Fantasian -Neo Dimension- [PC/PS4/5/XS/NSW]

[fuse]

The original release was one of those eyebrow-raising examples of a big name Japanese studio locking away a game behind the Apple Arcade subscription service, exclusive to their devices back in 2021. But after ten thousand years, it's finally free! Now it's time to conquer earth!



No denying that you have some JRPG tropes coming into it; amnesiac man meets mysterious girl with magical powers, can you believe it?! But cut it some slack on this front and you find that there's actually quite a lot that's fairly fresh too. The most immediate and obvious one is the game's look - rather than polygon-dense fully realised 3D worlds, you're typically seeing things from a fixed camera view. Rather than pre-rendered, you're looking at dioramas that have actually been crafted in the real world and then captured in extensive detail, allowing the perspective to pan and rotate and zoom about in them. It makes for some really gorgeous backdrops - I particularly like the interiors of buildings, and the awkward jank of having to change where you're holding an analogue stick as the camera spins to another angle is weirdly nostalgic despite being a pain in the arse.

The other thing that I'm a big fan of is the take on its turn-based battles - random ones in particular. Rather than constantly breaking up your wandering, you have a "dimengion" (nearly falled foul of the swear filter there) tool that lets you stock these up and carry on until you fight all of their enemies in a single battle at once. There's an upper limit naturally, which starts at 30 - meaning this can be dangerous but also a hugely efficient of fighting. Rather than simple "Fire > All" spells and skills, the battle field is deeper and within them each move has a range of properties - some attacking in a straight line and piercing weaker foes, some able to be manually targeted around the battlefield in an arc, and others coming with a radius that can be used between foes to hit many. It's a nice layer of complexity in even basic battles, but dimengion battles give you even bigger opportunities for smart strategy, and power ups (attack up, extra turn etc) littered around the field that activate on allow for even more efficiency to be drawn out of it all.

There are definitely still lots of things that feel like the result of its mobile genesis - a big, obviously fat-fingerable UI being a big one - but in true 'get the band back together' style, they've also been able to rope Nobuo Uematsu into doing some tracks for this to really hammer home the 'OG FF' feeling. Rather than making everything be told via the usual dialogue boxes, some of the inevitable flashback-y revelatory story bits are done with a nice font over some art - it isn't quite Lost Odyssey's "1000 Years of Dreams", but it fits as a slightly lesser version of this.

Check it out, RPG fans.

[fuse]

I am getting more conflicted with this as time goes on. I definitely enjoy the battle system, particularly when you're dealing with large groups of enemies and you get to be fairly creative in how best to take them all out - and to a certain extent, some bosses are fun too. On the other hand, others are *very* gimmicky - you need at least one failed run first to understand what it's about - what attacks it uses and what specific defences you need to come with, when it inevitably winds up a one-hit party wiper and how you avoid it, how to time your attacks to avoid being blocked, etc. Generic strategies just generally don't tend to work, and it is punishing. After level 40 there is an intentional and openly communicated tapering off to your experience gains, meaning going off and adding 3/4 levels across the board just isn't feasible, and that the interruptions for lengthy battles against fields of dozens of enemies becomes less of a pleasant interlude.

It also meanders quite a bit, giving you a lot more free rein on where / what to do than I had expected, and much earlier than I had really wanted. My hour count has gone up quite a lot with a lot of fairly aimless wandering, dealing with inconsequential side quests, and just generally trying to figure out what I'm meant to be doing next. I thought back to how this was released on Apple Arcade too - in two distinct parts - and I'm beginning to realise that it's this second half where things do start to go off the rails a bit, both in terms of direction but also in terms of the amount of re-treading you'll do, and how many of the new environments aren't anywhere near as impressive as those you see at the start.

I'm really near the end now and do want to see it through, but it is becoming a bit of a slog. Most of the trophies require a second run through in NG+ though and unless there is a very, very strong bounce back at the end I don't think I'm going to have that in me.