FANTASIAN Neo Dimension Preview: Once More, With Feeling - PAX West Hands-On

We’ve never been so back.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over my many years of playing RPGs, it’s that you should never doubt Hironobu Sakaguchi… that is, unless you can’t play his games. Sakaguchi’s Mistwalker studio released FANTASIAN Neo Dimension on Apple Arcade in 2021. It was critically acclaimed but also really difficult for the average person to play. No longer.

With the help of Square Enix, the house Final Fantasy (and Sakaguchi) helped build, FANTASIAN Neo Dimension is finally coming to every modern console, and PC to boot. I sat down with the new version of Sakaguchi’s latest during a behind-closed-doors session at PAX West. And man, I was really impressed.

First things first: FANTASIAN Neo Dimension came into this world as a mobile game, and you can see the remnants of that in its UI. Sometimes that means a couple extra taps on the d-pad holding a button to get to the menu option you want, but overall the experience works well. So don’t worry about that. 

If you’re not familiar with FANTASIAN Neo Dimension, it follows Leo, who — all together now — has lost his memories and is struggling to recover them. Along the way, he’s going to have to deal with a world overrun by a machine infestation. Crazy. My demo didn’t give me a ton of time with FANTASIAN’s story, but I did enjoy the characters I met and the exchanges I witnessed.

But the real draw, dear reader, is the combat. Lord, this combat system is cool. FANTASIAN’s battle system is actually, no foolin’, FFX-style turn-based, and you can see every upcoming turn laid out before you. That’s cool, but what’s cooler is the actual combat itself. The big draw here will be Skill Trajectories. See, abilities (and spells) in Fantasian don’t just go in a straight line. You can curve their trajectory, bending them so they’ll hit different enemies or, sometimes, several enemies at once. 

Got an AOE spell you want to drop on a whole group? You can move it around to make sure it hits everyone. FANTASIAN’s combat