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So because it was on sale (what else is new), I decided to buy Fantasian since I heard Sakaguchi and Uematsu worked on it. It was originally a mobile game that they optimized for console and PC and added voice acting. Since the FFXIV team worked on it you can see some overlap – such as the choice to cast Uchida Yuma as the protag since he voices G’raha Tia in FFXIV and allowing us to change the battle music to stuff from FF4, FF1, Endwalker, Dawntrail and also FF16. I ended up going with the FF16 soundtrack because it was the only one whose chosen tracks were actually good music…and not the worst possible tracks from all the others. (Like seriously out of all things you choose the Zoral Ja trial as the battle music ugh!?)
Basically, Sakaguchi wanted to do a modern version of FFVI with Fantasian. You’ve got the random battles, ensemble party, and the linear part one into the searching for friends part two. They have a few clever ideas for fixing some of the old school JRPG issues, but not quite.
Anyway I will say right off the bat, I could not have beaten this game without mods. The game has only Hard Mode and Insanely Hard mode (which they call Normal and Hard but that is not true.) Even at level 99, I still had to fight really long and difficult battles where the boss would basically annihilate my party if I didn’t have the mods on. You would have to spend time constantly shielding/healing the party, using tons of consumables, swapping characters until they’re all depleted of mana to kill the bosses otherwise. I’m sorry Square Enix but ain’t nobody got time for that. Like come on, you already made story mode in games like FF16, there’s no reason you can’t do this in any other new game! I don’t care that it’s a port, you could have easily just cut the enemies HP in half or even 1/4 for “story enjoyment” mode. Not everyone wants to tryhard every JRPG they play and I know you know it so I’m confused as to why this wasn’t applied to this game.
The game had a few interesting ideas for addressing some of the common flaws with classic JRPG design, although these were often a little undercooked. The most common of these is the dreaded scourge of random battles. Classic style JRPGs kind of need random battles because the map design (both the big overworld maps and the smaller area maps) don’t really represent “avoidable” enemies well. But these random battles are usually extremely annoying and extremely boring. They’re annoying because they explicitly take you out of what you were doing and force you into a completely different combat screen, often with a lot of dead air because of loading time, starting/ending animations, level up screens, etc. And then they’re boring because well, usually you don’t need to do anything more than hammer the FIGHT command (or for that matter, you often don’t want to do anything more than FIGHT because you’d rather conserve your MP or items for fights that require more than just mashing FIGHT).
Before playing I recall reading that the difficulty curve spikes up in this game overtime and becomes very annoying to deal with so I can’t say I was surprised but annoyed more than anything. The other nuisance is of course the fact that the game basically punished you for avoiding battles by locking keys behind trash fights and if you didn’t have the keys you basically couldn’t open 70% of the chests in the open world. The game also had a dimension system that allowed you to “queue” the monsters but it filled up so quickly, I literally went from 0 – 40 just walking around a tiny area of the map where I got lost. This got annoying fast so I disabled fights but of course that means no keys…and no keys means no chests. WELP. I’ve never seen a game punish you for avoiding fighting trash and this was a huge negative for me. The trash fights weren’t particularly interesting or engaging either. It was just fight 30 or 40 durds and then empty out your trash storage before you walk around some more, rinse and repeat. FIGHTING TRASH IS NOT FUN SQUARE ENIX WHEN WILL YOU LEARN.
Fantasian meanwhile gives the part a Dimengion, which is basically The Trap from Ghostbusters. As you walk around, you’ll have to fight enemies the first time that you encounter them but after that point they instead get sucked into the Dimengion. When the Dimengion gets full (which starts at 30 enemies and can upgraded to 50 enemies), you’ll be put into a battle where you need to fight all of the enemies that got sucked in. It’s a good idea for starters because it keeps you from being constantly pulled away from whatever you’re trying to do at a given moment. I can’t count the number of times when I was trying to do dungeon puzzles and would get pulled into constant random battles while trying to raise and lower some sluice levels and lose my train of thought as to what I was doing. It also cuts down on some of the dead air a bit because now you only get one loading screen, level up screen, etc. for those 30 enemies rather than having to sit through those 10 times for each individual pack. And then in terms of the battles themselves, it even cleverly solves the “do nothing but FIGHT” problem because now you finally have a reason to use spells and special attacks since now your AOEs can hit 10 mobs (and collect some powerups as well) instead of just one or two.
The problem is that well, even with the Dimengion there’s still WAY too many random battles. There were times where the Dimengion was filling up completely at the rate where it felt like each individual battle should’ve been happening. If the Dimengion was filling up roughly once or twice during the course of an area or dungeon (but still giving rewards at the same pace as the current way too high encounter rate) it probably would’ve felt fine. Then on top of all of that, the boss battles felt a little bit too much like they expected you to fail the first time so that you would then know “oh I need to rejigger everyone’s equipment loadouts because this time we need fire resist and HP up gear, and then go back into their skill trees and respect out of piercing attacks and into charge up effects”.
Anyway battle system aside the story was alright…but I’m a be real right now the most memorable thing wasn’t defeating the bad guy or seeing lore on Hmph Yim. No. It was MY SIDE SHIP:
I was joking “im an ancient god, ur an ancient elf…u wanna smash?” but I didn’t expect them to LITERALLY SMASH!!!!!!!
The entire game I had this side ship going between the gramps and the old elf lady and then the game is like I GOT U 😎. It reminds me of how basically the best ship in FF12 was actually Fran x Balthior meanwhile all the kiddies made 0 progress. Same thing happened here. Leo has 2 sisters who clearly have a crush on him and he just avoids the subject and runs away like a clown. 🤡 Leave it to the adult characters to fill the ship quota for me once again!!!!! On the topic of the story, at one point we completely derailed and got lost on where to go and ended up doing an ENDGAME BOSS DUNGEON instead of continuing the story. The game was pretty good showing us where to go but for some odd reason they decided we should be going to the clearly post end game dungeon instead of…the main story. After that grueling fight session, we looked up and realized where we were supposed to be going instead and teleported there to actually finish the main story.
I thought that the tilt shift diorama effect (and for that matter, the storybook cutscenes) were very charming visually and provided a way to give a 3D environment to navigate in, but OH MY GOD THE CAMERA. The game still wants to keep the classic 2D style where you’re looking at every individual area through a proscenium, rather than being a true 3D environment that you can rotate and zoom. The problem here is that most individual areas are not truly new areas with a loading screen but simply involve rotating the camera to show behind the building, on top of the cliff, and so on. This becomes INCREDIBLY ANNOYING because in order to move you need to constantly hold down a directional button. So you will be holding down the right button to walk to the right, until suddenly the camera spins and now you continue “walking right” but now “right” has changed from “east” to “southwest”. The maps and dungeons in this game not at all complicated, but you will still constantly get lost in them entirely because of the camera constantly spinning you into a direction you weren’t expecting. It gets so bad that they even violate the 180 degree rule sometimes and flip everything around. The absolute worst instances are when the camera spins completely around, which combined with how you’re holding the control stick (or WASD) in a specific direction now causes the camera and constantly keep flipping between the two directions as the character keeps spinning around. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh! I know that you guys really want to maintain that 2D feel, but seriously just make the camera rotation manual rather than automatic.
Ah yes the camera that actually made me nauseated with all the 180 degree spinning.🥴
As I mentioned initially, the game was clearly channeling FFVI with its two part structure, with the first part being almost entirely linear and the second part being mostly nonlinear. I do have to say that I wasn’t a huge fan of how the nonlinearity of the second part worked because it combined being generally vague about your objectives with sometimes needing to randomly explore on your own in order to stumble across the next part of the MSQ, but also having hard gates in numerous places. There were quite a few character quests that we never really noticed any contextual clues that would have lead us to discovering these on our own (and we never actually found what triggered Ez’s quest, for that matter).
Anyway it was an alright game. I would probably be more upset if I couldn’t brute force my way through it with mods. I wish there was more focus on characters than on trash fights. The characters all had their own little lore arcs and growth but outside of that there wasn’t much interaction at all. I wish we had more “side skits” with them which we did in the beginning but then as they added more characters to the party it all kinda just went into the background and there was just focus on clearing the story. Would I recommend this game? Only if you can stand the grind or are willing to use mods. Now if you excuse me, I gotta go buy Cheryl’s hair for my bun on Mogstation. 💸
Honestly there’s a lot to like, but a lot of the combat, questing, and so on really did need another couple revision passes to truly polish it. If you’re trying to make “modernized old school JRPG” this is sort of what you’d need to do, but I think the question is whether that truly is something that we still want to do any more these days.’
Also one last thing: THIS GAME HAS SO MANY CATS THAT I COULD NOT INTERACT WITH. -1 STAR. 🤣💔
Yurika and Kanade's Game Reviews 
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