The new game from the creator of Final Fantasy, Fantasian, arrives at the Apple Arcade in 2021

Fantasian, the new adventure of the Mistwalker studio by Hironobu Sakaguchi, is a classic Japanese role-playing game. Fantasian it has it all: turn-based battles, an amnesic hero, a cast of beautiful protagonists in interwoven adventures and, of course, an aircraft.

But Fantasian stands out for a design decision that attracted attention. The Mistwalker RPG was built using more than 150 hand-made physical dioramas. The 3D characters in the game are superimposed on top of them. Miniature-based environments give the game a unique sense of charm and warmth, Sakaguchi said in an interview with Polygon, and helped inform Fantasianthe mechanics of the game.

Fantasian features a system that distorts the way players deal with random encounters with monsters. Unlike the classic Final Fantasy games that Sakaguchi created, where a fight with a group of enemies could happen unexpectedly, Fantasian allows players to deal with random encounters … later. Mistwalker calls it the Dimengeon system – a mashup of dimension and dungeon – and sends the monsters that players encounter to an alternate dimension. Players can then jump on a Dimengeon whenever they want and enjoy the satisfaction of eliminating them all at once.

Sakaguchi said Fantasian was partially inspired by his own work in Final Fantasy 6. He and some of his colleagues who worked on that game played it again on Nintendo’s Super NES Classic a few years ago. “It really renewed my interest and love for this classic JRPG genre and gave me the opportunity to get back to my roots,” said Sakaguchi through a translator.

Image: Mistwalker

Fantasian it has a lot of familiar elements in Final Fantasy, said Sakaguchi, including “collecting information in different cities, talking to NPCs, going through dungeons, random encounters and turn-based combat”.

“But in the spirit of Final Fantasy development at the time, we always wanted to challenge the status quo, push the boundaries and bring some innovation to the genre,” he said. The Dimengeon system was born out of this, he said, and as a result of the game’s platforms. Fantasian is being released via Apple Arcade and was designed with touch screen controls in mind. Sakaguchi said the developers found it fun to explore Fantasiandiorama environments of pinning the map and moving quickly, but being interrupted by random encounters has altered the flow of the game.

The game’s dioramas were built by a team of 150 artists. Mistwalker himself is a team of less than 20 people, but he usually works with outside studios. Sakaguchi said the decision to build physical environments had its benefits, allowing designers to see new opportunities in game design. But it also brought its own challenges. After designing a physical object, he said, it is not possible to change the environment to add a new road or exit, as you would with a computer-generated 3D space.

“After you started building it, you committed to the level design,” said Sakaguchi. “You really have to be very intentional and know what you are looking for in the design phase. As soon as the artisans start to work, this will be your stage. “

Image: Mistwalker

The history of Fantasian it is grand and familiar. Players take on the role of Leo, who, in the search for his missing father, finds himself in an alternative dimension called Machine Kingdom. After an accident, Leo wakes up in this unknown realm with only one memory left, that of a girl named Kina who brings him back to the human realm. Leo embarks on a quest to recover his memory, unraveling “the mysteries of the bizarre mechanical infection that slowly engulfs everything that humanity knows”. Along the way, Leo enlists others for his mission, including a pair of robots, a princess with magic and the captain of the luxurious Uzra airship.

Sakaguchi wrote Fantasianstory of. He joined the project with the famous Final Fantasy composer and longtime collaborator Nobuo Uematsu, who wrote the score for Fantasian.

Mistwalker plans to launch Fantasian sometime in 2021. The game will come to Apple Arcade, the subscription service launched in 2019, and can be played on Apple TV, Mac computers, iPhone and iPad.