![]() The portability is amazing, but playing on an iPad or an Apple TV is a much better fidelity to experience Sakaguchi’s game. I did feel that playing Fantasian on the phone loses a little bit of its luster. The art is beautiful, and it’s hard to fathom that we went from playing games like Snake on our flip phones to fully rendered, 3D JRPG’s on a handheld device that makes phone calls, checks social media, and can text. Below is an example of them actually building the town, prior to adding it into the game.īehind the Scenes #FANTASIAN /5EqGSjje3zĮach area is an actual handmade diorama, built by a company of over 150 employees, with each live model being scanned into a 3D map. And the maps! Oh the maps! They are so gorgeous. “About three years ago I had the opportunity to play Final Fantasy 6 with my old colleagues, the people I made the game with, and it really reminded me of how much I enjoyed this genre, and how much I would like to make another game like that.” Handcrafted Maps?Įach battle has a specific order in which each character will attack, displayed in the bottom right-hand corner that appears anytime a random encounter is initiated. In a recent interview, he discussed what led him to return to those roots. ![]() They come alive and aren’t merely stagnant spires thrust upon a 3D renderer. ![]() Once you enter the first town of En, you are immediately ensconced in the graphical physicality of the levels. Upon loading the game on your iOS device, the stark contrast in graphics is on full display. Mistwalker has utilized the traditional tropes of turn-based combat, searching maps for treasure, and engaging in randomized encounters, but they have thrown a few variances on top of those existing structures. It’s a returning to the roots for the team, however, and for Sakaguchi, in particular. A battle from the original Final Fantasy, on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Fantasian is by all accounts, a traditional, turned-based endeavor, where each member of your party takes turns attacking, harkening back to the days of old, where turn-based RPGs, following a linear narrative were at the forefront of RPG design. Fantasian does deviate from that epic release in a few ways, however. Since that time, he had been the Game Director for most of the Final Fantasy releases prior to Final Fantasy VII, where he was responsible for the original story following Cloud and his battles with Sephiroth, as we attempted to uncover his mysterious past. The original Final Fantasy was released on the NES, with Sakaguchi serving as Game Director. But this is quite the leap from a traditional RPG experience and shows the leaps and bounds technology as a whole has made, since Game Director Hironobu Sakaguchi first started making games on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), with the 1987 release of Final Fantasy. Like a majority of Japanese Role-Playing (JRPG for short) titles, the titular character starts out with no memory a proverbial blank slate for us to manifest our emotions and reactions to the world upon. With an opening sequence eerily similar to Final Fantasy 7, Fantasian, an epic RPG released on Apple Arcade, plunges us into the shattered memories of Leo, as we attempt to ascertain details of his past life and search for the truth behind what happened to said memories. The story of Fantasian starts with a very familiar premise one of the lost memories being sought in the midst of a chase scene. In the midst of chaos and panic, Leo attempts to find familiarity, or some semblance of structure, as he attempts to escape from a facility while being pursued by a behemoth. The one issue we did run into was when the scenes on the maps changed perspective, the pressing of the controller made the character run in odd directions. The controller was very responsive, with no noticeable lag. We easily paired a PS5 controller with both devices in about 5 seconds at most. Fantasian was reviewed on an iPhone 12 Pro Max and an iPad Pro (12.9-inch 3rd generation), and the game was crisp and responsive. The action begins immediately, as we find Leo escaping from a structure he is very unfamiliar with but should remember, accompanied by a yellow-looking Baymax inspired, sentient robot. Directed by Hironobu Sakaguchi, who served as Game Director over the first seven Final Fantasy games, Fantasian plunges us into a world of peril and follows the mysterious exploits of Leo, a fighter whose shattered memory serves as the basis for the plot. Facebook Twitter Messenger Reddit PinterestĪs we celebrate reviewing the plethora of games added to the Apple Arcade, we look at Fantasian, a recently released game by Mistwalker Studios.
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