FANTASIAN Neo Dimension Review

My present circle of friends might not know it, especially after I recently traded in my Series X for a PS5 Pro, but I used to be a bit of an Xbox appreciator. Granted, it was around the same time as many of us – during the iconic Xbox 360 era – but where other folks were enjoying the latest Gears of War or a version of Skyrim that didn’t collapse in on itself, I was embedded deeply in the kind of JRPG glut you just wouldn’t see on a modern Xbox. At the forefront of that obsession was a brand-new studio going by Mistwalker, headed by the man who’d shaped some of my most memorable early PlayStation experiences, the legendary Hironobu Sakaguchi.

Mistwalker’s earliest releases, like Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey, struck me in many of the same ways as Sakaguchi’s previous creative output with Final Fantasy, perhaps even more so than the actual FF titles that would release after his bitter exit from Square in the early 2000s. It was in the wake of these games that I realised, had I opted to spend my money on a PS3 over an Xbox 360 back in the day, I’d have missed out on some of my favourite JRPG experiences of all time.

Your average Melbourne polycule

I was reminded of this again when Mistwalker first launched FANTASIAN in 2021, a brand-new Sakaguchi joint that was once again exclusive to a particular platform. Only this time it was one I didn’t have access to: Apple Arcade. I can’t begin to count how many times I found myself about to drop a bunch of money I didn’t have on an iPad or some other Apple device in the last couple of years for no reason other than to play this new Mistwalker joint, but thanks to a recent repairing of bonds between Sakaguchi and Square, I’ve been spared. FANTASIAN Neo Dimension is here, bringing a definitive re-release of the game to more folks than via PC and modern consoles.

FANTASIAN is an interesting game for a few reasons. It features a lot of hallmarks of the genre, especially from an era that I could comfortably call “Peak Sakaguchi,” but presents them in new and interesting ways that are clearly emblematic of a creator and a studio emboldened by experience and a lack of fucks to give. 

There’s always an airship

You only need to look at the game’s environments, a throwback to the pre-rendered backgrounds of PS1-era JRPGs that could very well have been produced in the traditional way, but have instead been created by handcrafting and photographing actual dioramas and transposing them onto 3D scenes.  Please understand – this is Sakaguchi’s Eyes Wide Shut. Sure, the man still seems undecided on whether this is actually his final project, but it certainly calls for the right balance of retrospection, introspection and bold innovation to be just that.

The game’s tale of might and magic versus machines, of order versus chaos and of men versus gods is similarly uncanny, hitting familiar notes but arranging them in new ways. It’s carried by top-tier writing that elevates all manner of tropes (why, yes, the protagonist does have amnesia, how did you know?) with plenty of great character work, surprising turns and fun winks to the audience to make it compelling and memorable. If you were a fan of Final Fantasy VI‘s themes and second-act structure, you’ll feel right at home here.

Billionaires, take notes

Despite following a general blueprint established back when Sakaguchi was a household name, FANTASIAN also makes some excellent plays at shaking up the gameplay formula. The most transformative of these is the Dimengeon system, which essentially allows players to procrastinate on participating in the game’s random, turn-based battles and instead bank them up until they either hit the limit or manually initiate combat, at which point they’ll fight all of those enemies in one encounter. 

Dimengeon battles are different to standard battles in a few ways. They take place in a floaty, ethereal zone complete with its own battle theme, they put more enemies on-screen at once, and they include “Gimmicks” that can be struck on the battlefield to add buffs to your party, so they’re genuinely more exciting than the individual fights. It’s a system that simultaneously smooths out the often pace-breaking nature of random JRPG battles, puts players in greater control of their experience and takes a lot of fatigue out of the grind, turning what could have been a frustrating holdover from decades-old titles into an homage that imitates and innovates in equal measure.

Nothing more satisfying than this, I’m afraid

I’m also incredibly fond of how enemy targeting works once you’re in combat. The various characters recruited to your party over the course of the adventure aren’t just unique because of their individual weapons and abilities, but also in their potential trajectories. More than just picking a move and an enemy to target with it, everything has a flight path, and these can be straight lines, they can be arcs, and they can pass through enemies or stop on contact. This adds an extra layer of strategy in how you respond to enemy placements, how you make your plays, and even how you compose and progress your party in the game’s back half. Like the Dimengeon mechanic, it’s a small, new wrinkle in a tried-and-true fabric that makes FANTASIAN feel cut from a whole different cloth.

These little nuggets of ingenuity retrofitted into a PS1-arse template continue outside of combat, too. At nearly any point while exploring the game’s environments, players can pull up a map of their immediate surroundings and click on points of interest to have Leo walk there automatically. In lieu of an “overworld” map to traipse around, the party can also simply warp across the various realms and locations at will. Looking up an active quest in your log even gives you a button to instantly appear at the required spot, provided you’ve already been there, which is *chef’s kiss*.

Sometimes, money does grow on trees

And those locations? Well, they beg to be appreciated given FANTASIAN’s unique, handcrafted aesthetic. Combining the set work of a stop motion film with the static cameras of old-school JRPGs was an inspired choice and makes for some truly mesmerising backdrops whether you’re touring classical towns and castles or abstract realms beyond realms. Mistwalker had a number of collaborators on these dioramas, I’ve learned, which goes a long to way making each pocket of the world (and the worlds beyond the world) look appreciably distinct.

The game sounds just as good as it looks too, thanks to what I’d argue is the seminal work of frequent Sakaguchi collaborator and Final Fantasy composer, Nobuo Uematsu. This soundtrack is something special, matching the game’s clashing of the baroque and futuristic with equally eclectic instrumentation and arrangements that are as bold as they are moving. It’s truly beautiful stuff, and while Neo Dimension newly gives players the ability to pick alternate battle music based on a smattering of FF titles, I can’t imagine why you’d want to hear anything else.

Skills also grow on trees, apparently

But what else is fresh in this version of FANTASIAN for PC and consoles? There’s actually a lot more here than just a standard port. Originally released across two distinct parts, the game is now a single, unified experience. It also features full voice work for the first time, with cutscenes reworked to accommodate it and the cast generally doing a pretty decent job of bringing these established scenes to life – though the purist in me was tempted to switch them off more than a few times.

Something that I’m sure will mean more to returning players than someone going in fresh like I was, the game’s difficulty has also had some adjustments to sort out some egregious spikes that Apple Arcade players struggled with, while also adding a “Normal” difficulty and labelling the original balance as a “Hard” mode.

Perhaps I’m at least partially influenced by what I’d heard about the game before now, but I still felt a bit of a jump in challenge in what was previously FANTASIAN’s second part. Less because of some arbitrary lift though, and more because it’s also the point at which Part 1’s guided story and character progression are replaced with a non-linear quest structure and sprawling skill trees that add a welcome bit of complexity. I’m yet to tackle the optional “Void Realm” stuff or dive into a New Game+ run, but Normal difficulty feels like it offers a good level of challenge without ever making grinding for experience feel necessary, aside from a small number of remaining pain points.

Normalise fantasy protagonists having really boring journals

The move to new platforms hasn’t come without foibles, however. FANTASIAN Neo Dimension is as much a visual treat as its original version simply by virtue of putting the same gorgeous dioramas and designs on new displays with modest reworks to accommodate 4K machines, but playing the game on a PS5 hooked up to a 65″ telly also brings out some glaring blemishes. There are moments where the camera crops close enough to the pre-rendered backgrounds to reduce them to a blur of giant pixels, though thankfully these are few and far. 

A worse byproduct of this newfound scrutiny is the realisation that the game really struggles with scene elements and character models interacting – I don’t think I’ve encountered a single environment where the 2D textures and 3D positioning of objects lined up properly or were cut out correctly, which results in Leo constantly clipping through things, standing in the wrong plane or being occluded by chunks of floor where the edges of a foreground element are a few pixels off in physical space. Looking back at footage of the Apple Arcade game, it’s seemingly always been this way, but where you’d barely register it on a phone or tablet (or maybe a Switch or Steam Deck this time around), it can really stand out on a 4K display.

Regular ground behaviour, I reckon

FANTASIAN’s roots also show a little too much in Neo Dimension’s UI and controls, which are largely unchanged from the original iteration. This means that, no matter where you’re playing, you’re getting an interface that was designed for portable devices with touchscreens. The positive is a lot of nice, big buttons and text that give it some welcome readability, but there’s a lot of digging through layers of menus to do basic things like using skills in battle or browsing stores that could’ve been eliminated by updating the console/PC version of the UX to be more fit-for-purpose.

Final Thoughts

For all it does to add value to the existing package, smooth over existing bumps and enhance presentation, FANTASIAN’s PC and console release is held back slightly by some of the fundamentals of the Apple Arcade original. But at the end of it all, Neo Dimension absolutely feels like the definitive version of an already-excellent little RPG that looks fondly back on Hironobu Sakaguchi’s gameography without using nostalgia as a crutch to skimp on innovation.

Reviewed on PS5 // Review code supplied by publisher

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