Fantasian: Neo Dimension is the newest (and perhaps final) game to spring from the mind of Hironobu Sakaguchi, the father of Final Fantasy. It is a love letter to the classic 8 and 16-bit games in the series, most notably Final Fantasy VI. It features a turn-based battle system, a world map, numerous dungeons, and a cast of quirky heroes as you would expect from a game of its lineage. However, Fantasian is far more than just a simple throwback to a gaming era long gone.

Fantasian also borrows from later titles Sakaguchi was involved in. From Final Fantasy X comes the ability to change your party members on the fly in battle (which offers a lot of versatility in combat). On the narrative side, flashbacks for the various characters are conveyed as narrated short stories that are the natural evolution of the text-only stories found in Lost Odyssey.

However, the key mechanic of Fantasian is something wholly new: the Dimengeon system. Using it, you can store random encounters (at first 30 enemies worth and later up to 50 enemies worth) and then fight them all at once. While this may seem an insurmountable challenge at first, it is doable because most skills and spells in the game come with special properties, like affecting all enemies within an area or penetrating through several enemies in a line or curved arc. It is often both easier and more time/resource-efficient to use the Dimengeon system whenever possible.

Yet, even such an advantage doesn't change the fact that Fantasian is an incredibly difficult game (even in normal mode). Now, you might be wondering, how do you make classic turn-based battles difficult? Can't you just over level? In Fantasian, this is easier said than done. Once your characters reach level 35, they gain only a fractional amount of exp from killing any monster a lower level than them. This does a fair job of keeping the game difficultly consistent throughout (though the non-linear nature of the back half of the game does allow over leveling somewhat).

The real difficulty of the game comes in the form of the bosses. Much of the time, simply spamming your most powerful attacks and healing damage when needed is not enough to seize victory. Almost every boss in the game has a gimmick of some sort. Sometimes, it's a special attack or status ailment that needs to be mitigated. Other times it's something like attacking when the boss is in a specific point in its animation or using weaker, multi-hit attacks to bring down barriers that single-hit attacks cannot break. In order words, each boss fight is a puzzle—one you must solve or die.

The first half of the game, due to its linear nature, acts as a bit of an extended tutorial. Your party is always predetermined as are the skills each has equipped. In other words, the solution to the puzzle is at hand, even if you don't immediately realize it.

In the back half of the game, however, it gets significantly more difficult. Not only can any character currently in the party be used in any battle, but each character gains a myriad of possible skills to learn (in a system akin to Final Fantasy X's sphere board) as well. This means you are constantly tasked with figuring out both which characters to use and which skills they need to have to overcome the boss gimmick. Luckily, you can respec your characters at any time so you don't need to worry about potentially missing out on a skill you need for a specific encounter. It can be hard—often brutally so—and you'll often have to give a boss a few tries before you can defeat it. The game rarely, if ever, feels unfair but you are expected to know the ins and outs of all your characters if you want any chance at victory.

On the story side of things, Fantasian doesn't quite live up to the epic plots of Sakaguchi's Final Fantasy VI or Lost Odyssey. The overall story itself is largely predictable (though enjoyable) but the characters and world are equally as memorable as the ones in those games. Each character has their own tragic backstory, an arc to resolve it, and an additional arc looking forward to what comes next in addition to their roles in the main plot. Meanwhile, the setting is fantastic, taking place in not only a world like our own but also venturing into others ripped straight out of sci-fi tales and eldritch fantasy.

This brings us to one of the game's greatest selling points: its visual design. Back in the era of the original PlayStation, dungeon and city backgrounds in JRPGs were often static mat paintings that you would run across. Instead of doing this for Fantasian, the team had over 150 dioramas built and then photographed at different angles to be used as backgrounds, including the backgrounds used in battle. This gives Fantasian a unique beauty that makes it feel unlike any other game ever made.

However, while this is a triumph of “games as art,” there are times when the automatic switching of static camera angles while moving across the map causes some issues. On the visual side, there are occasionally visual artifacts during the transition that make certain objects appear on the screen twice but in slightly different positions for a moment. On the gameplay side, the fixed camera nature of the game means you have to reorient your control stick after each camera change, which can lead to some annoying situations.

As for the music, it's simply amazing. Penned by long-time Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu, Fantasian features one of his most memorable scores in recent memory. The varied setting of the game allows him to play with many different styles of music, and you can tell he was having fun with it. The game also allows you to replace the battle music if you wish, swapping in tracks from Final Fantasy XIV or Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth among others (which, despite the quality of those soundtracks, feels a bit blasphemous, to be honest).

This battle music option is just the first of several additions to Fantasian's new “Neo Dimension” version. Fantasian itself was originally released on Apple Arcade back in 2021 and was thus designed for mobile devices with touch screens. Neo Dimension not only comes with an HD coat of paint for this PC and home console release but it also includes voice acting for large swaths of the game (which the original version lacked).

The other big change is the addition of a new “normal” difficulty mode (with the original version's difficulty now renamed as “hard” difficulty). However, while normal mode is easier, that doesn't mean the game is suddenly a walk in the park. Rather, normal mode is slightly more forgiving, which means that even if you don't figure out the boss gimmick right away, it's still possible to make a recovery mid-battle in some cases. But still, expect to have to try many boss battles more than once even on normal difficulty.

I should also mention that, during my 60+ hours with the game, I experienced no less than five crashes where the game soft-locked during loading screens. I had to reset the game each time to fix the problem. However, mitigating this issue was that, in addition to saving points, the game constantly auto-saves at checkpoints, meaning I never lost more than a minute or two of my time. (*Note: I was playing on a pre-release version of the game so this problem may be fixed via patch before the game releases.)

In the end, Fantasian feels like a game from a different timeline whereas Final Fantasy games kept their turn-based roots but still innovated within that framework in creative ways. It is a game that feels both new and nostalgic, especially for anyone holding a flame for the first 10 Final Fantasy games. While it may not have the most novel plot, it has a great gameplay system, memorable, well-developed characters, excellent music, and a diorama-based art style that visually sets it apart from every other game out there. If Fantasian: Neo Dimension sounds even slightly interesting to you, give it a try. You'll be happy you did.