Fantasian: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

This is not a review of Fantasian, but since I already kneejerk-called a post my “first impression” I’ve put myself in a goofy position here. I’ve put a decent chunk of hours into Fantasian, the newest Apple Arcade exclusive game by Hironobu Sakaguchi’s Mistwalker Studios, and now that I’ve actually had a chance to sink my teeth into the meat of this game, I do have some thoughts.

Let’s start with the story. I have heard a lot of JRPG fans gripe about the choice to make Leo, the game’s protagonist, an amnesiac, calling the choice narrative laziness, saying it doesn’t do anything but detract from the story, and so on. These folks are, of course, entitled to their opinions. I personally don’t find the “Amnesiac on a quest to regain their memory” aspect of the story in Fantasian to be all that grating, though it’s possible my feelings on this will change 20 or 30 hours from now.

I don’t feel so angsty about the amnesia in part because of how chilled-out this game is, in general, about progression. Missing from Fantasian is the overriding sense of urgency present in many other games in this genre, the sense that “oh my god the world is going to end in A WEEK if we don’t stop Bronson the Bad Guy!” By the time we enter the story, the world of Fantasian is already in the process of ending, and has been for a while. The “Mecha Infestation” has long been plaguing the land, driving humanity into more condensed settlements, siphoning off their emotions, and wreaking havoc on the flora and fauna.

Leo’s role in all of this, such that it is, is negligible (until it isn’t). His entire goal is to get his memories back, but this is so easy that it’s not worth counting as an achievement. He walks into a room: bam, memory restored. Talks to a certain person: bam, memory restored. Interacts with a certain object: you get it. We get hints early and often that his parents were Special Important People in the human society, that Something Bad related to the Mecha Infestation happened to them, and that he has been deeply effected by the trauma of this Bad Happening to the point where it has molded his personality on a fundamental level. He’s portrayed as a bit of a callous thief and womanizer in his past, seducing and then standing up a princess at one point – which our sweet innocent boy of course can’t remember now. (Leo is like a mix of Tiz Arrior and Ringabel from Bravely Default in this way.) He’s remembered by others as a brilliant engineer and inventor, but he can’t remember how to turn off the security system he set up or turn on the Warp Machine he gets from his own secret basement “Toy Box.”

What I will say as a point of criticism is that the game does seem to be substantially relying on beats and tropes from older games, especially older Final Fantasy entries and some of Sakaguchi’s previous Mistwalker works. Kina is essentially Aerith. The first two hours of the game take place in a setting I would heavily liken to the ShinRa factory and the Midgar-Sector 7 Slums. Vam the Malevolent is Sephiroth. I only find this to be more or less okay because the game itself doesn’t seem overly concerned with it. Like, it knows that we know that it is using/reproducing these pieces of JRPG history, and it doesn’t really seem to care that we know. Like, “you came for a very specific show, why are you surprised that this is what you’re getting?”

A big selling point for Fantasian is the hand-crafted diorama setting. Each area is a combination of digital effects and real life setpieces crafted by Mistwalker designers and contracted builders from the Tokusatsu and Kaiju film industries to create what I can only call “charmingly retro yet never actually done before.” Due to game size limitations, the 2D pre-rendered backgrounds upon which all the characters traverse are pretty distinctly low-resolution; while it’s still apparent that they’re photos of real crafted dioramas they look old-school as hell. It would be neat to see a version of this game with full-resolution pre-rendered diorama backgrounds, but for that to happen I suspect it would have to be ported to another console (or PC) and allowed the space to breathe. Still, Fantasian looks like a JRPG by way of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, and it rules.

I like this game a lot so far. It is not without flaws. But I need to tell y’all something, especially the haters and whiners who want so desperately for it to be on other consoles:

This game’s handling was tailor-made for the iPhone and plays like utter dogshit with a controller, something Sakaguchi and co literally warned everyone about in the leadup to the game’s release.

When I say it’s dogshit, I don’t mean that it’s a little finicky or anything, I mean playing with a controller sucks ass. The whole conceit is that you move around a static world whose camera shifts fluidly with your movement from area to area. The problem with this is, every time the camera shifts, the controller reference point fucking shifts too. The way it works on iOS is you just drop a pin and your character moves there, regardless of the camera shift. But on my Xbox one controller using the analog stick, I’d shift viewpoints and would have to fuckin let go of the controls for a second to let everything reset, otherwise Leo would go veering off to the left without meaning to. It’s a bit of a wild reversal from a game like Gris, whose touch controls did the same nauseating and irritating thing to me, but whose gamepad controls are just fine, I’ve heard.

I don’t really have any trouble recommending Fantasian to anyone who already has Apple Arcade (just so long as they play using touch controls, primarily), but what about to someone who doesn’t use the service or have any Apple products?

In the wake of Fantasian‘s release Apple Arcade itself has undergone a pretty substantial change. It added 30 games to the service on Fantasian‘s release day and created two new divisions to the service in addition to “Arcade Originals:” “Timeless Classics” and “App Store Greats.” In the former new category are games like Solitaire and Chess (Zach Gage’s Good Sudoku, Really Bad Chess, Flipflop Solitaire and SpellTower are all included here) and in the latter category are games like Fruit Ninja, Monument Valley, Threes and Reigns. While this (along with Apple’s proclamation that Arcade now boasts over 180 games to download) might sound initially like a pretty good deal, I find myself skeptical that it actually is. And the reason why doesn’t have much to do with Apple at all (for now), but rather Sony.

Back in late March Kirk McKeand over at The Gamer broke the news that Sony would be eliminating its PS3, Vita and Portable storefronts in the summer of 2021. This was confirmed a week later and further analysis of the storefronts as they currently sit concludes that this will result in a permanent loss of over 2000 digital-only games. This sits on top of a permanent loss of classic PS1 and PS2 titles that were only able to find players through these storefronts.

While this sounds – and is – extremely terrible for video games as a whole, this kind of culling happens in the mobile space – for both Android and iOS – at least once a year. For all the hundreds of thousands-to-millions of apps and games being sold on mobile platforms, untold numbers of games annually run the risk of simply becoming inoperable when Google and Apple release their new operating system iterations to go along with new phone hardware across the board.

Most of us never notice the casualties of these regular operating system shifts because the apps most of us tend to use – social media apps primarily, along with other high-traffic and high-use apps like banking and productivity apps, get updated just as often to compensate. And the games most of us tend to play on mobile tend to be new titles that have hit the zeitgeist just right. Think Genshin Impact or Pokémon GO. Hell, even Fortnite. These games last for a long time because they are highly-visible. If an OS update caused them to crash, enough people would be outraged that their developers would get an update that patched the crash issue out immediately. Malfunctioning mobile games without the visibility either get pulled or simply disappear.

Ultimately, developers and not Apple are responsible for keeping their apps current (and there’s a whole troubling discussion to be had there), but here’s my worry with Apple Arcade and its recent additions.

I’d argue that Apple is now actively deciding what the “mobile games canon” is, rather than passively letting the App Store ebb and flow. If you’re not part of the canon, the App Store is now even more likely to just swallow you up – if not now, then some day.

The ramifications of this will likely not be seen or felt for a while, and ultimately have nothing to do with Fantasian. But they have everything to do with my hesitation over recommending that anyone go out and get Apple Arcade just to play Fantasian. There are cheap Apple products out there that you can buy right now and play Apple Arcade games on with just about any Bluetooth-compatible controller, like the Apple TV or the iPod touch. But just be aware that Apple is now asserting itself as a Platform, like Microsoft and Sony, and if you’re into game preservation, that’s a cause to pay attention.