him, Prickle and Clicker. Wading through a Thaumaturge Factory, Leo doesn’t remember what he’s doing but Prickle and Clicker help him get to his warp device allowing Leo to escape. No such luck for Prickle and Clicker. Leo ends up in the frontier town of En with some roots laid down already. Speaking to the local bartender, Leo learns a little bit about his father and his past. His goal at this point is to recover from his amnesia.
The first thing I noticed in En was how gorgeous this dusty frontier town was from a graphical and artistic perspective. Walking around, the environments almost look like the pre-rendered backgrounds from the original PlayStation. They’re not. According to The Verge and Sakaguchi himself, the team put together 150+ dioramas to create the world of Fantasian and scanned them into the game. It shows, Fantasian’s environments are stunning and evoke the feelings of a truly lived-in world that’s full of strange and mysterious places. And though it looks so, so good, it feels like a lot of thought was put into the environments as well. Fantasian is a game that rewards exploration, not just with chests, but with the area surrounding the chest as well.
Moving through the environment isn’t just flipping through different camera perspectives. The camera follows Leo and the others through the environment that mimics standing over a physical set piece. As the camera moves the perspective changes and new pieces of the environment are shown, often showing something that you had completely missed in the previous screen. Yes, there are transitions to new areas, this isn’t one big environment, but seeing one static piece from different perspectives is entrancing. This does create an issue though, and I believe it’s a relic from being primarily a game played on a phone, using a controller. As the camera changes perspective, the directions change and if you’re holding right on the joystick and the perspective changes, you may not be going right anymore. This creates an issue where, if the camera is changing with regularity, you’re resetting the position of your joystick with that same regularity. This is frustrating, to say the least.
I mentioned chests and they play a pretty important role in Fantasian, as they do in any RPG I guess, but I can only think of a few examples where chests were locked. There are many different types of chests and they need to be unlocked using the chest-specific key. These keys can be found by doing side-quests or killing enemies that happen to be holding keys. You can tell they’re holding keys because the enemy model is literally holding a key beneath it, and the skin on the key shows you which one it’s holding. All told, I believe there are five different types of keys, making five different types of chests. The variety can cause emotions ranging from frustration to wonder, primarily due to the feast-or-famine nature of finding keys. You’ll either be inundated with keys or barely scraping by.
The battle system is where Fantasian Neo Dimension shines, being reminiscent of a simple turn-based battle system while utilizing new functionality at the same time. Battles take place in an arena with a set turn order that can be manipulated. Spells can be cast in a straight line, piercing through enemies, or curved along the sides of the arena to hit a line of enemies in the back. This alone would make for an interesting twist on a standard turn-based battle system but battles can get kind of big in Fantasian. Introduced early on, Leo has a strange device called the Dimengeon. The Dimengeon allows you to bank battles, mortgaging your immediate time for a much longer battle later. Starting, the Dimengeon can only hold 30 monsters but by completing a set of side-quests, you’re able to expand it to 40 and 50 respectively. That’s a lot of monsters! Unfortunately, it doesn’t feel like a lot of monsters while playing the game.
As you get further into the game, the battles become bigger and bigger making the Dimengeon, even fully expanded, feel smaller. By the end of the game, battles are typically anywhere between 6 – 8 baddies at a time. Considering the high encounter rate, I imagine that fueled by the existence of the Dimengeon, you’re not making it very far without having to fight an enormous battle. As mentioned previously, your spells and abilities can come with piercing and in some cases, are area of effect. This can make Dimengeon battles fun, giving you almost a dozen baddies on the battlefield to fight. Suddenly, your piercing attacks are hitting four or five baddies at a time and you get to see those big numbers fly up on the screen making the feel-good chemicals in your brain.
This is especially exciting when you unlock your tension abilities. About halfway through the game, Leo and pals discover the divine artifacts that the big bad is looking for. The divine artifacts first unlock the growth map. This is a big sphere grid style ability and stat upgrading system. Big enough that you can build your characters differently and swing wide in the character’s variety but small enough that you could conceivably unlock every node in a playthrough with some grinding. Each divine artifact has an elemental affinity and gives you a tension skill that eventually can be upgraded. The tension bar is a pink bar that fills up when you take hits. The bigger the hit the more tension, pretty simple stuff. What I liked about the tension bar is how quickly it fills during boss battles. Of course, it fills quickly because you’re taking big hits.
Boss battles are a THING in Fantasian. It feels like no matter how powerful I become, the next boss fight is going to keep me humble. All boss fights have a gimmick. There’s the occasional boss that’s just a big ole pin-cushion but they’re few and far between. For the most part, you’re dealing with bosses who are expecting your full attention. Some bosses will summon targetables on the battlefield that must be destroyed or the boss will perform a large attack, some require you to interact with the environment, and Fantasian likes to keep you on your toes. More importantly, you can’t simply ignore these gimmicks.
In one battle, Kina and Cheryl had gotten themselves taken by a giant flying space centipede. It’ll make sense within the context of the game, just roll with it for now. It’s flying through space at an alarming speed and we’re struggling to catch up to it on a moving platform. As it flies through space, its long body twists, revealing weak points on its belly. You must time your hits to hit the weak points on its belly to slow it down. This is a cycle, once you slow it down and attack its mouth, releasing Kina and Cheryl, you’ll hit a phase of the fight where you’re actually fighting the boss. But after some back and forth, the centipede will simply pick up Kina and Cheryl again and you’ll have to attack its belly to catch up to it. I decided to take the opportunity to heal and buff for a turn, resulting in the centipede getting away and me losing the fight. Fantasian expects you to play with its systems and expresses a sense of urgency in earnest.
Fantasian Neo Dimension is also the first RPG I’ve played in years, outside of Atlus games, that has an all-out earworm soundtrack. Naturally, Nobuo Uematsu has nothing to prove, and yet, the soundtrack is outstanding. There are a surprising amount of tracks for this game and be prepared to get them stuck in your head. Particularly, some of the battle tracks will bounce around in your head for days. Perhaps the soundtrack is what truly makes a great JRPG because, aside from the memories I’ll have of playing Fantasian, the complaints I had about the battle system fade away as the music kicks in and I begin cleaving through groups of enemies. Fantasian’s soundtrack is only hindered by the fact that it’s not nostalgic yet. Otherwise, this is an all-timer full of absolute bangers.
It should be noted that this console release of Fantasian also includes a fully voiced script, including both English and Japanese voices. While cool, I feel like the voice acting is a bit of a mixed bag, a term I hate using not just because my editor doesn’t like it, but because it’s easily dismissed criticism. However, the voice acting in English swings wildly. Some lines are delivered wonderfully with devotion or in a heartfelt way that truly makes me believe the character is experiencing said emotions. Some lines feel like the actors were given no direction whatsoever. I would say it leans towards good but I only played in English and I imagine the Japanese is probably better. Still, it should be noted that the script is fully voiced and it’s not bad.
Everything is stacking up to make Fantasian one of the great JRPGs of this generation of games. Imagine that, a game originally released for iPhones only and it rocks this much? Well, we haven’t talked about the story, have we? Leo’s amnesia cheesed me off at the beginning of this game. JRPG protagonists and amnesia, name a more iconic duo. As I continued, I was able to get over it, but my primary issue with the narrative was the initial hook. You see, Leo’s world is being infested by a substance known as Mechteria. Oh yeah, proper nouns, here we go. Mechteria is falling from the sky and is taking over large parts of this world. It looks like a robot’s head, primarily looking like a white sphere with a blue eye in the center, sometimes with hairs and purple mist extruding from the top. Even worse, it sucks the life out of those that touch it.
Nobody knows where it’s coming from but Leo’s father, Bernard, apparently had some idea of what’s going on. Unfortunately, our hapless protagonist has no memory. This creates a lot of opportunities for battles and cut scenes where he learns something that he should already know, thus conveying narrative information to the player. Again, annoying. What impressed me won’t happen until later in Fantasian. Because once we get past the obnoxious amnesia stuff, there’s a fascinating story to tell. We learn of other worlds that Leo’s able to visit. A wormhole that’s pulling Mechteria out from the machine world and dumping it into the human realm. Even more impressive is the character stories that are told.
Hitting the halfway point, Fantasian begins to open up. This is when you gain access to the growth map. It opens up in a narratively interesting way allowing you to choose how you progress through the story. Fantasian has a menu option for ‘story’ and in it, lists the quests that you’ve completed and have yet to complete. As you hit that halfway point, you’re given more main-story quests, allowing you to kind of attack it at your leisure. Impressively, this continues throughout the game’s back half, with every quest completed opening up new quests that you can take on as you will.
Each quest delves deeper into the backstory of each character but, while this gives context to who each character is and what they want, the quests then follow through and allow you to resolve these conflicts. Instead of simply twisting the main narrative in a way that has you tying up the threads of each character, each character has their main story thread. A rich tapestry is created to resolve each character’s internal strife to give them something to fight for and a world they want to come back to. It may not seem like much and, in all eventuality, results in you seeing the same thing as everyone else. But the illusion of choice here is nice and the ability to resolve certain narrative threads at your leisure is a nice change of pace in this genre.
I’m not sure if my initial impressions are the reason why or if we’re witnessing greatness initially locked away on a non-gaming platform but Fantasian is a surprisingly great experience. Between the characters and their growth, the interesting and winding narrative, and the fun combat, Fantasian is one of the best RPGs I’ve played this year. I’m shocked to be writing this but Fantasian really impressed me. However, recommending a game like this after the initial slog of the first third of the game is very tough. Whether or not this game will resonate with fans I can’t say, but I enjoyed the hell out of it.
The Final Word
I think the audience for Fantasian knows what they’re looking for and they’re going to find it in Fantasian Neo Dimension. I sure did.
MonsterVine Rating: 4 out of 5 – Good
