“Seeing those interact with each other, and their journey together - and departure, in some cases - is really touching and moving for the audience.” Charting new paths “For me, the characters, of course, are also very important, and there are a lot of different relationships and perspectives that they bring to the table,” explains Sakaguchi, who penned Fantasian‘s story.

All the while, Leo’s quest will unravel the mystery surrounding a mechanical infection that’s slowly overtaking humanity.

In keeping with JRPG tradition, Leo will eventually form a ragtag party consisting of such colourful characters as a pair of robots, a princess and an airship captain. “I think there is a very distinctive charm or warmth that you get from the dioramas that any other form of environment can’t really replicate.”Īt the heart of these remarkable dioramas is a story about an amnesiac named Leo who sets out to recover his memories and locate his missing father. He notes that the game features interior and exterior environments comprised of more than 150 incredibly detailed dioramas, ranging from a large, ornate airship to a small moss-covered hut and even a bedroom with a divider equipped with real functional hinges. “We were trying to explore and push the boundaries with what’s possible in terms of visual expression,” says Sakaguchi of the decision to use the dioramas. “We wanted to make sure that it didn’t seem like a chore or grind to have to fight a bunch of monsters at once” The dioramas give the game a stunning and distinct visual style that’s reminiscent of what Sakaguchi and his team created with the pre-rendered backgrounds of the groundbreaking 1997 PlayStation RPG Final Fantasy VII. To help with that, the studio enlisted a variety of experts from Japan’s “Tokusatsu” special effects industry, who have themselves worked on world-renowned projects like the Godzilla films, Ultraman and Attack on Titan. As previously mentioned, Mistwalker has taken real dioramas and scanned them into Fantasian to create the game’s worlds. “It comes down to the setting, and in Fantasian, we really set out to make a very unique world constructed by this multidimensional setup with a human realm and, on top of that, a machine realm.” And what a unique world it is. Waxing nostalgic, he notes that the experience was like “flipping through old diaries” that brought back fond memories of “the passion the team really poured” into those older titles. Speaking through a translator, Sakaguchi tells MobileSyrup of a time about three years ago when he replayed Final Fantasy VI with some old colleagues with whom he made the game. That’s all changing, as Mistwalker is finally pulling back the curtain on Fantasian, which should prove more pleasantly familiar than fans of the 58-year-old legendary designer’s work might have expected from the Apple Arcade game. When Apple unveiled its Apple Arcade game subscription service in March 2019, one of the most intriguing titles to be shown off was Fantasian.ĭeveloped by Mistwalker, the Japanese indie studio headed by Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, Fantasian was initially teased as a diorama-filled role-playing game (RPG) “that shouldn’t exist” during a brief 30-second section of a larger Apple Arcade sizzle reel.īut fast forward two years and we’ve actually seen very little of the game, outside of what could be gleaned from occasional pictures shared to Twitter by Sakaguchi and, in one case, even Apple CEO Tim Cook himself.

Fantasian android