Fantasian (2001) [+]
Apr 01 2024
Fantasian is a JRPG from the creators of the Final Fantasy series. You're playing a young man with amnesia exploring a fantasy world being invaded by tech globes that poison the land and people. You gain two female companions -- one raised by a hermit mage and has healing magic and the other a princess with cold magic -- who kind of vie for your affections. Later on there is adventuring in the Machine Realm which has been invading your world.
This has a typical 2-1/2 D perspective as you move around, though photo-realistic diorama backgrounds which is a nice effect. Combat is turn based and everyone has special abilities that use magic points. A lot of the exploration is picking up random items, mostly consumables and components (though I didn't get to the part where you use components to upgrade items). In general the UI is easy to use and responsive.
One thing I hate about JRPGs is random combats as you wander around. In this game early on you gain a device that stacks encounters with a limit of 30 monsters. So if you get a random encounter of 4 monsters the device count goes up by 4. At any time you can initiate combat with all stacked monsters which goes into a special combat arena. In the arena you fight 9 monsters at a time (when you kill some more are added not quite immediately) and there are power-ups (regular combats don't have power-ups). In general you can go quite a while before having to fight the monsters which cuts down on annoying combats.
The story is not too bad. You can talk to most people and there are a few side-quests. The game has a nice log where you can see your main quest, side quests, by location and their status. Later on you also get a teleporting device so it's easy to jump around from main quest to side quest. As usual the main quest is gated and fairly plain what you need to do next -- this is not an open world game.
I've played 11 hours and this game is 60 to 90 hours long. Did stop playing because it's kind of a slow game, though typical of JRPGs -- lots of moving around, talking to people in slow dialogs, cut scene-like dialog expositions where you have to keep tapping, also backstory recollections which are just walls of text which are also a bit slow and tap-heavy (though fairly well done for walls of text format). I think JRPGs are not my style.
Still, it's a polished and mostly interesting game that I might come back and continue later.
This has a typical 2-1/2 D perspective as you move around, though photo-realistic diorama backgrounds which is a nice effect. Combat is turn based and everyone has special abilities that use magic points. A lot of the exploration is picking up random items, mostly consumables and components (though I didn't get to the part where you use components to upgrade items). In general the UI is easy to use and responsive.
One thing I hate about JRPGs is random combats as you wander around. In this game early on you gain a device that stacks encounters with a limit of 30 monsters. So if you get a random encounter of 4 monsters the device count goes up by 4. At any time you can initiate combat with all stacked monsters which goes into a special combat arena. In the arena you fight 9 monsters at a time (when you kill some more are added not quite immediately) and there are power-ups (regular combats don't have power-ups). In general you can go quite a while before having to fight the monsters which cuts down on annoying combats.
The story is not too bad. You can talk to most people and there are a few side-quests. The game has a nice log where you can see your main quest, side quests, by location and their status. Later on you also get a teleporting device so it's easy to jump around from main quest to side quest. As usual the main quest is gated and fairly plain what you need to do next -- this is not an open world game.
I've played 11 hours and this game is 60 to 90 hours long. Did stop playing because it's kind of a slow game, though typical of JRPGs -- lots of moving around, talking to people in slow dialogs, cut scene-like dialog expositions where you have to keep tapping, also backstory recollections which are just walls of text which are also a bit slow and tap-heavy (though fairly well done for walls of text format). I think JRPGs are not my style.
Still, it's a polished and mostly interesting game that I might come back and continue later.