Fantasian Neo Dimension is a little like Japanese role playing game comfort food. There’s the slightly androgynous amnesiac hero. He’ll go on a quest to reclaim his memories and along the way he’ll meet up with a slightly kooky orphan mage with secrets of her own to uncover. They’ll befriend the sassy princess, the lovable rogue, the comic relief, and more. Together they’ll discover that there’s a world, nay, universe-ending threat on the horizon, and only they have the means to stop it.
You’re Leo, and you don’t remember who you are or why you’re in the Machine Realm, a world of metal and robots and conveyer belts and sparks and grey. It’s grim. After your daring escape from the metallic hell you awoke in, you wander the human realm trying to piece together your identity. This involves — in traditional JRPG style — talking to people in towns, traversing the world map, recruiting new allies, entering dungeons, and besting villains.
The game’s world was created first by making actual dioramas for each location and then 3D-scanning them, effectively using the scans as pre-rendered backgrounds for the more traditional 3D anime characters we control to explore. The results are quite beautiful, lending each location a real-but-not-quite quality. It’s a little like looking at a photograph of the interior of a doll’s house, or the bit in the old Godzilla movies where he smashes up the cardboard city. You can tell everything is a miniature, painstakingly hand-crafted. It never looks truly real, but we appreciate the work it took to build.
Fantasian’s soundtrack comes from the legendary composer of many Final Fantasy games, Nobuo Uematsu, and his work here is splendid. From the jaunty pieces that play during moments of hijinks to the industrial din of the Machine Realm, the elegant pomp of the Royal Capital to the dramatic themes during climactic battles, the soundtrack is unequivocally sublime. The tunes are varied, fitting, and eminently hummable.
There were moments playing Fantasian that evoked such strong feelings of nostalgia in us that they were almost palpable. The delightful music from Uematsu, the pre-rendered backgrounds — if you turn off the slightly grating voice acting, it feels like one of those Final Fantasy games from the original PlayStation, like an unfinished missing link between Final Fantasy IX and X, finally unearthed over two decades later for our playing pleasure. It’s wonderful, or at least, it’s wonderful until you get into a fight.
Combat is probably what’s going to make or break this game for you. There were times we loved it, and other times we hated it. It feels unbalanced; both way too easy and way too difficult depending on where you are in the adventure. It’s the sort of game where, depending on which skills you’ve unlocked on the skill tree, the next boss you fight will either be impossible or trivial. If you follow the level recommendations for quests you’ll quickly discover any minor enemies you face in that quest will die as soon as you look at them, but bosses you encounter will be harder than a coffin nail. It’s all over the shop.
Battles in Fantasian are turn-based. A helpful chart at the bottom of the screen tells you which character’s turn it is, who’s next, and then a dozen or so turns after that. You can plan which character is going to attack or heal or buff based on their placement in the running order. On your turn you can either use a standard attack, a special skill, or an item.
Most attacks in Fantasian are projectile based, and so enemy positioning matters. If you happen to see enemies stood in a line you can fire a projectile to hit all of them one after another. Some characters can cast spells that you can fire on a curved trajectory to hit multiple enemies in turn. Some attacks, like grenades or bombs, hit multiple enemies in an area.
Battles involve working out the most efficient way to hit as many enemies as you can with each turn so you can take them out before they take you out. If they’re bunched together, throw a grenade. If they’re a little spread out then your mage might be able to curve a spell to hit four or five of them at once. It’s a little like solving a puzzle, and for a while we were really into it.
Unfortunately, Fantasian suffers from some truly outrageous difficulty spikes. You can get through a lot of battles using basically no strategy at all. They’re far too easy. Then you’ll face a boss that doesn’t just require strategic thinking; it requires you to follow a specific strategy, and even then luck is involved. It’s not a game where you’re rewarded for experimentation. It’s a game that requires you to have a specific skill unlocked, do this thing, then that thing, then the other thing, and then pray to the RNG gods that the wrong person doesn’t die when the enemy retaliates.
We found it really frustrating, and it becomes even more frustrating roughly half-way through the game when the skill trees open up. Once you have access to the skill trees, you can tailor your characters to your liking, focusing on a particular skill or trait. But you’ll then fight bosses that are nigh-impossible without having access to certain skills, which obviously you don’t know until you fight them. Fortunately, you can easily reset the skill trees and get your points back to reallocate them. Some people might like this type of micromanagement, but we found it frustrating.
One shining star in the combat system is the Dimengeon Machine. If you turn the Dimengeon on, it’ll “stock” random battles for you, so instead of being interrupted as you explore the world to fight a giant crab or something, you’ll simply get a notification to tell you that an enemy has been added to the machine. Once you’ve stocked thirty enemies, a dimengeon battle will take place in which you’ll fight all of the enemies you’ve stocked in one go, letting you take out multiple baddies at once with curved attacks or area-of-effect spells. You can turn this feature on or off, but we enjoyed using it and having less interruptions and more interesting battles.
Conclusion
Fantasian Neo Dimension evokes memories of classic Final Fantasy. It’s got an impeccable soundtrack, beautiful locales, and a world that inspires wonder. But it’s let down a little by likeable but fiercely archetypal characters and a by-the-numbers story, and it’s let down a lot by wild and uneven difficulty spikes that make combat a source of constant frustration in the second half of the adventure.
