Getting older comes with the benefit of experience. Unfortunately, some experiences you felt when you were younger may be harder to capture now. I still remember my goosebumps when first experiencing a ‘Final Fantasy’ game.

Recapturing that feeling happens less now, but when the experience hits, I sit up and pay attention. Developer Mistwalker Corporation and Publisher Square Enix have brought us ‘Fantasian Neo Dimension’, a game that gave me those same goosebumps I felt with Final Fantasy.

There is a good reason why my goosebumps reacted to Fantasian Neo Dimension. The look and feel of this game are a strong reminder of Final Fantasy and with good reason. Hironobu Sakaguchi, dubbed the father of Final Fantasy, and Nobuo Uematsu, famous composer of Final Fantasy worked together on this new title.

If you are familiar with Final Fantasy, you’re already aware of the genre of Fantasian Neo Dimension; an RPG, but heralds from the older days being a turn-based combat system.

Fantasian Neo Dimension has you playing as Leo. Leo awakens in a strange mechanical environment with only fleeting images and the only memory being his name. When cornered in an inescapable situation Leo uses the warp device, he must teleport away using the fleeting images in his mind. Appearing in a desert environment town called En, Leo tries to remember who he is, and the plight the world faces.

A wormhole in the sky spills forth with an infestation called Mechteria. The Mechteria slowly transforms the land and steals emotions from those getting too close. The people say the Mechteria is brought forth by the malevolent god Vam. It isn’t long before Leo learns he is entangled in something much deeper with Vam, and getting his memories back is as important as saving the world from Vam the malevolent.

As exciting as this sounds, I unfortunately found the story uncompelling. The story isn’t bad by any means, I just found it predictable and cliché, but if you are looking for a classic RPG story this will be right up your alley.

The gameplay of Fantasian Neo Dimension is also a classic presentation of a turn-based RPG. You will navigate through environments interacting with NPCs and items while being pulled into battle from random encounters. Battle encounters only differ in one way compared to all the regular trappings you’d expect, by the trajectory system. Trajectories are the key to taking command of the battlefield against overwhelming enemy numbers you will be coming up against.

Each character attacks enemies differently based on their weapon and the skill they are using. As an example, a sword will attack in a straight line slicing all enemies along its path depending on the skill, but a flying axe can be arced, and it too will strike all the enemies along its path.

These skills will also vary with elements, debuffs, and buffs, and more will unlock from levelling up. Gear will further augment your characters, with not only attack and defence boosts but also passive skills like starting a battle with a shield or stronger magic.

The equipment is broken into three categories weapons, armour, and jewels. Weapons are simple where only certain weapons can be used by a certain character, like Leo only using swords.

Armour comes in vests, belts, and bangles, but you can only wear one piece at a time, so balancing defence, skills, and buffs will be up to you to strategise. Jewels boost stats, and defence, or give special passives like additional experience points, or a fatal hit reducing you to 1HP instead of death, again more things for you to think about.

There is one last tool in Leo’s arsenal that falls under both equipment and combat, and it’s called the Dimengeon. The Dimengeon traps random encounters in a pocket dimension to be battled later. At first, I was sceptical, because why would you want to trap more monsters and fight them all at once, because of the trajectory system and the bonuses, you get in the pocket dimension, this makes it more fun and strategic than just facing the monsters in their natural environment.

Boss fights in Fantasian Neo Dimension are exciting and fun with the trajectory system. Strategising whether to attack the boss directly, aim at different parts of a monster, or target minions will keep you on your toes and choose different skills with every encounter.

The environments are presented as dioramas, and they are magnificent. The computer-generated characters pop against the backgrounds. As you move about the camera spins, so Leo remains visible and shows you different angles to appreciate the dioramas.

Unfortunately, the controls do not adapt well when the camera turns. For quite a while I thought my controller was failing because when redirecting Leo, the direction I would push did not represent my intended path. With each camera spin, I would have to have the thumbstick in neutral before pushing in the direction I wanted Leo to move. This was very frustrating because the camera can shift multiple times in quick succession with little warning.

As Leo unlocks memories they are presented in hand-drawn stills, and a narrator speaks over the top of them recounting the story. The art is stunning and has a once-upon-a-time fairytale vibe. The narration is the best voice acting in Fantasian Neo Dimension and it isn’t all that great. The characters, unfortunately, are flat and spend more time repeating what someone else has said before forwarding the conversation.

The music is beautiful and a further testament to Nobuo Uematsu’s brilliance. The sound effects are great, capturing all the little things that sometimes would be forgotten allowing the world to be as alive in sound with its visuals.

Hironobu Sakaguchi has delivered another worthy RPG to his portfolio. Its nostalgic RPG systems are interesting with, the new entertaining twists, to the turn-based genre. Though the story did not fully endear itself to me, it is still a great adventure with magnificent environments and beautiful music. I will be playing Fantasian Neo Dimension for many more hours.

Written by: Ashley Barnett-Cosgrove