Final Fantasy creator’s new game Fantasian comes to Apple Arcade in 2021

Fantastic, the new adventure from Hironobu Sakaguchi’s studio Mistwalker, is a classic Japanese role-playing game. Fantastic has it all: turn fights, a memory loss hero, a cast of beautiful protagonists on intricate adventures, and of course an airship.

But Fantastic stands out for one design decision that attracted attention. Mistwalker’s RPG is built with more than 150 handmade physical dioramas. The game’s 3D characters are covered on top of them. The miniature-based environments give the game a unique sense of charm and warmth, Sakaguchi said in an interview with Polygon and helped inform. Fantasticsee game mechanics.

Fantastic features a system that revolves around how players deal with random monster encounters. Unlike the classic Final Fantasy games that Sakaguchi created, where a battle with a group of enemies could start unexpectedly, Fantastic let players handle random encounters … later. Mistwalker calls it the Dimengeon system – a mashup of dimension and dungeon – and it sends the monsters players encounter to an alternate dimension. Players can then jump into a Dimengeon if they wish and enjoy the satisfaction of wiping everyone out at once.

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

Image: Mistwalker

Fantastic Sakaguchi has many well-known Final Fantasy elements, including ‘gathering information in different towns, talking to NPCs, piercing dungeons, random encounters and a fight in turn.’

“But in the spirit of the development of Final Fantasy 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 it, he said, and because of the platforms of the game. Fantastic is released via Apple Arcade, and was designed with the touch screen controls in mind. Sakaguchi said the developers find it fun to explore Fantastic‘s diorama environments by placing pins on the map and moving around quickly, but the interruption by random encounters changed the flow of the game.

The game’s dioramas were built by a team of 150 artists. Mistwalker itself is a team of less than 20, but often works with external studios. Sakaguchi said the decision to build physical environments holds benefits so designers can see new opportunities in game design. But it also comes with its own challenges. Once you have designed a physical object, it cannot 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 dedicated yourself to your level design,” Sakaguchi said. ‘You really have to be very intentional and know what you’re looking for in the conception phase. Once the artisans are at work, it’s going to be your stage. ”

Image: Mistwalker

The story of Fantastic is both grandiose and famous. Players take on the role of Leo, who in search of his missing father finds himself in an alternate dimension called the Machine Realm. After an accident, Leo wakes up in this unknown kingdom with only one remaining memory, that of a girl named China who brings him back to the human kingdom. Leo begins to regain his memory and unravel “the mysteries of the bizarre mechanical infection that is slowly engulfing all that is known to mankind.” Along the way, Leo summons others for his mission, including some robots, a magic princess and the captain of the luxury airship Uzra.

Sakaguchi wrote Fantasticsee story. He participated in the project by the famous Final Fantasy composer and longtime collaborator Nobuo Uematsu, who performed the score for Fantastic.

Mistwalker plans to release Fantastic somewhere in 2021. The game comes to Apple Arcade, the subscription service that launched in 2019 and can be played on Apple TV, Mac computers, iPhone and iPad.