Fantasian Neo Dimension Preview: As if the original PlayStation had never gone away

Porting games to consoles from mobile is not always a successful venture, yet Fantasian: Neo Dimension from Square Enix has the odds stacked in its favour. Firstly, the game was released for the Apple Arcade as a premium experience, with no microtransactions, battle passes and other such nonsense. No, this is just a pure 20-hour long JRPG with no extra fuss. Secondly, and more importantly, the game is the brainchild of Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of the Final Fantasy series, and it marks the first time that Square Enix publishes one of his games since he left the company back in 2003.

If you think this means it will be a very traditional JRPG, well, reward yourself with some experience points, because you are absolutely correct. In many ways, Fantasian plays, looks and sounds like a JRPG from an alternate world where the PS1 had stuck around to this day, complete with pre-rendered backgrounds, spiky hair, and some absolutely hilariously bad voice acting.

The voice over is one of the few new features in this console port that also adds an easier difficulty setting and 4K support on newer consoles and PC. From the moment I boot the game, I can tell it's worth every penny they've paid for it - which I imagine can't be a lot, since it's hard to believe most of the characters are voiced by professionals. The tone is all over the place, from unenthusiastic one-liners more fitting of an automated customer service hotline, to lines delivered with all the pathos of a trained Shakespearean actor - often during the very same dialogue sequence! Most dialogue is extremely stilted, with absolutely no interplay between the actors, and you have to wonder, whether it's an intentional throwback to PS1 titles such as Resident Evil, or if this remaster has been made on a shoestring budget.

The same holds true for most aspects of the game, and your enjoyment will probably depend on whether you view Fantasian as a cheap mobile port or the return to simpler times. The environments are apparently based on scanned versions of handcrafted dioramas, but the end result doesn't differ much from early PlayStation pre-renders, and you're never really quite sure where you end up transitioning from one screen to the next. Battles can occur almost everywhere on the map, and they are strictly turn-based, with the order of attacks shown in the bottom left corner.

While the presentation is all very classical, it would be unfair to criticise the developers for staying true to the ideas they themselves helped popularise. And there are some ingenious concepts as well. One of them is the so-called Dimengeon, a feature that lets you skip random battles. Instead, the monsters you are supposed to battle get added to a sort of queue, and once it's full, you will have to battle them all at once with the aid of extra abilities. I didn't actually get to experience this doing my half-hour preview, but I did get to meet an item-hungry monster, which forced me to approach battles in a new manner. Speaking of the battle system, I found it quite engaging, with swift attack animations, a snappy menu layout, and the added dimension of being able to direct your attacks in specific directions opening up for AOE damage.

The preview session took place some hours into the game, as we were traversing a desert area, and the final boss, a huge stone golem, had me on the ropes. I managed to scrape through, but it was only thanks to what I suspect was a very generous supply of healing items for this session. My reward was more bad voice acting, but also a quite impressive cutscene that lived up to the production value one expects of a Final Fantasy-style game. In short, if you want to play a game that rewinds the clock about 20 years, Fantasian: Neo Dimension should be right up your alley when it releases in the fourth quarter of 2024.