Welcome to our review of Fantasian Neo Dimension, the last big RPG for the year and well, it is not that great.
The Father of FINAL FANTASY, Hironobu Sakaguchi, and renowned composer Nobuo Uematsu return to deliver an original RPG story. Mechteria—a deathly mechanical infection that robs humans of their emotions and lives—is slowly engulfing the world. The protagonist Leo awakens with only one memory left to him in a strange land abundant with machines.
The human world, threatened by mechteria… a machine world, filled with mysteries… and the unseen dimensions that lie beyond both. Using the Warp Device that was left behind, Leo must now embark on an interdimensional journey to reclaim his lost memories and save the world from the mechteria infection. This apocalyptic looking world is where you embark on your adventure.
A rather dull adventure at first, there is very little information thrown at you and it takes around 45 minutes before you even figure out your real name and unlike some other games, you do not “get another name from the start either”, this entire time the game just leads you without any real guidance, luckily there is very little need for that as the initial part of the game is pretty monotonous in its approach to things.
A lot of it is just walk on the chosen path and fight when the battle is triggered. At first, you will be mostly occupied with learning the mechanics of the game and not even realize how messed up the camera positions are. It becomes very clear later in the game and to be frank, they are borderline fun-destroyingly shitty. Yes, I wrote and intended shitty. There is really no other way to describe this, you have this apparent top-downish game and when you walk, it decides to flip the direction of the camera but it refuses to make the characters follow the same direction.
I can not stress enough this is in my opinion a game-breaking feature/bug/whatever you want to call it. It’s just not good at all, I had so many times where I had to go right on one screen, for it to switch cameras and when I wanted to move Leo in that direction, he went off elsewhere. If you do plan to add a feature like camera switching, at least keep your hands off of the direction the player is going, now it just feels like I am totally wasted on whatever liquor someone fed me.
Another thing that irked me, is how basic the graphics are on a current-day console… I know this was originally an IOS game, but I am just disappointed in its graphics like they just upped the scale on it and left it at that. I also get that this game is supposed to be a love song to the 80s and 90s, but if that was the case, this RPG clearly did not age very well and is about to get a failing grade from me. It just falls short on fun, graphics and all out game mechanics.
In conclusion, Fantasian Neo Dimension is not fun to play and has more than a few irks that prevented me from giving it a higher score
