FANTASIAN Neo Dimension (2024)
2025-01-05
i don't know how Sakaguchi and the rest of the crew at Mistwalker managed to make not only their best game, one of the best RPGs of all time, and the perfect swan song to the careers of multiple legends in the medium, all while having it go so unnoticed. this game deserves ten times the recognition of any of the slop Square Enix has churned out since, like, 2010. (even that's only being generous because i like FFXIII.) in a perfect world Fantasian would sell eleven bajillion copies and the FFVII remake would not exist. every single part of the game is packed with so much love for RPGs as a whole, in a way that can only be accomplished by people this knowledgeable and skilled. it really feels like they all sat down and wrote a huge list of everything they've ever loved about making and playing video games, and casted some crazy black magic in order to make everything fit together perfectly. there's SO MUCH stuff in this game, and none of it feels out of place.
the combat works like a dream; people complain about its difficulty, but Fantasian is just a game that takes the problem solving nature of turn-based combat seriously and it expects the same from the player. no, you don't NEED a guide to get through the bosses in the second half of the game; i was able to feel my way through most of them on my first or second try just by thinking a few turns ahead. it's really, really satisfying to think up a particular strategy and have your efforts be rewarded. some of the fights later in the game had me white-knuckling the controller in a way i haven't since, like, some of the hairier bosses in SMT III. (buuuuuut Fantasian's final boss didn't take me 5-6 hours like Lucifer in SMT III, so who's to say which game is harder? (i'm one of those people who thinks most of SMT III is too easy after the early game, though.)) the game never feels like it's TOO hard--it's perfectly tuned to challenge you without making things feel unfair. if you're not supposed to beat a boss yet, due to a gap in level or whatever else, it telegraphs that quickly enough for you to know not to waste your time bashing your head against it. boss gimmicks are telegraphed just enough for you to understand what tactic to take without holding your hand, and if a boss DOES have a gimmick, the game will always let you know. i can't stress enough how perfectly tuned this game is to challenge you without being unfair.
at the same time the game doesn't baby you by letting you overlevel; it kneecaps your experience gain after you outlevel the enemies in a way reminiscent of Suikoden, but it feels like this mechanic is used to a much more purposeful end in Fantasian because it does actually challenge you. it doesn't let you outgear, either, because gear progression is also tightly controlled. instead of feeling restrictive, though, this approach really works. a lot of this is due to how you're allowed to freely respec your characters' Not Sphere Grids to fit whatever a particular encounter demands, and there WILL be a use case for every single skill a character can learn no matter how niche it may seem. you also can't, unlike FFX, grind until every character can fulfill every role and just faceroll everything. a lot of this shakes out to feel like you're playing a kind of FFX hardtype, which may not work for everyone, but it really satisfies my appetite for problem solving in a way that's just enthralling. i would zone out for hours going from boss to boss and running through every problem that they would throw at me in a state of perfect contentment.
the galaxy brain mechanics aren't just limited to bosses either; the game's Dimengion system, where you store and avoid random battles until you hit the limit on the number of monsters you can stash away, really changes how you approach dungeons. in the early game, you can turn it on while you're going from the last save point to the boss so you don't hamper your party's status on the way; you can turn it on when you're backtracking and don't want to have to deal with combat for a bit; you can just turn it off when you're lost and getting annoyed. importantly, though, you don't outright avoid combat forever--eventually that box is going to fill with enemies and you'll have to fight them all at once. it's a great kind of risk-reward that i've never seen before in an RPG, and i really love the idea. towards the later parts of the game, random battles stop being a threat entirely, and you can safely just leave the Dimengion on forever and always fight battles against 50 enemies without breaking a sweat, so i actually think this could have been balanced a bit better. the dungeons stop feeling threatening, especially compared to the constant onslaught of bosses; the late game kind of feels like a boss rush, which certainly isn't a bad thing--i didn't lavish praise all over the boss design for nothing!--but it would have been nice for the dungeons and random battles to continue to have teeth to them all the way until the end.
while Fantasian's combat is far and away its greatest virtue, it's far from lacking in every other respect too. it should go without saying that the music is absolutely fucking incredible--you can tell this this was Uematsu's last full game soundtrack project, because he really goes crazy. it runs the gamut from somber piano themes, to relaxing acoustic guitar, to doom, to eerie ambient vocals, to a fucking boss theme that HAS to be a direct reference to Eternity, the boss theme from Blue Dragon... just without a decrepit-sounding Ian Gillian, charming as that song is. there's enough prog rock in this game to make me blush, but my favorite track has to be the one that just sounds like it came off of one of the 80s jazz fusion records i've spent years of my life listening to. Fantasian's soundtrack really feels like the perfect send off to his career, and i'll always cherish it. (i'd also be remiss to not mention the short story Uematsu wrote that is included in the game--that shit had me crying.) (on that note, the novel segments made me go "oh my god, it's just like Lost Odyssey!" and i haven't even played Lost Odyssey because that shit is still trapped in 360 jail. free him.)
the characters are all great and each fill their own role in the story, which separates this game from something like FFVI where half the cast is just there for no reason. some of them have their arcs wrapped up better than others--Ez just forgives the moustache-twirlingly evil artisan guild guys who constantly plagiarized his work and landed him in jail because they apologized nicely once?--but i'd say he's the only weak link here. the characters all fit their individual tropes, sure, but pulling off tropey characters well is a perfectly fine accomplishment in itself. i love all of the robot friends. Sakaguchi made his ideal dark elf wife with glasses and a facial hair fetish. Tan is my favorite character because not only is he strapped with the best risk-reward DPS skills, he's also gap moe. him saying にゃんこ～げんきかー will live in my brain forever.
the story is also really nice; i like how you start as a guy with amnesia and end up facing a dimensions-ending threat and kill god. it's simple on its face, and i'm always a sucker for that sort of story. i think Fantasian being the swan song of these developers adds to the meaning of its story, too: i can't read text about treasuring your connections with others and facing your collective and individual hardships together without imagining how that reflects the lives and careers of the crew at Mistwalker. i would say that Fantasian is a simple story told well, and i do think that's true for the most part, but there are points where it does get pretty wordy and theoretical--at one point a character talks about ヒッグス粒子 and i had no idea what he was talking about because i don't understand anything about physics in English, let alone Japanese. the game also has some neat things to say about the balance between law and chaos and the place of humanity in the universe. Fantasian is, alongside its relative simplicity, absolutely FULL of things to say about the human condition in a way that really works for me, which is almost kind of a miracle because FF's own attempts at that haven't always worked for me--FFVI and FFIX are real stinkers in that respect--but i'm really thankful it worked out.
going from those extremely low stakes (the first real dungeon is even a tiny forest!) to those extremely high stakes is just another way in which Fantasian feels like a proper swan song for Final Fantasy. that series died after XIII and all that's left is a shambolic husk that Square Enix trots out to burn money and labor. being raised off of Final Fantasy, playing Fantasian for the first time was an exercise in me going like, "oh my god! this is just like that thing but somehow better! how did they do it!" the second part of the game is like FFVI's World of Ruin; there's a weapon like the Chicken Knife from FFV; there's the aforementioned Not Sphere Grid, and the skeleton of the combat is much like FFX's; there's long-lost sister princesses like FFV; one of the bosses is like FFX's Chocobo Eater.
i could go on, but listing all of the ways in which Fantasian is like Final Fantasy starts to feel a bit reductive after a while. this game can and does stand on its own feet as an incredible game, even if you aren't a sicko who's had Final Fantasy in your blood for as long as you can remember. it's easily my favorite RPG released since, uh, Demon's Souls in 2009. everyone at Square Enix is going to hell for not marketing this port. it's FINALLY been released from Apple Arcade jail and no one is playing it or talking about it. god help me. please play Fantasian. it's really, truly special.