Operation Backlog Completion 2026

Fantasian Sounds Much Longer Than I Expected

 Video games  2 Responses »  Tagged with: ,
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?

My Time With Animal Crossing: New Horizons

 Reviews, Video games  4 Responses »
Mar 222021
 

A year ago, I had never played an Animal Crossing game and had no intention of doing so.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons looked like it had some interesting ideas, but I didn’t see myself enjoying it when I prefer story-driven and/or more focused experiences. I worried that I’d find myself bored and my interest in it would fade away.

But several of my friends pestered me to try it, and once it came out, I found myself getting caught up in everyone’s excitement and thinking that maybe it would be nice to have a more relaxed sort of game to put a little time into here and there over an extended period of time.

So I bought my first Animal Crossing game.

Once I got into it, the first thing that really caught my attention was the world’s most adorable owl, Blathers the museum curator. For a long time, I played New Horizons as more of a collection game than anything else. All I wanted to do was catch bugs and fish and dig up fossils to give to Blathers.

(It even occurred to me that an Animal Crossing spin-off solely about collecting things for Blathers would be perfect for me.)

I eventually did start doing other things in the game, with holidays being a big draw especially because of this past year. No fireworks because of the pandemic? At least I could see fireworks in Animal Crossing. Special events were cute and entertaining and helped me appreciate the game’s real-time calendar, although I wish I didn’t have to go online every time.

Sadly, the villagers were probably the weakest part for me. At first I was excited to talk to them and get to know them, but once I realized villagers with the same personality type will give the same dialogue and I started hearing the same lines over and over again, I lost a lot of interest in that.

Soon I switched the major focus of my attention from the museum to my house, and I began making plans for customizing my Oak Island themed island, as well.

Oddly enough, the feature that held my attention the longest was the stalk market. Tracking turnip prices along with friends to find the best price, visiting other islands to sell turnips for the biggest profit, checking each Sunday to find the best price to buy them at; this appealed to me so much, I finally got a Nintendo Switch Online subscription, and I kept checking in each week for turnip prices long after I would have otherwise stopped playing.

Now that it’s been several weeks since I felt any real urge to play, I officially consider my New Horizons playthrough to be “finished.”

I never finished customizing my island. I never built a bridge beyond the one you’re required to build. I finally built a single ramp this weekend after a friend implored me to. I have a bank full of bells I’ll never spend. In a sense, my prediction came true – my interest gradually faded. But I got 150 hours out of it, and while that’s nowhere near the playtimes I’ve seen from some people, I can hardly say it wasn’t worthwhile to play a game I enjoyed for 150 hours.

My time with Animal Crossing: New Horizons has left me curious about whether there are other slow, low-key games I’ve written off as not my sort of game that I might enjoy after all, or if I might even like playing another Animal Crossing. Thoughts? Suggestions? Let me know in the comments!

After 6 Years, I Returned to Ys I

 Reviews, Video games  3 Responses »  Tagged with: ,
Mar 192021
 

Six years ago, I decided to play the very first Ys game, which I have through the Ys I & II Chronicles+ collection on Steam.

Then I got stuck on a boss fight, so stuck that I quit the game and never returned.

…Until this year, when I decided to finally restart Ys I and play it through to the end this time.

Ys I is an old game, and one of the most unusual things about it is its combat system. The “bump” combat system is a form of action combat where instead of swinging your sword or anything like that, you attack enemies by… bumping into them. Hitting them straight on lets them damage you as well, so you want to hit them off-center to safely deal damage.

It’s a strange system, but it’s fun once you get used to it. Boss fights are a little different, where it becomes more a challenge of getting close enough to bump the boss without taking damage.

(Oh, you also bump into NPCs to talk to them, too.)

You play as Adol Christin, a swordsman who tries sailing through the wall of storms that surrounds the land of Esteria and gets shipwrecked there, after which he decides to investigate what’s going on and why monsters have filled Esteria. Now, for as much as people describe Ys as being more focused on gameplay over story (especially compared to Falcom’s other big series, Trails), there’s a surprising amount of interesting lore, frequent new dialogue from NPCs, and even a journal with descriptions of every single character you talk to.

So I was pleasantly surprised to find myself enjoying the story and lore. It’s straightforward, but it’s also a fairly short, old game.

What I didn’t care much for was the “what if we make everything a maze?” approach to dungeon design, as well as the boss fights. Aside from the dreaded boss that stopped my playthrough six years ago, the final boss was so annoying that I might have given up again if I wasn’t almost at the end.

Anyway, I’m happy I finally returned to Ys I after all this time, and since I’ve been assured Ys II has better boss fights, I’m looking forward to playing that as my next Ys game.

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