I beat Fantasian Neo Dimension. Good luck to anyone else who wants to

REVIEW: A beautifully presented game, that’s best played with a guide due to brutal mid-game bosses and a weird progression system.

Yim, right before her shell game of pain.

The odds were not on my side. I had a two in three chance of dying to this boss, and there was very little I could do about it.

I'm over halfway through Fantasian Neo Dimension and without realising, I've stumbled into a trap within the game. I noticed this weird-looking bubble on the world map and went to check it out. It froze time and locked me into an inescapable sequence of events, closing out with a boss that felt vastly more powerful than my party.

Yim, the god-like apparition, hits like a truck, bringing one of my party members down to critical life with each attack. My party's speed stat isn't high enough; there's not enough time between her attacks to fully recover. Just when I feel I have the hang of things, she moves back from the arena, splits into three, and commences a mechanic leaving two fake clones and the real one for me to attack. Do nothing, and all three clones attack meaning certain death. Hit the wrong clone, and it explodes, dealing enough damage to the party to make the run unrecoverable. It's a shell game of death.

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I felt under-levelled and under-equipped to deal with this fight. What's worse, the game locks you in this section. You can't go level up and come back, or purchase additional items if you are running low. You needed to know that this section was indeed a trap going into it, in order to be prepared for it.

That more or less describes my experience with Fantasian Neo Dimension, a game created by the makers of the Final Fantasy series. It was originally designed for Apple Arcade and released in two parts in 2022. Late last year, the game was combined into one title and released across most platforms. It’s an ode to one of my favourite games of all time, Final Fantasy X. It hosts a similar turn-based combat system and its core character upgrade system — which gets fleshed out mid-game — is reminiscent of the Sphere Grid in that game. By rights, I should love it. But after 70 hours of being ambushed by bosses, I could not wait to be done with the game.

Before I delve into the fundamental issues with the mechanics of the game, it's worth pointing out how it succeeds as a role-playing game and why this game is perhaps so polarising.

Fantasian is a visually striking game. Instead of opting for high-end graphics, it relies on real-life hand-crafted dioramas for its setting. Characters in the game are essentially superimposed onto them. It also means areas are fairly well-contained, which for a mobile game turned into a console experience makes sense. It's a work of art in its own right, but its look is unique and may jar with some.

Musically, the game also shines. Composer Nobuo Uematsu has created a fantastic score to accompany the game's levels and encounters. The updated edition also gives you the ability to swap the original game's score with more recent entries in the Final Fantasy series, fuelling that sense of nostalgia and really allowing you to edit the music to your mood. The script and voice acting of the game are also on point. The writing of the Cinderella Tri-Stars — who are basically this game's version of Jesse and James from Pokemon's Team Rocket — made me chuckle. The localisation here had me wondering — despite the nearly entirely Japanese team making the game — whether it was written in English first.

While Fantasian borrows heavily from Final Fantasy, it aims to expand on the series in its own way. Random encounters — where the game stops and suddenly throws you into combat — have fallen out of favour with the franchise. But they're back in a big way here. The twist is that Fantasian's Dimengeon system allows you to bank enemies and fight them all at once in a massive battle where you can end the lives of up to 50 unwitting monsters in one fell swoop. These fights are a highlight, becoming a game of eliminating enemies in a particular order to maximise your turns in combat and minimise theirs. It's a fresh and welcome twist on this mechanic, and a fun and frenetic way to level your characters.

The plot is interesting but perhaps plays second fiddle to these other elements. The first act progresses like any Japanese RPG and is somewhat deceptively straightforward. You are thrust into the world playing Leo, a young man with amnesia who sets off on a quest to regain his memory. He builds a party and, like most games in the genre, this eventually becomes a quest to kill a god. In fact, two of them.

There are a few interesting twists with the story, but the plot is somewhat by-the-numbers. It doesn't quite hit the highs of tales told by many of the Final Fantasy games it draws inspiration from. As the game was designed to run on mobile, epic set pieces and cutscenes are few and far between. There's nothing wrong with a paired-back game, but it's telling that 1997's Final Fantasy VII has a bigger sense of grandeur with its pre-rendered scenes and overall tells a larger, more nuanced story.

A shot from the final cutscene in the game. I promise, I finished it!

The story is a two-act affair. The first is incredibly linear and, as a result, well stage-managed. There are a few surprises and tricky bosses, but nothing too difficult. In Act 2, the game opens up. You can teleport anywhere you've been and use a ship to traverse the world map. Each area is given an indicative level to help indicate where you should go next, but you can generally do things in any order.

It's not just the gameplay style that changes in Act 2. You gradually unlock a new upgrade system for each character, and the levels that you earn generally start to mean less and less. Not that it tells you this, but as the game progresses, your character's gear actually becomes increasingly important and can often be the difference between surviving a fight and dying to it. Past level 35, the game also starts to make levelling harder. Going against enemies of a lower level means you receive significantly less experience points, almost punishing you for doing areas out of the designated order. Eventually, that incredible Dimengeon mechanic starts to become a chore as a result, when slaying 50 enemies under your level nets you a handful of items and basically nothing else.

Janky mechanics, like what was described earlier with Yim, also begin to appear. Some bosses start to use objects as shields that require you to attack them at the right time or have your move deflected. This is particularly painful when combined with mechanics that require you to damage the boss a certain amount to avoid a wipe-worthy attack. Other bosses unleash moves that afflict status effects that cripple the entire party, but then you have to burn your turns to remove those afflictions one at a time. Your character's toolkit doesn't improve in line with these mechanics. Indeed, your best way of countering them is to know they are coming and equip gear — ahead of the fight — for them. And therein lies the rub: too often Fantasian relies on surprise as a crutch for difficulty. It's like designing a flawless Mario Maker level then placing a giant Bowser at the end of it to kick it up a notch.

The most fun to be had with the second half of this game — unless you really love repeating 20-minute fights — is with a guide telling you how to play. At least for your first playthrough. Such guides will likely instruct you to have certain gear equipped, have certain moves learnt, and a certain party composition too. It's telling that such guides are written for the original Fantasian — not Neo Dimension — and that many of the bosses have had their total health and attack power lowered from the base game, but still pose a significant challenge. I suspect those original values now sit within the game's optional hard mode. Kudos to you if you are willing to take it on.

This all being said, there's still plenty of fun to be had with Fantasian Neo Dimension. After a lot of struggling, you do get to a point where your party feels unstoppable, and that final boss battle is — like most JRPGs — pretty epic. But the challenge isn't the only thing that had me questioning this game: For a mobile game ported to console, it's retailing for over $80 AUD.

It's a long game, and there's a lot of value to be had here if you decide to engage in additional content and the optional new game plus. But many indie titles these days are a fraction of the price and are arguably much tighter as a whole package. The two-part design aspect of this game has damaged it. I don't mind the idea of Fantasian Neo Dimension as a AA game, and perhaps this is an appropriate price point. But its mobile-first design has somewhat cheapened it as a console experience, perhaps eroding my perception of its value.

Like I said, many of my favourite games are JRPGs and have similar turn-based combat. I've often wondered what they would be like if there was a hard mode or they ramped up the difficulty. Fantasian Neo Dimension gave me my answer and a new appreciation for any designer that can make a hard but fair game.

Reviewed on: Playstation 5

Worth trying if you like: The Final Fantasy series, Octopath Traveller, Persona, Metaphor ReFantazio.

Available on: PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X and Series S, Microsoft Windows, Steam.