The world of Fantasian is also fleshed out through beautiful hand-drawn vignettes that offer a nice change of pace from traditional cutscenes while allowing the music of famed composer Nobuo Uematsu - Sakaguchi’s friend and longtime Final Fantasy collaborator - to really shine through. All the while, Sakaguchi maintains the whimsy of the older FF games through fun bickering between the characters, like the Uzra airship captain Zinikr constantly butting heads with the disrespectful-yet-genius orphan Ez. Learning more about Leo’s past by following the interdimensional exploits of his enigmatic father kept me intrigued, while the tragic backstories Princess Cheryl and the Queendom of Vibra and the mysterious Kina added a powerful emotional hook. “Impressively, Mistwalker has gone to the trouble of producing more than 150 physical models filled with incredible amounts of detail and scanned them into the game.” While the dialogue itself might not be terribly original, the characters prove to be quite likable and grew on me over time. Instead, he uses these tropes to weave an engaging tale about the balance of “chaos” and “order” and the unwitting heroes who get caught in the middle. Fantasian is very traditional in this sense, but therein lies a good deal of its charm.īut Sakaguchi - who penned the game’s story and oversaw the rest of its development - is careful not to rely solely on fanservice. The story places an amnesiac protagonist named Leo at the centre of a multi-dimensional conflict between machines and humans, the gameplay revolves around turn-based combat and random encounters, and you’ll even ride on an extravagant airship early on.Įven more casual players of Sakaguchi’s older games are likely to catch that characters named ‘Sid’ and ‘Garland’ and a ‘Phoenix’ item being used to revive downed party members are not-so-subtle nods to Final Fantasy. Like a long-lost Final FantasyĪt first glance, Fantasian might seem rather derivative. And as much as I’d love to believe the claim that “Lost Judgment” is a Judgment sequel, I want to see it from more than an anonymous source.Although a full verdict will have to wait until the Apple Arcade game’s second and final part releases later this year, Sakaguchi has already won over this lifelong fan of the genre. I’m planning in case the PSP/Vita/PS3 store is really shutting down, but we don’t know that for sure yet. Meanwhile, there have been a lot of rumors going around lately that I’m not going to write a full post about until we have something more official. In other JRPG news, Kazushige Nojima has a mobile game called Zodiac: Orcanon Odyssey that is now being reimagined for Switch, PS4, and PS5, so I’ll be keeping my eye on that. It’s looking like a JRPG I don’t want to miss. Several games have started on Apple Arcade and come to other systems later, so I can’t help but hope Fantasian will be ported once both parts are out. On the other hand, the official website FAQ confirms that once it’s downloaded, you can play Fantasian offline, a major point in its favor if I do get to play it. Unfortunately, Fantasian is exclusive to Apple Arcade, and after looking at its page on the App Store, I’m not sure my old iPad will be able to play it anyway. The second part will reportedly have a more quest-focused, open structure. It won’t necessarily be split perfectly in half, but if the length of the second part is similar, we could easily be looking at 40+ hours of playtime for Fantasian. The first part has an estimated playtime of 20-30 hours.Įven taking into account that developers tend to exaggerate game lengths, that’s longer than I expected and it’s only the first part. Yet a recent Famitsu preview, translated by Gematsu, suggests it will be much longer than I expected.įantasian will be released in two parts (which seems to be common for Apple Arcade games for some reason), both of which are due out this year. Now, up until now I’d expected Fantasian to be a short JRPG. The soundtrack is composed by Nobuo Uematsu, and it might be the final game he composes the full soundtrack for. The more I see about Mistwalker’s upcoming JRPG Fantasian, the more excited I am (and the more I wish it wasn’t exclusive to Apple Arcade).įantasian is a turn-based JRPG where the environments are all hand-crafted dioramas, and it looks great.Ī features trailer released earlier this month showed off some of its gameplay mechanics, such as how you can save up random encounters to fight the battles in a chain later on instead, and the story trailer really does remind me of classic JRPGs.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |