“Since I was ready for this to be potentially my last game, I wanted as many players as possible to be able to get their hands on it.”
It’s always quite surreal to have the opportunity to speak directly to the people responsible for some of my most cherished games and gaming memories, especially as I’ve slowly made my way through creators like Yoshinori Kitase, Tetsuya Nomura and Naoki Yoshida – names that undoubtedly mean a lot to a full-blooded Final Fantasy fan. It’s something entirely different though, meeting a fabled creator after what they once believed was the end point of their career, in some ways.
Having been a fan of Hironobu Sakaguchi’s work through my first exposure to the Final Fantasy series and then eventually his efforts as the founder of Mistwalker after departing from Square Enix, the reveal of FANTASIAN Neo Dimension earlier this year was great news, personally. Without a lot of access to Apple devices, 2021’s FANTASIAN being exclusive to Apple Arcade has kept it out of reach for myself and I’m sure many others, but I was interested to know how this entire journey started and how much of the game’s existence is owing to that first Apple Arcade version.
“Well, this is going to go back quite a quite a bit, but I would say turn the clock back about 40 years ago, I had my first Apple II computer, and on the Apple II computer, I played games such as Wizardry or Ultima II, and I was just shocked by what was possible through computing and video games,” Sakaguchi-san explains. “And it was those games that I would say brought me into the video game industry in the first place.”
“Fast forward to more recently, and I was approached by Apple Japan, who said, ‘Hey, we’re launching this new platform called Apple Arcade, and we’d love to work with you to make a game together.’ And that conversation was the very, very start of how FANTASIAN came to be.”
By his own admission, this couldn’t have been a more fitting place to create and release what was to be the very last project that Sakaguchi would helm in his 40-year career. I shouldn’t have been surprised, either. Looking at FANTASIAN with its novel twists on classic RPG systems, rich cast of well-rounded characters and astonishing visual style where real-world dioramas are scanned in to form the game’s backgrounds, it’s all emblematic of a man with four decades of ideas ready to spill onto that final canvas.
“When I was making FANTASIAN, I was prepared for this to be my final game. And I think that was the stance or posture I had going into it, my first game, or my first computing experience being with Apple, and then the last game I create, also being on Apple platforms, I felt had this very poetic ending to it, but here we are with FANTASIAN Neo Dimension, and of course, we’re adding a few upgrades to the game as well. Part of that reason being, I think, as you mentioned yourself, Apple Arcade as many countries as it can touch, it also does limit some players from being able to access the game. And since I was ready for this to be potentially my last game, I wanted as many players as possible to be able to get their hands on it.”
Usually these PR-arranged developer interviews are a fun bit of fluff, so I wasn’t expecting the great Hironobu Sakaguchi to spend much of it musing about FANTASIAN’s importance as his once-final project. Here we were though, with the man largely considered the “father” of Final Fantasy describing how this game represents the closing of more than one door. As perfect as a pin this all would’ve been to put on a career inspired by that early Apple device, as it turns out that wouldn’t be the end of it. FANTASIAN Neo Dimension’s launch on a swathe of new platforms wouldn’t be possible if Sakaguchi-san hadn’t reopened another door entirely – the one to the offices of Square Enix, where his career in video games largely began.
“Not sure if you’re familiar, but I’m a huge Final Fantasy XIV fan, a very heavy player, if you will,” he admits. “And through, of course, my past industry connections and experience I was connected with the producer of Final Fantasy XIV, [Naoki] Yoshida-san, and when we got to talking, he was very excited by the prospect of taking FANTASIAN and bringing it to more players, which is when it came to be that Square Enix would be publishing the console version of FANTASIAN Neo Dimension.
“So there are almost two loops, I guess you could say, that we’re closing here. My gaming career starting with Apple and ending on Apple Arcade. And likewise my career starting at Square Enix, leaving and now coming back to Square Enix, to publish this game.”
Having visited the Square Enix offices in Japan myself, and being able to picture the very same doors that Sakaguchi-san will have walked through on this victory lap nearly two decades in the making, I had to imagine that it was a surreal experience both for him and the staff there who’ve either already had the pleasure or grown up on the man’s games.
“It’s obviously been a long time since I parted ways with Square Enix, almost 20 years, I want to say. And the team members, of course, have come and gone. Some of them are still there. But I recall when this project looked like it was going to happen, I went to the Square Enix building. Of course, I myself was a bit nervous, in the elevator. And I think the other people in the elevator perhaps recognized my face, so they were all frozen. Maybe thinking, ‘What’s this guy doing here?” he joked, a smile cracking beneath a moustache almost as synonymous with Final Fantasy as big swords and bigger birds. “But when I got to my floor and people started to warm up, I had a very, very warm welcome. People were open to me coming back into the building.”
And while there may have been initial nerves around the reception at Square Enix, trust had already been built with Yoshida-san, so much so that Sakaguchi was willing to take on feedback around his original vision for FANTASIAN, resulting in some of the marquee new features that are coming in Neo Dimension – like voice acting.
“Originally, to be quite frank, I didn’t think the voices were necessary. I’m one of those creators who likes to create. I think that perhaps the characters and the text speak for itself. But producer Yoshida said ‘No, it’s really important to have voices in a game.’ And he convinced me, and having played it now with voices on, I could see, and I think it’s really good how it all came together,” he admits.
“The characters always had certain emotions or dialogue ideas, but how the voices can depict that, I think it made them a lot more dense, in a way, and they captured more of the nuance of different scenes and different relationships between characters. So I think overall, having a cast and having it be voiced adds a livelier element to the game that it didn’t have previously.”
It’s a similar story for the game’s difficulty settings, which are new to this version and come following more than a little criticism from players on Apple Arcade.
“When going into FANTASIAN, I thought this could potentially be my last game that I developed. So in terms of the game design and balance, actually, it was the two programmers and myself who worked on it. We didn’t have a game designer or game planner, as you will, present. So the programmers and I got into developing a lot of the balance, the adjustments, the combat mechanics. I think we got really into it, and the three of us have certain tendencies. So I think the difficulty felt a little high,” the 61-year-old admits.
“But now with this collaboration with Square Enix, many more players are potentially going to get their hands on the game, and we needed to open it up. So I went for a different balance, where it felt good, rather than optimising it for how I thought players would want to see it. I wouldn’t say we necessarily just simply made it easy – it’s been adjusted in a way that I think players can get the most amount of fun out of it, and not necessarily skewed too much in both my and the programmer’s direction.”
As exciting as it is to hear the fruits of his collaboration with new figureheads like Yoshi-P though, Sakaguchi-san’s work with the legends of Square never really ended, the creator still frequently working with other icons like the preeminent musician Nobuo Uematsu. Before Square Enix was even in the picture, Uematsu-san’s incredible compositions graced FANTASIAN’s score in its entirety, and even before I’d played the game myself it’s a soundtrack that’s a constant in my library, easily one of the renowned composer’s best ever works. And like the game as a whole, it was all about returning to those beginnings and what first inspired these creators in their earliest efforts.
Sakaguchi names 1982’s Blade Runner, and in particular the score from Greek electronic musician Vangelis, as a favourite amongst both himself and Uematsu. This became a direct inspiration for the sounds of FANTASIAN, with the two deciding to bring the score’s synths to the foreground a little more than the other instruments, resulting in this almost bitcrushed baroque soundscape that genuinely feels like the final form of what we heard from this pair’s foundational work. It’s the kind of output that could only come from a combination of liberation and letting go, almost mirroring Sakaguchi-san’s path to FANTASIAN as Uematsu himself prepared to call this his final, full composition.
“For months on, I think he’s been open about saying that this is the last game for which he is going to compose the entire soundtrack,” Sakaguchi explains. “You know, I think given his age and the amount of stamina and energy he has, it would be tough to again compose 30-40 tracks for a game.”
“So all of that considered, we wanted to return to our roots.”
And so that’s where we are, now. Not at the end, but back at the beginning. It’s hard to imagine a better send-off for Hironobu Sakaguchi than FANTASIAN might have been, but even harder to think of a better way for the creator to realise he’s not done yet than to be working with many of the folks he once inspired. Even if they’ve really Square Enix’d that “Neo Dimension” subtitle onto the end of it. I guess FINAL FANTASIAN was too on the nose.
Oh, and I was handed a Nintendo Switch with a preview build of the game running on it to try the new features out for myself. It looks great, sounds great and seems to play well, in case you were wondering about that. I opted to put it down pretty quickly, though. After hearing Sakaguchi-san reflect first-hand on the journey that brought him to FANTASIAN, I think it’s only fair I see his game through from beginning to end.
