Make no mistake. Fantasian is an old-school game. The game was conceived when Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi was called upon to replay Final Fantasy 6 for some promotional live stream or another – and Sakaguchi realised ‘hey, this is actually pretty good’. A new project was born.
“It was this moment where I felt like I was going back to my origins,” Sakaguchi says of booting up the seminal SNES classic, which he devised the story for and produced. “I wanted to design a game in a similar style.”
The result is Fantasian, a staunchly traditional RPG that nevertheless has that Sakaguchist (to coin a phrase) sense of swagger to it – traditional it may be, but it still wants to challenge the status quo and genre conventions. This time, however, it’s all about the art.