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Fantasian review ios7/4/2023 ![]() Likewise the wild encounters, which you just start to tire of before being introduced to a very clever twist called a "Dimengon Machine", a doohickey that bottles up enemies you would've encountered, up to a limit. There are a moderate amount of systems here, and they're introduced in layers: turn-based battles, fine, but then positioning becomes important, and then a bit of very casual mechanics become important, as you learn to "bend" spells to get around blocking enemies or hit several at one. A welcoming kind of "onboarding" is not something I've associated with JRPGs, but - maybe because of its launch on Apple Arcade, with the different, presumably quite specific kind of audience that brings - Fantasian does it well. Mistwalker’s engineers clearly need to spend some time on optimization.I have more or less no familiarity with any of this though, having dipped toes in a number of Final Fantasies and reliably found their water a little cold - but I'm sinking into Fantasian quite nicely. It should run smoother on Apple’s latest iPhone, one of the most powerful handsets on the planet. Fantasian is a pretty game, but it’s not that pretty. I played using an iPhone 12, one of Apple’s most powerful mobile devices, and cinematic sequences with lots of action frequently resulted in frame chug. It’s manageable, but I’d really like to see this problem fixed with a patch.Ī slightly bigger issue is performance. ![]() This is clearly an issue with the fact that the game was designed first and foremost for touch screens. It made for a pleasantly console-like experience, save that quick changes in camera angles required me to stop pressing the thumbstick while moving in order to reorient direction. In my case, I played the bulk of the game using an Xbox controller, my phone’s screen mirrored on a TV using Apple Air Play. Like any game, Fantasian isn’t perfect, but its problems are mostly technical rather than creative. These miniatures also look great viewed as 3D maps, making it easy to figure out where you are and where you need to go. These areas have a distinct vibe, almost like dioramas, amplified by a camera focus plane effect we’ve seen previously in games like Octopath Traveler and 3D Dot Game Heroes. But Sakaguchi and company, never content to simply regurgitate, have added some modern sparkle to both presentation and play.ĭozens of the locations we explore began as intricately sculpted real-world miniatures before being scanned into the game, where they received digital augmentation.
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