Fantasian: Neo Dimension

 I played Fantasian Neo Dimension.

Fantasian is an RPG developed by Mistwalker, released in 2021 on mobile devices. The "Neo Dimension" enhanced version was released in 2024 on modern platforms.

I played the Nintendo Switch version. 

Fantasian is a classic-style JRPG. It uses pre-rendered backgrounds with fixed camera angles, in a similar style to Squaresoft's PlayStation 1 RPGs (Final Fantasy 7, 8, 9, Chrono Cross, etc). It also uses invisible random enemy encounters and turn-based, menu-based combat. This is a fully classic style JRPG through and through!

In fact, this game was created by Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of Final Fantasy. So the similarities are no coincidence. Also worth mentioning is that the music in Fantasian was done by Nobuo Uematsu, another well-known name among Final Fantasy and other RPGs.

The story of Fantasian follows Leo, a boy who wakes up in a strange factory without his memories. Leo is greeted by two seemingly friendly robots. Leo doesn't have much time to figure out what's going on, because it just so happens that the three of them are in the middle of being chased by a giant killer robot. Leo doesn't remember anything about why he would find himself in this situation, but eventually he manages to escape by use of a Warp Device he finds. Leo teleports to safety, using his vague memory of a girl, and the memory of a small town. ...because, apparently, the Warp Device relies on its user's memories in order to function.

With nothing more to go on but his memory of this girl, Leo begins his adventure. Along the way, Leo discovers his lost memories, meets new allies, and learns about the nature of the "mechteria", a dangerous infestation that has been spreading across the land.

The storytelling in this game is really nice. For the most part, it's a normal kind of JRPG story - the characters are all fun and likeable, and there's lots of great interactions between them. The story isn't too overly complex, though it does occasionally go into some confusing detail about the nature of human emotions and how they relate to interdimensional physics... you gotta take it at face value, you know?

But more uniquely, there are these occasional moments where the game uses a storybook narration style. This happens whenever characters talk about the past - especially when Leo regains one of his old memories. The storybook scenes have a slow pace with illustrations, accompanied by a soft, gentle narration reading the words on screen, and it even uses a sort of kinetic style of text where important words or phrases appear larger, and text can appear at different speeds for emphasis. 

I find these storybook scenes to be really sweet and relaxing. They invite you to just take a moment to just slow down and listen.  I really like it. :)  And every time you watch a storybook scene, it gets added to your quest log so you can re-watch it again whenever you like.

As you explore the towns, you can talk to NPCs and visit shops, buy new equipment, and find sidequests and all that good JRPG stuff. Outside of the towns are the more dangerous areas - usually pathways between locations, or dungeony areas, which have monster encounters in them.

The dungeon areas are fairly short and simple in this game - they normally take the form of a simple maze of paths, with dead-ends and treasure chests and hidden collectable items. There are a few areas with some interesting navigational challenges, but for the most part, the challenge of the areas comes from the enemy encounters. Again, very reminiscent of the classic Final Fantasy style of RPGs.

So, the battle system is simple, but it has some unique twists.

You have a party of up to three characters versus an assortment of enemies.

You can either select a regular attack, a skill, or an item. Skills take MP to use, and items can be bought or found around.

Turn order is determined by everyone's Speed stats, and is shown as a timeline in the bottom of the screen.

The combat works with a line of sight system. All your attacks, including regular attacks, take the form of a projectile slash or beam of some kind. You select a target by positioning the trajectory line so that it connects with an enemy. Enemies can block other enemies from being targeted if they're positioned in front of them, however this also allows you to target multiple enemies at once by using a piercing skill that can cut through them.

Characters with magic attacks can also curve their trajectories along the edges of the battle screen, which can allow for some cool trickshots where you can target many enemies with a single attack, depending on their positions. There are also a few area-of-effect attacks, where you place a circle on the field to try and include as many enemies as you can within it.

This targeting system is only applicable for the enemies - your characters don't have any formation system to worry about, and the enemies target your characters freely.

An important aspect of the combat system is buffs and debuffs - Some characters have skills that can buff your attack and defense, and I enjoy the fact that there is no separate stat for magic vs physical or anything like that - all damage-dealing moves are improved with attack boosts, and all damage taken is reduced with defense boosts. Because the buffs are so important against the harder enemies, it would be too fiddly if there were so many different types of buffs to worry about, so the game keeps it simple. 

I actually found myself using items quite a lot on this game, which is surprising considering how many RPGs seem to encourage you to hoard them.  For example, if you use an Energy Drink on one of your characters, they get an attack up buff, which can actually make quite a difference, especially if you're paying attention to the timeline and use it on a character whose turn will be next. 

These buff items are not difficult to come across, and as you get further into the game, you'll be swimming in them, so it never feels wasteful to use a buffing item or a healing item in battle. In fact, once you have a ton of them that you're unlikely to run out, you start to think about usable items as just another available option for your character on their turn, rather than as a special resource that must be used wisely. 

That being said, that doesn't mean consumable items are so abundant as to be completely free to use: One of the party members you meet is Ez, an enthusiast of engineering and crafting, whose attacks use up consumable items rather than MP. I think having a player character like this is a clever way to make sure that the player's large stockpile of items has any danger of actually being used up, since Ez's skills often use many items at once. And I always enjoy it when games find unique ways for party members to differentiate themselves in their gameplay.

The combat system really gets to shine during the boss battles. Each boss battle is a uniquely designed encounter with its own individual patterns and gimmicks. And there are a LOT of bosses in this game.

An example of some of the boss variety...

Some bosses have multiple pieces to target - a big robot with two arms who charges a super laser, which can be stopped if you break the arms. Or a big salamander whose tail can perform a healing move, so you can cut off its tail to prevent it from healing. (but you can only reach the tail with curved shots, as straight-on hits will target the main body).

There's a boss who summons minions who charge the boss's ultra attack, so you gotta make sure to prioritise hitting the minions to avoid that (and using a piercing skill to hit the minion and the boss at the same time is even better).

There's a boss who poisons you and then feeds off your poison to absorb power - so equipping anti-poison items will prevent the boss from doing its strong moves. Or if you don't have enough anti-poison gear for everyone, curing poison with an Antidote just before the boss's turn can be useful too.

There's a boss whose mega-meteor attack causes debris to float around it to form a protective barrier, so you need to make sure to kill it before it does this move too many times (or remember to use one of Ez's skills to move the debris out of the way).

There's a boss who revives itself if you don't kill it and its two knights at the same time (so using the area-of-effect attacks to hit all three at once is a good idea)

There's a boss who summons several spirit swords while charging their super move, but the move can be weakened depending on how many swords you kill before the attack comes out (which may be easier or harder depending on how many swords you can get in your line of sight at once).... 

...I think you get the idea. There's a LOT of boss variety in this game, each one making full use of the battle system's mechanics in interesting and unique ways. 

The bosses are the standout stars of the game for sure.

I should mention that, the original 2021 mobile release version of the game was considered a very difficult game The difficulty was in fact the most common criticism of the game by reviewers and fans. When the Neo Dimension version came around, they turned the existing difficulty into "Hard Mode", and created a brand new "Normal Mode" so players can progress without getting too overwhelmed. Because I read about this before I started playing, I decided to play the game on Hard Mode so I could see it as it was originally designed, and... wow, these bosses can be super tough! I frequently died against the bosses in this game. I had to really rethink, re-equip, and reconsider how to approach them. But interestingly enough, I never really had to grind.

But that's because this game actually has some anti-grinding measures built in, which I'll talk about in a sec.

But yeah. I agree that the bosses were definitely too difficult for the original release - I felt undeterred because I knew I was willingly doing it to myself by selecting Hard Mode. But players of the original 2021 version must have been feeling pretty desperate to go up against such difficult encounters with no choice but to keep trying.

But anyway. 

The enemy encounter system is interesting.

On the surface, it feels like it's a classic random encounter system, but as you play, you'll realise that it seems to work based on fixed number of steps travelled. Encounters seem to happen at regular intervals as you walk, rather than purely randomly. Reminds me a bit of Legend of Dragoon in that regard. 

Encounters in this game are definitely on the maybe-a-bit-too-frequent side, but it was done this way in order to work with the added "Dimengeon" system.

Early in the game, Leo finds a machine called the Dimengeon Machine, which allows you to store enemy encounters away in an alternate dimension. You can turn the machine on and off at any time, and if you're walking around fields and dungeons with it on, instead of an encounter starting, you'll just see a notification saying "enemies sent to the DIMENGEON", and you'll see a little capacity gauge fill up. And you can keep walking with no interruption.

So if an encounter would have been against four enemies, you'll see your Dimengeon gauge is now at 4/30. next encounter would have been against seven enemies? Now it says 11/30. A third encounter that would have been against 5 enemies? Now it's at 16/30. At any time you can decide to enter a battle within the Dimengeon, which means that you'll have to fight every enemy inside, all in a row, without the ability to run away.

This is interesting and unique, and I rather quite enjoy it. It allows you to reduce the amount of interruptions that combat encounters make, while consolidating them all into one big encounter to take on when you're good and ready. I personally like to explore a dungeon without interruptions, and then whenever I reach a save point, I like to empty out the Dimengeon Machine there in relative safety. It reduces annoying interruptions when I'm remembering which paths I've already taken etc as I explore the environments, and getting the fighting done at the save points also allows me to save right after having the big encounter.

You need to be careful, because if you let the Dimengeon Machine fill up to maximum capacity, it forces you to fight them all 30 of them right there and then.

While fighting an encounter of 30 enemies, you generally fight them 10 or so at a time, and as you kill them, more and more will spawn in until all thirty have been killed. Thankfully it's not literally 30 enemies all at once, that would be too much.

Since you have to fight so many enemies at once, Dimengeon battles are a great way to make full use of all those area-of-effect and line-of-sight attacks in order to kill lots of enemies as quickly as possible. This is another example of the game's various gameplay systems working well with each other - a Dimengeon Machine system would be difficult to make work well in a different RPG that didn't let you target multiple foes at once for example, because it would be extremely arduous to clear it.

One annoying aspect is that, there are occasions during the story where the Dimengeon Machine is not available. This mostly occurs when playing as characters other than Leo - at certain points in the story, the perspective shifts to other characters, but Leo is the one with the machine... so without him, you have to put up with the regular overly-frequent encounter rate. This is a bit annoying, but not having Leo around only happens a few times, so largely it's not too much of a problem. 

Since encounters are not random but happen at predictable step intervals, you can strategically use the Dimengeon Machine to reduce the overall number of enemies you come across as you explore. If you choose to fight inside your Dimengeon just before a new batch of enemies would have appeared on the next step, it will reset the step counter with the dimengeon fight, which means the encounter you stopped short of won't appear afterwards. I like how the system allows for neat little minor optimisations like this if you're paying attention.

The game is structured in two distinct parts. During part 1, the story is quite linear. Leo goes from location to location, and you have no choice but to follow the story as it's presented. Once Leo gets the Warp Device functioning again (the one from the prologue), you unlock fast-travel and are free to return to previous towns to do sidequests and stuff, but even so, there isn't much freedom of exploration during the first part of the game.

After about 20 hours of playtime, part 2 begins, and suddenly the whole game is extremely open-ended. Now you have six or seven areas available to you all at once, and every previous town has a slew of new sidequests available too. 

The way to progress the main quest is not conveyed to the player at the start of part 2 - you're just dropped into the world and have to figure it out yourself. I do enjoy this way of doing it, it feels fun to discover everything. 

Part 2 also introduces several new gameplay mechanics. Now there exists a Tension Gauge - a meter that gradually fills up during combat, granting access to a powerful super move that targets all enemies when it's full. And you also get Character Growth skill trees - leveling up now earns SP, which can be spent in the skill tree to unlock new moves and passive buffs. For example, Leo can learn an auto-counter passive, which gives him a chance to automatically respond to taking damage by hitting the enemy back for free. There are new skills such as Taunt, which forces enemies to target Leo instead of his friends. And all sorts of other cool stuff can be unlocked too. Additionally, Part 2 allows you to swap your party members as you wish. Previously they would join or leave as the story dictated, but now you can to choose who's in your active party or not. All this means that, starting from part 2, the combat gets a lot more intricate and customisable. But part 2 is also where the more difficult boss encounters start appearing too.

The skill tree in this game has the ability to actually undo decisions. You can unspend your SP and reclose the skill tree nodes and try other ones, any time you like. And sometimes this can be important versus specific bosses - for example, Leo's automatic counterattack skill might actually be a detriment versus a boss who responds to direct damage by exploding... ...So because there exist bosses like this, it is really really good that they also let you unlearn skills whenever you want at no extra cost. We would have some major problems otherwise.

This structure where the first part is linear and the second part is open is very reminiscent of Final Fantasy VI. And in fact, I read somewhere that Sakaguchi did say he re-played Final Fantasy VI for inspiration before working on Fantasian, so I have no doubt that the similarities are fully intentional.

Part 2 is also where the anti-grinding measures comes into play. Since you can do everything in part 2 in any order you choose, they needed to solve a game design problem of how a player might be overleveled for an area just because they decided to do it later. They didn't want their cool boss fights to be trivialised due to players choosing to do other quests first.

So the solution they ended up using is...

After you reach level 35, the game starts significantly reducing the amount of EXP you earn from normal encounters.

And that's it. There's just a flat level 35 cap on EXP gains. Of course you can level up beyond 35, but only from bosses and endgame enemies. So during the majority of Part 2, you'll be hovering around the 35-40 area for a large potion of the game. Only once you reach endgame areas will you resume levelling up normally as this EXP limit seems to selectively apply based on the enemies' levels compared to yours. 

To be honest, it feels a little artificial to limit it like this. Suddenly you just stop earning EXP in the name of game balance. I do appreciate that it means that bosses never become pushovers, but it also means that the order you decide to tackle them in is less important than it could have been. And if there are any RPG fans who prefer to grind levels in order to take down tough bosses, their preferred playstyle is no longer viable at this point.

And also, this level-up situation actually does lead into one side area becoming impossible to complete on a regular playthrough.

Late in the game, you unlock a bonus area called the Void Realm, where you can rechallenge difficult versions of previously-fought bosses. There are three levels to the Void Realm: Outer, Middle, and Inner. However it's only really possible to beat the Outer level. The Middle level has a "recommended level" of 80, which is just ridiculous. You can't hope to touch any of the bosses in the Middle Void Realm at all, and grinding to that level is also made impossible due to the level cap system. So what gives?

Well, this game has New Game Plus mode.

In order to activate New Game Plus, you must reach the room before the final boss, find a treasure chest with a token in it, and take the token to a shrine in an optional area that becomes active if you've been following a semi-optional sidequest chain. If you offer the token to the shrine, it will offer for Leo to go back in time, which is essentially starting a New Game Plus run.

...I find it interesting how defeating the final boss has no bearing on New Game Plus - when you beat the boss, the ending plays and it doesn't save anything to your file. 

In New Game Plus, you get to play again with all your items, weapons, skills, and everything you have already. The main difference is that enemies are higher level. Which means that, now the level cap system now allows you to very easily level up to 80+ ...because whatever calculation it's doing is now taking higher-level enemies into account. I don't get how it works, but for whatever reason I'm now getting a lot more exp just because I'm on New Game Plus.

I...kinda don't like this approach to be honest.

On my New Game Plus playthrough, it took me 6+ hours of speeding through the game, breezing through the bosses with my endgame build, skipping all the cutscenes etc, just to get to the point where I was back in the endgame with all my party members, finally ready challenge the Middle Void Realm.

I didn't exactly want to add an extra 6 hours to my playtime just to finish the last side area before I stopped playing the game. I kind of wish that... they just let me level grind in the end game properly without having to be in New Game Plus?

There's a bit more going on in New Game Plus than JUST the higher level enemies, though - they added an extra explorable cave in the first town for some reason, but it's an annoying maze with no encounters, just lots of dead ends and no map..., and the prize at the end is a unique equipment item that raises maximum HP. I guess that's cool? Dunno why this needed to be New Game Plus exclusive tbh. Game design is funny sometimes. They also give you a brand a new skill tree exclusive to New Game Plus, but it's mostly just stat boosts and endgame style bonus perks such as "increase overworld movement speed" - no tangible new combat abilities or anything.

But anyway.

Overall... I'd say that Fantasian is a really cool classic JRPG! Its battle system is simple and inventive, and its systems mesh very well with both the unique random encounter system, as well as the extremely well-designed boss fights. The characters are fun and lovable, and the storybook narration style cutscenes are very pleasant to watch.

I really like Fantasian! This is a good game!