Fantasian Neo Dimension PS5 Review. Rarely does a mobile RPG garner acclaim like Fantasian did. At the same time, names like Manabu Kusunoki and Nobuo Uematsu naturally draw attention for any fan of the genre. Due to their ages, these two RPG legends have gone on record to say that this might be their final large project they work on. While not perfect, Fantasian Neo Dimension does so much right, making this a potential worthy labor of love for these beloved creators to wind down their careers with.
Fantasian Neo Dimension Review (PS5) – An Imperfect Yet Special Labor of Love From Two Beloved RPG Creators
Leo regains consciousness in a strange place filled with mechanical structures and machines. A couple of robots assist him as well as they can to get him back to his own world. Unfortunately, Leo’s amnesia keeps him from validating any information the robots give him. Either way, the robots know very little about Leo to begin with, leaving the situation quite vague for Leo.
With the help of a mysterious device, Leo gets sent back to his own world; but not before a powerful deity appears and tries to take the device Leo uses to return to his world. When he comes to once again, he finds himself in a small village in the middle of a desert. A young girl saved him and brought him to this location to rest. From here, Leo travels from town to town, looking for pieces of his past through hints left behind by his parents.
When it comes to narrative, Fantasian doesn’t push any envelopes. In fact, it relies on many RPG tropes, like the aforementioned amnesia. Then, a couple women join your party, who spend a lot of time guilting and hinting to Leo that they like him. The big one is the way that the game uses deities and supernatural events to move the plot along.
The writing itself is hit and miss. Sometimes it executes well while other times it throws in weird hooks and odd statements, likely due to translations that go too literal in their phrasing. All in all, while it doesn’t do anything profound, it doesn’t do much to get in its own way. When everyone comes across a little odd, then it begins to feel more natural in that context.
Combat On A Curve
Where Fantasian truly shines is its combat. Much of it is the standard affair where all combatants take turns attacking. Like many before it, some allies even use skills that attack circular sections of the map, hitting anything that stands in that circle.
The best part is using skills that follow lines. Some attacks go in a straight line, and some of those pass through targets, hitting everything in its path. This is cool enough on its own.
To make things interesting, some skills follow paths you can curve. So, if there’s an enemy you want to attack in the back row while avoiding some frontman, just use those skills. Exactly like the linear skills, any enemy that sits in the path of the skill takes the hit.
It seems like such a little thing, but being able to string targets together like this never gets old. Plus, some frontmen use guard, which keeps skills from going through to enemies behind them. The arching attacks are just as strategic as they are fun to use.
Controlling the Field
All of this is very important, especially in boss fights. Most of them feature unique mechanics that do devastating damage if you don’t destroy a boss’ weak spot or appendage. The characters usually tell you what to do to beat a boss, which dumbs down the experience a bit. Even then, these attacks deal heavy damage and can one shot you if you’re not careful, even on normal difficulty.
While such a little design choice, choosing skills works so well. Instead of a traditional combat menu, you use L2 to choose a basic attack and then R2 to use the last skill you used on that character.
To switch skills, just press right on the D-Pad and it opens the skill menu. Another right press goes to the item menu, and a final right press brings you to the escape option. Like I said earlier, it’s such a little design choice that doesn’t technically change anything. At the same time, not needing to actually select an option to go into a submenu saves a lot of time over tens of hours in an RPG.
Fantasian also offers another unique feature. Using your Dimengion, you can temporarily store enemies from random battles and fight them all at once. The game limits you here, though, since it only allows you to store 30 enemies before forcing you to fight them. This doesn’t change how random battles work, but it does provide you with more control. Besides, using the combat mechanics against even more targets at once just feels awesome.
Living In The Past
One major problem with many RPGs is their grindy nature. For the first half of the game, Fantasian has a nice balance of enemy difficulty and natural progression. If you defeat every enemy that pops up, you don’t need to do much extra, even on hard difficulty. However, get toward the second half of the game, and boss fights ramp up health levels and damage output to the max. Since this game follows similar trends from retro games, this leaves you needing to grind out levels for more than half of your time playing the second part of the game. It’s not as bad on normal difficulty, but it still rears its head far too often.
Games of a certain age benefitted from pre-rendered backgrounds. Aesthetically, these games age well in that regard, including the likes of Resident Evil. In a similar vein, Fantasian does the same thing-but with a twist. The team constructed physical dioramas for each location and then took enough pictures of it from different angles to properly utilize the dioramas in-game.
To boot, there are no camera controls. Instead, the game uses fixed angles (again, much like Resident Evil), which allows the game to truly show off the backdrops this team created. It’s a very cool effect. There’s a lot of detail in these dioramas, but they don’t utilize a high resolution. Instead, this helps to sell the in-world realism. Ultimately, the final product that combines digital characters and physical backgrounds feels cohesive and retro yet unique in its own right.
Tank-ish Controls
One mistake this game makes may not be a massive one, but it rears its head all the time. It comes down to how character movement interacts with camera changes. Whenever the camera shifts, it turns your current input into something akin to tank controls. For example, you run across the screen to the left in the first section. The next section then changes and makes you move down. Instead of your controls adapting to that change, the game registers your previous input as forward.
So, in this scenario, you keep following the path as long as you keep your joystick pointing left. This took me a long time to get used to, and it still messes me up. Granted, you can let up on the joystick to reset your controls to the current angle. Personally, needing to do that just feels unnatural, so I try to make it work to keep the character in constant motion.
Sometimes, the angle change is so obtuse that I need to let up on the joystick to reset the controls. Combine this with narrow paths, and this oddity quickly becomes a regular frustration. You can get used to it, but the need to do so feels like an overlooked flaw.
A New, Yet Nostalgic RPG
Fantasian Neo Dimension may suffer from a hefty grind, a control oddity, and a rather tropey story, but it also shines in ways that made the now-retro RPGs so special. Combine the dioramic backdrops with engaging combat and just enough modernization without going too far away from its retro inspirations, and Fantasian practically demands that all RPG fans give it a chance.
As long as you know what you’re getting from Fantasian, I believe that the $50 price tag is justified. However, that price point could easily be a deterrent for anyone even remotely on the fence. Since the game lasts upwards of 80 hours, that’s not a bad time-to-price ratio.
Review code kindly provided by publisher