Fantasian Neo Dimension

• Genre: RPG
• Spoiler Free Review: Pretty much spoiler free, didn't really talk about the story, screenshots have the slightest of spoilers, like party members you get later.
• Time Played: ~85 Hours
• Too Short/Long: It's a little long for what it is. I thought I was going into a PS1-2 era rpg here, and when those pushed over 60 hours back in the day, it was noteworthy. "This is a super long rpg, it's nearly 80 hours!" and you'd see something about the length in everything discussing it. 40-50 hours would have really been the sweet spot for this.
• Soundtrack: There are a couple tracks that are pretty good, and it has the option to play music from a handful of more recent Final Fantasy games. I think it's necessary because this soundtrack isn't always the best on it's own merit.
• Pleased/Disappointed: At first I was extremely pleased, then it waned a little bit as I got tired of grinding, but overall, I'm pretty happy with it.
• Why I played: Fantasian's main draw for me was how it invoked classic JRPGs, and this has been a big year for me in revisiting some old favorites.
• Did I cry: I don't really think this game had any big moments like that. Maybe one or two slightly watery eyed moments.
• Recommend to others: I would recommend Fantasian to anyone who loves classic japanese rpgs, specifically PSX-PS2 era - maybe some weirdo PSP or DS games. It does a good job at invoking nostalgia despite being an entirely new thing.

I really did love this game. I'd have to sit with a bit to think if it's a "favorite of all time", and maybe it's not quite that, but it's really up there. I really enjoyed it and as I mentioned it did a great job at invoking nostalgia while being entirely it's own thing, and I mean it. It has these prerendered backgrounds, but these aren't primitive CG, they're photos/models build from actual real life dioramas, and that's amazing to me. There are so many areas in this game. Hearing about this aspect, I thought there just may not be a ton of areas in the game, but there are, and you can tell each was just so meticulously crafted. It really makes the world come alive in a way that modern games with their basic textured assets that may look "realistic", but in the end are the kind of copy-paste type thing you see in any game.

Fantasian has an identity of it's own, visually, that if you played the game, you'll know it the second you see it. Each area isn't just copy-pasting the same assets into another. Even though I'm sure they must have reused them to a degree, it feels hand crafted, because it is, and I really appreciate that.

It has a combat system that definitely borrows from a few things I've seen before, but put all together is rather unique for a turn based rpg as well. Besides your standard single target attacks, there are attacks that penetrate a line, attack in an area, and even bend and curve. I would have liked to have see even more variety with this, but they were clearly trying to keep it pretty tight from a balance standpoint. I do appreciate all the variation in combat too, there are a lot of pretty fun gimmicks.

What I don't appreciate as much is the fact that because the balance and such are SO tight, that sometimes you can really just be screwed going into a big battle, because you don't know what's ahead of you. I'm not sure it's the most I've ever done it, but Fantasian is pretty high in the list of rpgs I've had to restart a boss battle for. I feel like some kind of warning system, or ability to swap items mid-battle or something could make up for this. It does KIND OF, by allowing you to pretty much freely swap characters in battle once you get to a certain point, but that's part of the consideration of the balance. It expects you to use damn near your entire party for every big battle. I appreciate that, but it can make it a bit tough at times.

I don't mind it being tough though. What I mind is the "forced grind". Random encounters are so damn frequent. One of the primary mechanics allows you to stock those random encounters and have a big battle with up to 30+ enemies at once(like 10-12 on the field that get restocked as they are defeated). It's a really fun mechanic... the first hundred times. Stocking up your battles all the time can become pretty arduous with how often your gauge fills up. Considering the average random encounter is like 5 or so enemies, that means your big battle, filled up, could be a combination of 5-12 random encounters. You end up doing this just crossing a pretty small map. I think ~10 random encounters is just WAY too many for the size of these zones. Each area has like 3-5 zones. So if you left it off, you'd be having 30-50 random encounters per area. That's just way too many if you ask me. Especially since you don't get that many benefits for doing it. The game softlocks EXP gain once you reach a certain point, so that you only get like 1xp of thousands needed, if none of the enemies were close enough to your level. This means you could be wasting 10 minutes on a battle... for 1 experience point(and some items too, but resources are abundant). You can't escape the stocked up battles either. So you either have to deal with going in and out of battle dozens of times, or do a very long battle just as a... going through the motions, type thing.

I feel like that is what really padded the game for me. It wasn't that I felt like much of the content was dull, but just... too many random battles. There were tons of unique battles, and tons of fun encounters, and I liked how each character falls into their own archetype, sharing some aspects of another. Again, I would have been happy with a little bit more variety and expansion on these systems, but maybe that's something I could hope for in a sequel, or spiritual successor because really even though I went on a bit about the grinding, I really did enjoy the game.