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Fantasian


Maf

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This is a 2021 JRPG by Mistwalker exclusive on Apple Arcade and I'm about 3 hours in to it. My understanding is the Mistwalker team worked on Final Fantasy. I don't know which ones, but I assume FF7. Because this, at least to start with, is the most on the nose FF7 clone I've ever played. 

 

It literally starts with the guy in the thumbnail^. Yep, I know you see the hair and the headband and the earrings. It's a guy. He's name is Leo. He has AMNESIA and WEIRD HEADACHES THAT GIVE HIM FLASHBACKS. Leo starts in a FACTORY/REACTOR that is EXPLODING. SO HE MUST ESCAPE while being chased by the FIRST BOSS who is a BIG ROBOT that takes time to CHARGE UP A BIG LASER BEAM and shoot Leo with it. Leo then has a flashback to a CAFE WITH A SECRET BASE and a HOT ANIME GIRL WHO HE MET BECAUSE OF SOME FLOWERS. Stop me when you've heard this one before. 

 

The big difference between this and FF7 is this game is kinda dumb and a lot slower. Not that I mind too much, I've played it for 3 hours. I do like the game. It just does the default JRPG stuff and I enjoy the default JRPG stuff so by default I enjoy this. If you're going to copy a game, FF7's not a bad game to copy. 

 

After about an hour or so it does start to break away from the FF7 template and there are some cool moments and story beats that happen. It's just the beginning was so on the nose I couldn't quite believe what I was looking at. From a purely cynical perspective I guess they know FF7 is beloved and know that people playing JRPG's on Apple devices probably are a lot younger and not familiar with it. So for them it's all new. But if you've played FF7 it's like wow. 

 

Mechanically it's got some neat gimmicks. The battle system is turn and "row" based (?) system. Basically you can't hit enemies in the back row. But the 2nd party member who can use magic can fling her magic in a boomerang style arc around the front row, or hit multiple enemies at once. You do it by touching the screen and bending the line. It's neat. It's a cool thing.

 

The other gimmick is the main character has a Ghost Busters style ghost trap which collects enemies as you wander through areas and then you can fight them all at once. There's barely any narrative reason for why you can do this (So far). But it's clever because instead of constantly stopping for turn based battles you can collect a whole area at once and fight them at the end. There's a little bit of risk/reward as you don't want to fight too many high level enemies at once. But the game is very easy so far so being able to fight 30 guys at once instead of 10 sets of 3 is good. It works well with the bending magic thing too because for one spell you can pop a lot of monsters at once. 

 

Another thing it does is the areas are like dioramas. So walking through the forest area can look really quite stunning with how 3D the presentation is. Some of it doesn't work and looks rough, some of it I didn't even notice, and some of it looks great. Really eye catching. 

 

Yeah. Now it's stopped being quite a FF7 clone I'm not entirely sure where it's going. The game is sometimes so dumb it made me eye roll. Just some contrivances and the girl talking about how she grew up in the forest and then came to the city to learn about human beings, human lives, human emotions. That bit was killing me. But overall I'm actually really liking it and will probably play more. 

 

I'd give it a mild 7/10 so far. It's pretty ok. 

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Even the music sounds very FF7. It doesn’t sound like any one song from that game but (I dunno music) the instruments or style sounds like it could be from that game

 

 

Skip to Dire Threat and 6 minutes something. Isn’t the baseline (?) to the battle theme similar to FF7. I swear it’s like they know FF7 is a great game so let’s just do that for an audience that hasn’t played it before. 
 

I’m really liking this game. It’s trashy, but in a fun way 

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11-12 hours in and this game is starting to get actually difficult. Every 20-30 minutes I’m running in to a boss or mini boss that is wiping out my whole party a few times before I figure out a strategy. There was actually one really cool boss which was a thunder storm eagle monster thing. It’s surrounded and calls for little electric orb monsters that shoot it with electricity, and one it’s got 4 charges it does a big attack and blows the party off a cliff to instant death. 
 

The trick is to have one of your party members act as a tank and taunt all the enemies, including the boss. Then another party member throws these bombs and is the main damage dealer. Then the 3rd part member is healing.

 

I worked this out quick but getting it right was hard. Firstly because the damage dealer ran out of bombs. Which meant the tank character had to do some attacking too. But get the timing on the taunts wrong and the eagle gets charged and death.

 

A really interesting boss fight and my most deaths so far. But over the past 3-4 hours of so the game’s difficulty has been ramping up. It started with close calls. Then 1 death but get them the next try. Then a few deaths and have to re-equipped my party with appropriate items. Now it’s dying a few times to each boss to really nail down the strategy

 

It’s like it’s becoming a real video game.

 

It’s a shame the story and story telling is such utter shit. I’m enjoying it enough. I like the characters enough. But this is some weak fucking sauce the way things lead from one to another. The coincidences, the idiotic choices the characters make, how slow the game is to reveal things you can see coming from a mile away. 
 

I enjoy the game and the fights are actually getting interesting which I wasn’t expecting. So I’m liking it more. But the story here is comedic. So much padding, so much pointless leg work, so many dumb and lazy things happen to get characters from  A to B. Even in the context of JRPG’s which mostly have some really silly stories and stuff. This is low quality. 

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I reached the half way point in this game at 16 hours. The last 6 bosses or so have been so difficult. A big robot thing I fought last night took me a hour + of retries before I finally cracked it. Haven’t had such a hard time in JRPG boss fights since Final Fantasy 4. Except these bosses are less clever. More just big damage and tricky gimmicks.  

 

Some of it is the bosses are just hard but also it’s because I haven’t done any grinding at all. I did some grinding just now and the big mid-game boss went down easier than the mini bosses up to this point.

 

A thing I’m just learning about JRPG’s is if you leave grinding to as late as possible it’s actually faster and more effective than trying to keep an even pace throughout the game because by the time the game gets really hard the enemies are giving out tonnes of XP so the level ups are faster. It was only taking 2 to 3 battles and my whole team were gaining a level just now.
 

Anyway. I think in certain ways this game is really clever. The dungeons are bad and the story is…passable? But I just really enjoy the way it handles pace and it’s combat system. The combat system is simple turn based stuff, but the touch controls and how it’s all about maximising attack turns makes it fun and changes typical JRPG strategy. And the way you can horde random encounters and do them all at once is pretty fucking genius at helping the flow of the game. Where as JRPG’s are very start and stop this game has managed to overcome that by having the ability to round up a bunch of random encounters and beat them all at once in a big battle. There’s no penalty like XP being diluted either, I still get all the rewards from the battles except much faster. So mechanically this game has a really good flow complemented by a fun battle system which is why I’m 16 hours in. It’s really good playing JRPG and I find it rare to say that about these games. It’s more story first and gameplay second but here they’ve done cool stuff. 

 

It’s a shame that why your character can trap monsters and save them for later is not explained narratively at all. It’s one of the many things that turns this game from a pleasure to a guilty pleasure. It’s enjoyable but very stupid.

 

I won’t bother with the context because it doesn’t help any but there was a line from a character that said something like “If there’s one thing I know about your father, it’s that he always kept his most important notes in boxes” 

 

I was like fucking hell. I wonder if they skimped out on translation with this game sometimes. Although when told that you have to open up boxes in the correct order to make progress so maybe it’s just that dumb. 

 

But I do enjoy playing it a lot. So there’s that.

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  • 1 year later...

I'll put this here I suppose?

 

 

 

FANTASIAN Neo Dimension is a version coming to Switch which maybe a preferred place to play a game like this.  I believe this voice acting is new and I'm not sure what else is added.  Maf might be able to tell.

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I just watched the trailer I posted above to remind myself. Looks basically identical except now it has voice acting

 

This game is not bad it’s just very mid, and surprisingly hard. 

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  • 7 months later...

Started playing this, ii's mostly what I was expecting in the sense of a very classic, not overly complicated JRPG that doesn't reinvent the wheel in any shape or form. Even the angled attacks that look like a novelty are just a different execution on systems we've seen before. I agree that the 'Dimengeon', the gadget that allows for trapping monsters and tackling them all at once, is a neat feature to bypass the sometimes annoying side-effect of random encounters without being a sort-of god-mode toggle to turn them off, like seen in some remasters in recent years.

 

Visually I also really like the Dioramas, but sometimes the way the screen flips and turns when you reach the edge feels very choppy and almost makes me feel nauseous. I'm not sure if the transitions are smoother on other platforms maybe, I'm playing this on Switch. But on a purely visual standpoint it looks really nice and it's an interesting idea to re-create the feeling of the old-school pre-rendered backgrounds without applying the exact same technique.

 

The only really disappointing thing so far has been the music. I might have gone into it with my expectations set too high because of Uematsu, but outside of maybe the boss theme there hasn't been much here that was either enjoyable to listen to or channeled some nostalgia, like Octopath managed to do. There's even one track, in the Venice-like city, that uses such grating flute sounds (a combination I thought impossible) that I had to turn off the music in the options as I felt I was getting a headache.

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This is slowly growing on me – not that I didn't enjoy it before but it's starting to feel more complete now with more party members, more options in combat and even the dioramas have become more complex as it moves along. I've reached Vibra I think was the name, the Royal Capital, and the backgrounds here almost evoke a similar kind of awe than the good old FF1 backdrops back in the day. They also patched it today and added an option to smooth out the screen transitions, so it wasn't just me who had some issues with those.

 

I also like how they handle the tinkerer class in this. This is usually the type of RPG character I don't like using because it's often a case of trial & error and then you might not even get much out of the item combinations you picked, or forget the good ones etc. Here it's just a standard skill list that shows you how often you can use which specific attack with your current item quantities. It might not be as deep as the more freeform alternatives, but at least I'm using it and don't let the character warm the reserve bench (looking at you, Rikku).

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This game just pulled some sort of Dragon Quest 7 on me by

Spoiler

introducing a skill tree 17 hours into the game.

 

But it's also very FFVI, which is still fresh in my mind as I played it last year. Not a bad thing per se, but it also copies that game's penchant for splitting up the party and it's been quite a while since I've last seen two specific members. And while most of its writing falls a bit flat I think, there have been some genuinely funny moments as well. I think at this point it would have to mess up quite a bit for me to stop enjoying it.

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