I am easily the biggest proponent of Apple Arcade that I personally know. I frequently find myself reminding folks that the mobile game subscription service from Apple is shockingly robust, filled with video games that are absolutely worth your time – some of which are even exclusive to the service! Until now, one of my go-to titles in this argument was Fantasian, a beautiful turn-based JRPG from Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi's Mistwalker. Thanks to the release of Fantasian Neo Dimension, an upgraded version of the game for consoles and PC, there's no longer any need to fiddle with anything mobile.
Not to say you can't go and play Fantasian on Apple Arcade if you really wanted to, it's absolutely still right there and currently available to anyone interested, but why would you? After spending some time with Fantasian Neo Dimension on the Nintendo Switch, I have a hard time imagining playing it any other way. And that's without playing it on a beefier console or PC, where I imagine it looks even better.
Old is Neo again
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All of the old bits of Fantasian that made it so fascinating in the first place remain in the revamped title, and hopefully now more folks will be able to realize just what it is that the developers have done. While combat is turn-based with party members having weapons and skills, attacking enemies aren't just sitting in a line – they're on a plane with depth and multiple possible locations along the battlefield, and all attacks hit differently along it. This is the first big sign that Fantasian, and Fantasian Neo Dimension by extension, is cooking something different.
Main character Leo, for example, can initially slash straight on through multiple enemies, depending on their positioning. Kina, the early mage, can curve her magic so that you hit enemies on the side of the battlefield and back at the same time. Cheryl basically hits a specific circle's worth of enemies. Adding all the usual RPG tactics like weaknesses to this formula just makes it all the more complex.
There's also a wild little tool called the "Dimengeon Machine" that lets you send random battles that crop up featuring previously encountered enemies to a pool of enemies that you can fight at your leisure. You can stack up to 30 in there and fight the waves of critters all at once rather than constantly get annoyed as you try to move around the map.
But if you know anything about Fantasian already, it's likely that the game takes place across scans of over 150 physical, handcrafted dioramas. From forests to rooms with beds and trinkets to deserts, the environments are physical while 3D characters move across them. It's a stunning bit of work that was frankly underappreciated on mobile, and even with the limitations of the Nintendo Switch, it's fairly stunning to see it on an actual TV.
Neo-ly renovated
Perhaps most importantly, Fantasian Neo Dimension does come with a bevy of new features that aren't available in the mobile version. For example, English and Japanese voiceovers have been added to all the cutscenes in addition to several optional scenes, bringing a significant amount of liveliness to the characters. The PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC versions also have 4K support, which I can't personally speak to but appreciate. But purely in terms of how much easier it is for me to recommend Fantasian Neo Dimension to potential players, the newly added difficulty mode is easily the biggest.
Fantasian notoriously has a reputation for a major difficulty spike, and it seems that the developers ultimately agreed this was something of a problem. "Fantasian was a very difficult game upon release," an official Square Enix website page about the game reads in part, "with many bosses pounding players before they worked out the optimal strategies to defeat them." In the newly upgraded version of the game, there's now "Normal" and "Hard" with the former being the new difficulty setting. So far, Normal seems… pretty normal, and I've not had any major challenge with the game's content.
Unfortunately, the same can't be said for navigation. Actually moving from place to place in Fantasian Neo Dimension is where its roots as a mobile game are most apparent. The camera constantly swivels around to give different perspectives on the physical dioramas, which can be a pain as it's sometimes hard to tell where chests and the like might be hiding, but using a controller while this happens makes characters go off on strange tangents until you reorient with the new angles. You'll be going up and to the right and suddenly the camera will shift and you're going in an entirely different, unintended direction.
It's a relatively small gripe in the grand scheme of things. I can deal with some clunky movement and awkward visual novel-style vignettes in order to experience a new (version of a) game from Mistwalker and Square Enix with music from Final Fantasy maestro Nobuo Uematsu. Between the physical dioramas, combat mechanics, RPG growth charts, and multiple party members, I suspect my holidays are sorted.
Fantasian Neo Dimension releases on December 5, 2024 for PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch. If this particular game doesn't interest you, there's always all of the best JRPGs from our ranking to check out.
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