Fantasian Neo Dimension Review

When I played Fantasian back in 2022, I thought it was a game with an inventive combat system, great music, and amazing art direction, but had lacklustre characters and a story that was only okay. After having played Fantasian Neo Dimension in 2024, I can tell you that it is the exact same game. Except now everyone talks.

Developed by Hironobu Sakaguchi’s Mistwalker, composed by Nobuo Uematsu, and now published by Square Enix, Fantasian has you in the role of Leo as he goes up against gods alongside his friends to save the world. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before (literally, for those who played on Apple Arcade), designed as a classic JRPG experience by Sakaguchi’s own admission, but it’s how Fantasian presents itself and its gameplay that makes it such a noteworthy experience.

From Your Pocket To Your PC

It’s important to remember when looking at Fantasian that it was originally created as a mobile game. Every part of it, from how combat functions to the way you navigate menus, was designed with a touch screen in mind. And a relatively small screen, at that. At the time of release, the biggest iPhone only had a 6.7 inch screen, and it was already struggling visually when played on an iPad. So how does it look now, when it can be put on the 4K TV in your living room?

Well, it’s a mixed bag. The character models scale great, and the diorama backgrounds are using much more high-quality scans this time around to look sharper even on a significantly larger screen. Certain UI elements don’t get the same treatment though, and look noticeably jagged even on a 24 inch 1080p monitor. I primarily reviewed the game on Steam Deck, and it looks perfect there, though I imagine that isn’t where the majority of people will be playing it.

For core gameplay, everything works perfectly fine with a controller, though that’s not surprising as the original mobile game also had controller support. You can play exclusively with a keyboard too, though this bizarrely disables using the mouse as a cursor entirely, so you’re better off playing with just a mouse to emulate the original touch controls. There are plenty of idiosyncrasies like these, where you can see the new platforms being forcibly slotted into the confines of the mobile restrictions.

Combat is where alternative control schemes suffer. In battle, enemies spawn randomly across from you, and you have to aim your attacks to take down as many as you can in a single turn, cutting through lines of them, arcing around them, or precisely aiming an area-of-effect attack. On a touch screen, you can get extremely granular, making tiny adjustments with your fingers to fit an almost unfair number of enemies into a single attack.

You can use the touchscreen on the Steam Deck the same way you could on mobile, giving you the best of both worlds. It even shows your battery life in-game.

You can recreate this precision with a mouse, but not with a standard controller. This applies to the UI as a whole as well, where it is much more cumbersome to navigate than with touch or a mouse. There’s no way of approximating the cursor movement of the mouse with a controller, which is ironic given how prevalent it is in most games, and would have been quite an effective solution here.

A Tale Of Two Games

Whether it’s fair to unilaterally declare mobile gaming a lesser art form, there are quirks of Fantasian that feel out of place now it has been lifted out of its cellular cell. For example, the Dimengeon system that lets you stock up random encounters and battle them all later in your own time. This worked as a great quality-of-life feature in an otherwise classic JRPG experience, but it also meant that you didn’t need to waste precious battery running through the same encounters just to reach the next area, boss, or cutscene.

It was designed so you could jump in-and-out of the game quickly, from the frequent auto-saves to the instant fast travel. Cracks start to show when you settle down to play for a few hours.

Fantasian feels like a bunch of bite-sized adventures stitched together. Each location feels very self-contained, and cutscenes don’t dwell for overly long. This is true for characters too, who tend to get many scenes all at once, and are then quickly assimilated into the main cast. It especially hurts the companions, who end up with only enough screentime to become archetypes of characters, rather than fleshed-out individuals in their own right.

Nothing has been done to improve the harsh transition between the two episodic parts it launched in either. Suddenly, all of these characters who had a rapport in Act 1 just don’t interact anymore until the endgame. Though difficult to account for all the ways players could’ve gone through the story, it feels like a missed opportunity to not have added some extra dialogue or shared quests in this new release.

A World In Miniature

Thankfully, the game’s strongest feature has been retained beautifully – the dioramas. Rather than digitally constructing the environments for Fantasian, every single area is a hand-crafted diorama from experts in the Tokatsu industry, as well as some special creators like the late Akira Toriyama. They are gorgeous, and massively diverse too. For any other shortcomings the game might have in this release, the dioramas have thankfully been preserved, if not outright improved.

And there are so many of them, too. Each of them is painstakingly detailed, from the fluffy texture of a bush, to all the little knick-knacks in a shop. The interiors are some of my favourites because having actual physical objects placed in the scene gives them a lived-in, organic feeling that just can’t be recreated digitally. The item shop in En, the first village you visit, is a great example of this. It feels cosy and cluttered in the way a shop peddling curios should be.

But this brings the game’s newly-added voice acting into question. Many of Mistwalker’s titles have been mostly unvoiced, and you can feel this legacy in Fantasian, too. The way certain scenes are paced feel like they’re meant to hold for as long as it takes you to read a line of dialogue, rather than how long it takes to be spoken.

Comedic timing feels lost when voices are retroactively fitted in, and Uematsu’s music is now over-powered by actual voice-acting in more emotional scenes. I’m sure it will be to some people’s preference, especially those who haven’t played the original, though you can graciously still play the game voiceless if you’d prefer.

This port is an enjoyable way to experience the game, but it is much more limited than the name ‘Neo Dimension’ might imply, especially with Square Enix branding it as an enhanced release. The inventive combat and gorgeous dioramas Fantasian always excelled at are still incredible here, while its inconsistent pacing and poor character development remain untouched. It has had some bells and whistles added, including an easier difficulty mode over the at-times grueling challenge of the original game, but nothing that substantially improves the experience. Fantasian is still a mobile game, you can just play it on a bigger screen now.