Fantasian is the upcoming new JRPG by Mistwalker, spearheaded by Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi. A new trailer has revealed some gameplay, as well as detailing some features coming to this JRPG.
We’ve known before that the art style uses dioramas for its world and background, similar to how early 3D Final Fantasy games used pre-rendered images.
The new trailer shows the turn-based combat, very reminiscent of Final Fantasy X where you can see each party member and enemy’s turn order, with different attacks affecting the order. But it has a trick, enemies can be standing in rows, with attacks can do damage in a straight line or an arc.
The other cool trick is how Fantasian will handle random encounters. New remasters of JRPGs usually have a ‘no encounter’ option to disable random battles. For Fantasian, it’s baked as a gameplay mechanic rather than just a quality of life option.
This is done by turning on the Dimengeon System. When it’s on, all random encounter enemies are sent to an alternate dimension. You can then trigger a Dimengeon Battle and defeat all the enemies in one go. From the trailer, it looks like that you have a limited amount of enemies you can store in the Dimengeon.
The trailer features music from Nobuo Uematsu, also a Final Fantasy veteran.
Fantasian looks to be a very strong nod to the PS1-era Final Fantasy games, while innovating enough to be its own thing, or so it looks like. Fantasian will launch exclusive on Apple Arcade, but no release date yet.