Cut free of Apple Arcade, Fantasian shows off the revolutionary spirit that helped Hironobu Sakaguchi create Final Fantasy in the first place - interview

Make no mistake. Fantasian is an old-school game. The game was conceived when Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi was called upon to replay Final Fantasy 6 for some promotional live stream or another - and Sakaguchi realised ‘hey, this is actually pretty good’. A new project was born.

“It was this moment where I felt like I was going back to my origins,” Sakaguchi says of booting up the seminal SNES classic, which he devised the story for and produced. “I wanted to design a game in a similar style.”

The result is Fantasian, a staunchly traditional RPG that nevertheless has that Sakaguchist (to coin a phrase) sense of swagger to it - traditional it may be, but it still wants to challenge the status quo and genre conventions. This time, however, it’s all about the art.

Musing on the genre that defined much of his career, Sakaguchi expounds a belief that RPGs have moved to conform to the technology available, being a story-driven genre. The rise of action-RPGs, for instance, is something he puts down to game mechanics shifting to accommodate the sort of visual flair you can accomplish with modern technology. That certainly tracks with Final Fantasy, which outside of Sakaguchi’s influence has spent the last 20 years chasing the battle visuals of spin-off movie Advent Children.

But with Fantasian, Sakaguchi had a different kind of revolution in mind. With the genre going in one direction, his still-present revolutionary spirit had him dashing in another - towards a new visual style that is deliberately more static. Though no less immersive.

“Ever since I was really, really young I just loved arts and crafts, and handcrafting elements,” Sakaguchi explains. “I think that love for handcrafted items and dioramas serves as the foundation for a lot of what I do.”

With this as a starting point, the legendary creator launches into detailed musings on Gunpla, the little plastic models of Gundam mechs, and the artistry that goes into them. It’s so considered that it almost sounds rehearsed - though you can tell it really isn’t. It’s just passion that runs deep.

“Rather than seeing a Gundam in CG or as a 2D anime... to me, the Gunpla format, or rather the Gunpla interpretation and expression of Gundams is the most exciting,” he continues. “I find photos of very detailed Gunpla very attractive.

“So I think that handcrafted feel and touch is something that I myself am very attracted to. I wanted to take that emotion and feeling and bring it into the world of a video game.”

The result is Fantasian’s unique artistic flair. Where the PS1-era Final Fantasy games used pre-rendered CG backgrounds to great effect, Fantasian has a new twist on this idea: real-world dioramas that have been meticulously built and then photographed with great care, the real-life images then stitched together to turn an intricate model railway style terrain built by the development team at Mistwalker into environments you can explore on-screen.

It’s unique, beautiful, and striking. The game is deliberately slow and simple in visual style beyond this. Sakaguchi says he wanted to let the style sink in, and so did away with things like flashy camera moves and battle animations. It’s stripped back, I’d argue, to something more akin to those SNES-era Final Fantasies, but with a fascinatingly unique background art setup.

Beyond that, Fantasian is a pretty competent RPG. Avid VG247 readers and Donaldson-stalkers will know that I’m the co-founder of RPG Site, a website dedicated to the study and celebration of the genre. Fantasian actually released on Apple Arcade back in 2021 - and in that year, as other outlets largely ignored it due to its exclusivity on a phone-based subscription service, RPG Site gave it a glowing review and then went on to call it Game of the Year. My point is: it’s good.

This new console version, needlessly subtitled ‘Neo Dimension’, is largely the same game that hit Apple Arcade in two parts previously - but it’s been tweaked for console in ways both obvious and less obvious.

A publishing tie-up with Square Enix, facilitated by FF14 producer Naoki Yoshida (“A very dedicated and honest person,” says Sakaguchi) means this is optimised for console platforms and even has some Square Enix-inspired features like the ability to switch Nobuo Uematsu’s new battle music compositions for Fantasian to some classics from Final Fantasy history. But probably the biggest changes come around its difficulty.

The original version of Fantasian was balanced for real RPG systems freaks, which is perhaps why the delinquents on RPG Site liked it so. This time, the game comes with ‘Normal’ and ‘Hard’ modes - where Hard is equivalent to the original release, and Normal is balanced for people who are more, well, normal.

“When making the game for Apple Arcade, I thought, well, it would be okay if Fantasian perhaps is my final game. My final piece. A retirement game, if you will. So I put all the balance adjustments that I would have personally liked to see,” explains fellow RPG systems sicko Sakaguchi.

“In hindsight, though, the difficulty curve is very peaky and streaky,” he adds, using a very cute term for a game that, in its later stages, could easily provoke you to smash in your brand-new, thousand-dollar iPhone.

“When we began to think about bringing Fantasian to a wider audience, in this case with Neo Dimension I tapped back into my experiences with FF4 through FF6, and even some Chrono Trigger.

“I don't really want to say that it's geared towards a casual user per se, but I think there is perhaps a different difficulty balance or difficulty curve that would better engage the type of audience that wants to have fun and have very satisfying encounters. So, we went through the entire game in preparation for Neo Dimension to rebalance, and tweak and kind of customise a lot of the encounters for normal mode.”

The result should be a more accessible game - which should help more people to experience those lovely dioramas, a charming story, wonderful music by the incomparable Nobuo Uematsu, and some good, crunchy, staunchly traditional RPG design.

Playing the game on Nintendo Switch for an hour or so, memories of how good it was on iOS come flooding back. Yes, it’s got the hallmarks of a game that was built for mobile and has now been nipped and tucked into console-fit shape. It’s also, undoubtedly, an acquired taste. But it’s lovely - a game dripping with personality, straight from the mind of one of the greatest RPG creators to ever do it. This is a game that never should’ve been stranded on some phone-driven service, and I can’t wait for more people to play it.

Fantasian: Neo Dimension will release on Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox Series, and PC via Steam later this year.