Call it a desire to revisit an old, dear friend that ultimately turned into his new best friend. Originally released as an Apple Arcade mobile exclusive, Japanese role-playing game (JRPG) Fantasian marked the latest creation of acclaimed game designer and grandfather of the Final Fantasy franchise, Hironobu Sakaguchi. Although well-received by the critics and players who bothered playing it, the game practically flew under the radar due to its platform exclusivity and lack of visibility.
But three years after its release on mobile, Fantasian: Neo Dimension, an enhanced version of the mobile title will finally make its debut on consoles and Windows PC, to provide the complete Fantasian package to a wider audience.
During an extended hands-on and interview session with Sakaguchi, alongside co-producer Naoki Yoshida, Geek Culture had the opportunity to get a better understanding of the team’s design process when adapting their mobile game to a more mainstream platform, even as few realised that the mobile game stemmed from a desire to bring a console classic to a modern, smartphone-using audience.
The idea for making the original Fantasian actually came to Sakaguchi via a familiar face of an old friend.
“A few years ago, platform makers were producing miniature versions of their consoles, and it was the SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System) that had a version of Final Fantasy 6,” recalls the video game legend, who designed the original Final Fantasy in 1987, and played a role in every subsequent Final Fantasy game all the way to Final Fantasy X-2 in 2003.
“While playing Final Fantasy 6 during a Famitsu livestream, I realised the title was the epitome of my work in the JRPG space. So after playing it, and having spent 20 years away from the series, it made me realise the kind of feel I wanted to evoke in my new game, and that’s how Fantasian turned out to be.”
One of the ways that set Fantasian apart from its peers is the use of hand-crafted dioramas as the basis of its environmental art style. This results in a unique visual style rarely seen in gaming, and according to Sakaguchi, the idea for this came rather out of the blue.
“Early on in the game’s development, I had these props lying around in my office, and it made me think, it would be really fun to have characters explore and have adventures amongst the props themselves, to have handcrafted worlds to run around in.” That was the moment he decided to use dioramas to create all the environments in the game.
Of course, bringing realistic dioramas into a video game is no easy feat. Sakaguchi explains how his team had to undergo multiple stages of trial and error, along with allocating resources to research and development to find a perfect way to incorporate them into the game.
In the end, he notes, “[the team] finally settled on a technique used to create 3D models or meshes of entire cities, whereby hundreds of still photos are taken and stitched together to render a 3D model.”
As the title originally launched exclusively on Apple Arcade, there were some limitations in terms of how substantial a game could be. “Of course, apps [on Apple Arcade] come with their limitations, namely that [developers] are only allowed to create apps up to 4GB.” Sakaguchi notes.
So by bringing the title to consoles and PC, the team has been afforded more leeway, especially in terms of the resolution of assets, hence the enhanced version. “We had actually photographed all the dioramas in 4K resolution but weren’t fully able to utilise all of it. Now with a shift to console and PC versions, the details that make dioramas charming, such as minor imperfections only seen when something is handcrafted, will be better expressed.” he adds, noting how the team was able to extract the “essence of the dioramas” due to the shift in platforms.
Porting a mobile game, especially one designed from the ground up for the platform, proved quite a challenge for the team. “We assume that a majority of players are going to play [the Apple Arcade version] using a touch type of user interface, but now that the game is coming to PCs and consoles, the controller is probably going to be the primary method of play,” Sakaguchi explains.
Alot of attention thus went into optimising the game for controller inputs, as well as other quality-of-life improvements, such as making characters move faster. Of course, players with a mouse and keyboard can still experience the game close to how it was originally presented on IOS. In fact, this is Sakaguchi’s favourite way to play, as he describes how he “personally enjoys clicking around with the mouse cursor.”
In order to bring the game to a larger audience, Sakaguchi and his team at Mistwalker teamed up with Square Enix for Fantasian Neo Dimension. According to producer Naoki Yoshida, the game was more in need of refresh than they thought.
“We knew the Apple Arcade version already existed, but when we did focus group testing, it turned out a lot of people weren’t aware of the existence of Fantasian,” he acknowledged, so the team knew they had to find a way to deliver the title to a wider audience.
With any partnership, there would always be disagreements, and here it was no different. “We initially disagreed on having voice-overs in the game, since Sakaguchi-san came from an era where text was the primary medium to convey information.” Yoshida explains, stating how Sakaguchi argued that voice-overs could “narrow the vision of the experience, since players can read and digest text at their own speed, expanding their imagination in the process”.
Eventually, Sakaguchi himself changed his mind once he played the title and heard the voice-overs. “Having played the game [with voice acting], I think there’s a different type of emotion experienced presented, and a lot more nuance that you can feel from the characters,” he admits. The duo believes that their initial disagreements actually helped to establish a level of trust among them as partners in the project.
For Sakaguchi and Yoshida, working together on Fantasian Neo Dimension was an incredible learning journey. “It’s been a huge honour to be able to work with Sakaguchi-san,” Yoshida concludes. “We love that many more people will get to experience this journey, and we hope this title will translate to Sakaguchi-sans motivation to continue making creative endeavours in the future.”
Sakaguchi, who is now more of a self-proclaimed video games consumer than a producer, is not too concerned about the future and is happily content with enjoying the now by playing his favourite game, massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) Final Fantasy 14, an FF title that he was not involved in developing.
He jokingly concludes: “I play [Final Fantasy 14] every day since I arrived in Japan [yesterday], I’ve already played a few raids. I think it’s no coincidence that we got to share this [interview] experience with all the different outlets, and I would love to be invited to any gaming events, big or small, just please put me in a Hotel with good Wi-Fi so I can play video games.”
Fantasian Neo Dimension is set to launch on 5 December 2024 on PlayStation 4/5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch and Windows PC via Steam.
Kevin is a reformed PC Master Race gamer with a penchant for franchise “duds” like Darksiders III and Dead Space 3. He has made it his life-long mission to play every single major game release – lest his wallet dies trying.
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