Certain bosses will require very specific strategies using unique party combinations – and while it’s a lot of fun figuring out how the game wants you to tackle a boss, simply knowing the intended solution isn’t enough to make these battles a cakewalk. While the game eases you into the battle system and how each character plays in the first 15 to 20 hours of the story, the last 30 to 40 hours expect near-perfect execution when it comes to tackling bosses. In this second part of the game, players are given more or less the entire world for them to explore and can tackle a variety of quests in any order.

Going through the linear early portion of the game, you won’t have too much trouble making it to the clearly World of Ruin-inspired latter half, where players are instead tasked with tackling the challenges at their own pace. While I played through the game on an Apple TV, one would normally assume that a game exclusive to mostly mobile platforms would have a much more forgiving difficulty curve.īut enough talking around it – Fantasian is a very, very difficult RPG. Fantasian is an Apple Arcade exclusive, only playable on Apple devices – primarily mobile platforms, like iPhone and iPad. It’s a weird situation for a game to be in, and even more baffling considering the platforms that it has released on. The problem, instead, comes from how much of Fantasian might seem to appeal to a wider audience, only for one or two key design philosophies to severely limit who will end up enjoying the title as a whole. How do you tackle a game where aspects of its core design will be poison for a wider audience, even if those decisions aren’t inherently poor– and, in fact, might even be welcomed by a specific type of player? Challenge on its own doesn’t make a game bad, and I believe there’s a space in the industry for RPGs of all types.

That’s maybe a bit of an odd start for a review, I must admit, but that’s the same challenge I’ve run headfirst into when attempting to articulate my thoughts on what might well be industry legend Hironobu Sakaguchi’s final project.

Fantasian on pc