Mar 242021
The more I see about Mistwalker’s upcoming JRPG Fantasian, the more excited I am (and the more I wish it wasn’t exclusive to Apple Arcade).
Fantasian is a turn-based JRPG where the environments are all hand-crafted dioramas, and it looks great.
A features trailer released earlier this month showed off some of its gameplay mechanics, such as how you can save up random encounters to fight the battles in a chain later on instead, and the story trailer really does remind me of classic JRPGs.
The soundtrack is composed by Nobuo Uematsu, and it might be the final game he composes the full soundtrack for.
Now, up until now I’d expected Fantasian to be a short JRPG. Yet a recent Famitsu preview, translated by Gematsu, suggests it will be much longer than I expected.
Fantasian will be released in two parts (which seems to be common for Apple Arcade games for some reason), both of which are due out this year. The first part has an estimated playtime of 20-30 hours.
Even taking into account that developers tend to exaggerate game lengths, that’s longer than I expected and it’s only the first part. It won’t necessarily be split perfectly in half, but if the length of the second part is similar, we could easily be looking at 40+ hours of playtime for Fantasian. The second part will reportedly have a more quest-focused, open structure.
Unfortunately, Fantasian is exclusive to Apple Arcade, and after looking at its page on the App Store, I’m not sure my old iPad will be able to play it anyway. On the other hand, the official website FAQ confirms that once it’s downloaded, you can play Fantasian offline, a major point in its favor if I do get to play it.
Several games have started on Apple Arcade and come to other systems later, so I can’t help but hope Fantasian will be ported once both parts are out. It’s looking like a JRPG I don’t want to miss.
In other JRPG news, Kazushige Nojima has a mobile game called Zodiac: Orcanon Odyssey that is now being reimagined for Switch, PS4, and PS5, so I’ll be keeping my eye on that.
Meanwhile, there have been a lot of rumors going around lately that I’m not going to write a full post about until we have something more official. I’m planning in case the PSP/Vita/PS3 store is really shutting down, but we don’t know that for sure yet. And as much as I’d love to believe the claim that “Lost Judgment” is a Judgment sequel, I want to see it from more than an anonymous source.
Getting back to the matter at hand, what are your thoughts on Fantasian? Are you surprised by its potential length, and do you expect we’ll see it on platforms other than Apple Arcade in the future?
I am on Apply Arcade with my new phone. Still not 100% sure if I will stick with it, but games like Fantasian make me want to wait it out and enjoy the games I can play here that I don’t have on other systems, or don’t want to play on other systems. It will still remain behind my consoles (especially since I often just use it for GACHA games) but I am glad for the chance to try some of them, though controls are still something to get used to…
Being a subscription service makes me less inclined to try it, but considering the length of Fantasian, it might be worth it as long as I played it without taking too many breaks in the middle, haha.