They are dioramas and Final Fantasy. This is the first lesson of Fantasian, a new game from Mistwalker, the studio responsible for the Blue Dragon series and The last.
According to the initial teaser and some comments made in a Polygon interview with studio founder (and RPG legend) Hironobu Sakaguchi, Fantasian it seems to fuse those Japanese RPG tropes of airships, mysteries and magic with, er, handmade dioramas. Characters and the rest of the game are then overlaid on these fully detailed spinning scenes.
Each of these scenes – there will be more than 150 of them – was created by artists from the Japanese film industry “Tokusatsu”, some of whom worked on the Godzilla films, Attack on Titan, and Ultraman. These cities that are crushed underfoot by giant monsters? Someone had to do this. The game will also feature music by Nobuo Uematsu, who also composed the soundtrack to some of the most popular Final Fantasy games in the series.
The big difference may be how you deal with random encounters, an RPG feature summed up in Sakaguchi’s own Final Fantasy series and other JPRGs like Dragon’s mission. While you can still be distracted by an occasional random battle, you can also simply pocket them in an alternate dimension (the “dimengeon”) and face an entire mob later. There seems to be a limit to how many enemies you can avoid before having to deal with them all at once, but it’s a good way to be able to focus on exploration or history and keep the battles available when you’re ready for a big fight. .
Otherwise, battles appear to be turn-based, with attacks capable of affecting multiple enemies and locations. His characters seem to pack the usual combination of HP and MP, and the battles bring in a protection system and buffs to further complicate things.
Although the game does not yet have a release date, it will soon be coming to Apple Arcade, apparently exclusively. Sakaguchi was featured in the Apple Arcade developer teaser in March 2019.