But with how detailed each part of the world is, itвЂ™s easy to miss some secret locations. Throughout the game, there are plenty of save points and easy-to-navigate areas. It definitely alleviated grinding levels in later parts of the adventure. So make sure to plan accordingly with items and spells before hopping in. However, they can still be challenging if you have way too many enemies saved up. You can also activate it whenever you want to fight all the enemies at once to receive experience and items. By activating it, you can skip many random battles of enemies youвЂ™ve already seen as theyвЂ™re stored in the archive. I was thrilled to see the Dimengeon feature. It makes fighting bosses less mindless, so you donвЂ™t have to hit the same button over and over again repeatedly. Thanks to the AOE capabilities of each character, you can strategically whittle away at this boss without having to hit each fish one by one. One boss, in particular, was at least 100 flying fish causing havoc in the engine room of a cruise ship.

It makes for interesting boss fights as well. For example, KinaвЂ™s holy spell can curve and hit each enemy in its path.

Each character has different abilities that can be manipulated to curve and pierce through multiple enemies. If youвЂ™ve played any RPG in the past 20 years, youвЂ™ll find Fantasian offers your typical JRPG turn-based combat system with a few fun twists. They could have altered the pitch slightly for the characters to give them a bit more personality. I think my only real complaint is the вЂњvoicesвЂќ of each character that have this weird robotic rambling when they talk, but itвЂ™s all the same sound. I did enjoy how the memories were treated using cut scenes that give deep insight into each character. It blends elements of what you know about triple-A JRPGs today while bringing a sense of old-school titles visually. I found myself more interested in exploring the environment than even progressing the story at times. There are nothing truly groundbreaking or additional twists in terms of storytelling. ItвЂ™s typical JRPG tropes where you have the main best girl, tsundere love interest, and other fun and cute characters who team up across a possible end-of-world mission. FantasianВ puts youВ in the shoes of Leo, a boy who looks like he could be related to 2B and 9S of NieR: Automata.В He lost his memory and has to piece different parts of his life together while saving the world. Such as one moment where you fight a giant mecha leviathan on a sand cruise ship, and all the meticulous little details of the ship were handmade is mindboggling.ДЄs impressive as the visuals are, the story canвЂ™t seem to keep up in this first half. The characters appear to fit perfectly with this art direction making me forget the backgrounds were real dioramas.

ItвЂ™s quite fascinating to think that the beautiful worlds youвЂ™re running around in-game are literally handmade. The developer used a visual technique that involved creating more than 150 dioramas (just like those you made in middle school) that were photographed and incorporated into the game. IвЂ™ve never been so intrigued to play a game based on visuals alone, especially its environments.

Fantasian game review