While a complete duplication, I absolutely loved seeing them honored. It’s literally a trio that is lead by a beautiful woman who is assisted by a skinny dramatic man who attacks from a range and a stocky guy who shields the team. They’re rival treasure hunters to the main character, and outside of the fact that they introduce themselves almost exactly like Team Rocket they are exactly like the LeBlanc Syndicate of Final Fantasy X-2 (a game I love a lot). My favorite nod is the Cinderella Tri-Stars. Also, instead of Materia, there’s Mechteria, a mechanical equivalent of the same damn thing. It doesn’t help that the game features a villain who looks exactly like Sephiroth. She even fights with a staff and focuses heavily on magic and healing. She finds you for the first time passed out in a field of flowers. She has the same taste in clothing colors and boots. She is also identical to Aerith from Final Fantasy. The main love interest in the game is painfully obvious. Why did he lose his memory? Because, as a robot says, “magical particals from the explosion may have affected your nervous system.” Sure. Your main character is a thief, much like the protagonist from Final Fantasy 6 but also a tough amnesiac with a pension for black clothing, like the protagonist from Final Fantasy 7. If you’ve played Final Fantasy this feels like a greatest hit collection. Where the game suffers though, is the story. That little tiny glass jar with shells in it? The orb? I don’t know what any of that is supposed to be but it’s cool as hell and Iove it. Here’s an example from one of the first towns where I noticed this. One thing I didn’t like is that in many of the cities, which are gorgeous at first glance, you’ll occasionally have moments where the cameras zooms in and the scene gets a little grainy. The backgrounds in this game are literal real-world dioramas photographed from multiple angles so your characters are running around on real dirt on real surfaces. The environments were built from the ground up. Now though, games look a lot more realistic so he found a way to capture the model feel without making the backgrounds suffer. Hironobu Sakaguchi was kind in the era of having characters running around previously rendered backgrounds, which often resulted in your character looking like they were running through a weird model city. The other thing that made me interested in the game was the environments. If an RPG is coming out by him, I’m going to pay attention to it - especially if he was inspired to do it while playing Final Fantasy 6, my second favorite Final Fantasy game (after 9). For those unfamiliar, the game comes from creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, tthe legendary mind behind almost every great RPG of the last several decades including the vast majority of Final Fantasy games to Super Mario RPG to Xenogears to the criminally underrated Brave Fencer Musashi. I’ve been following Fantasian for a while. Platforms: iOS (Reviewed on) Apple Arcade

Fantasian release