During Pax West 2024, we were invited to check out FANTASIAN Neo Dimension thanks to Square Enix. FANTASIAN is a game currently exclusive to the Apple Arcade but Square Enix is helping port it to other consoles and PC. It was helmed by the father of Final Fantasy, Hironobu Sakaguchi. It has been a while but it is so good to see Square Enix working with Hironobu Sakaguchi once again even if it is for remastering and porting over FANTASIAN to consoles.
With that said, lets get straight to the game!
Learning Leo
You don’t get a ton of story in the demo we saw for FANTASIAN Neo Dimension. Leo is with Kina and Cheryl when they meet up with Tan. After Tan leaves, Leo and the rest of the gang travel across the area, which lets you see how the gameplay mechanics work. Afterwards they come upon a wizard who put down a golem and wants to get his staff back. As Leo gets the staff back, the golem gets up and now you have to fight it.
FANTASIAN Neo Dimension has a twist with the random encounters. When you take down new monsters in the area, all future enemy parties that are the same get placed into a dungeon dimension. Known simply as Dimengeon. If you collect too many enemies in the dungeon, it bursts and you have to fight all of them at once. Considering the limit in the demo is 30 monsters, that is a huge amount of enemies to fight in a single turn based encounter. I hope the full game lets us increase the limit of monsters personally. Though if you don’t like this Dimengeon mechanic, you can just turn it off and have random encounters as normal throughout the game.
Unique Combat Lines
In combat you can do a normal attack with your equipped weapon or you can use a skill. In FANTASIAN Neo Dimension, skills are unique in the sense that each skill has what’s known as a skill trajectory. This trajectory is a line that you can manipulate in order to hit more than one enemy at a time. Some skills can go through other enemies and some end at a certain point. There are some that have Area of Effect explosions. Skill trajectories add a level of depth to the normal turn based formula. Also when you need to fight 30 monsters in the same encounter, it is very helpful to be able to manipulate the trajectory to hit the enemies that give you the most trouble.
In the build that we were able to play of FANTASIAN Neo Dimension, we got to fight a golem boss. This fight was actually quite difficult, especially in the beginning. You could target its hands and body. The best method to take this golem down was to destroy the hands first. Without the hands, the golem only does a single attack instead of a two to three hit combo per turn. There is a new difficulty mode in the game than there was in the Apple Arcade version of the game. The two difficulties to choose from was Normal and Hard. Hard is the original difficulty. One of the biggest complaints on Apple of this game was its daunting difficulty so adding a normal difficulty was a good choice.
Luckily I had a few items during the build that was able to help raise my allies a few times. I had my party members die quite a bit to the golem. This game is going to be difficult regardless of the difficulty you choose. Normal is just going to be a more manageable difficulty than the original version of the game.
A big draw of FANTASIAN Neo Dimension is the handcrafted dioramas that make up the settings of the game. The models meld almost perfect with these sets. If you just focus on the character models, you don’t notice a huge difference with the background from other 3D turn based games. When you do glance over though you get to see the love that it took to craft each individual background with these dioramas.
We were placed somewhere random in the game so I wasn’t exactly sure what the story was trying to do, but the gameplay and the added mechanics were fantastic. English voice cast was competent and there was a lot of fun to be had getting used to the skill trajectories. You are able to change from an English cast to a Japanese voice cast just in case you like having more options.
FANTASIAN Neo Dimension will be released Winter 2024 on PS4, PS5, Xbox Series S|X, Nintendo Switch and PC.
