How Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi’s past, present and future can be found in Fantasian

The release of Fantasian Neo Dimension was something of a full circle moment for Hironobu Sakaguchi. Final Fantasy’s creator left Square Enix back in 2003 and founded his own studio, Mistwalker, where he’s since continued making RPGs. Fantasian, in 2021, was one such release, but remained exclusive to Apple Arcade until last year’s re-release – published by none other than Square Enix.

“It certainly feels very nostalgic, almost as though you’re going to a high school reunion of sorts,” Sakaguchi tells me over video call. “Having parted ways with Square Enix all that time ago, I think there was, over the years, this distance that was built between us – with the people who I created Final Fantasy with who were still at Square Enix. But, looking at the email interactions that we had over the course of producing Fantasian together, it almost felt that this distance grew smaller, and we reconnected on a certain level.”

Sakaguchi is best known as the father of Final Fantasy, and Fantasian feels like a throwback to his earlier work. As I wrote in my Fantasian Neo Dimension review, the game is characterised by its “blend of old school genre trappings and modern sensibilities” and appears to be aimed squarely at longtime RPG players: those who have grown up with Sakaguchi’s games over the years.

Fantasian, as a result, is notoriously difficult and demands its players understand the complexities and depth of its world and systems to best its tough menagerie of bosses. The Neo Dimension re-release even added a new easier difficulty, though it remains a steep challenge.

Sakaguchi refers to his “dabbling in programming” in the past as reason for the game’s toughness. “It was actually myself and two other programmers who settled on the type of gameplay experience you see in the game,” he says. “Normally you would probably want a game designer of sorts to be in between, and adjust and plan for the audience’s learning curve. But over 40 years ago, I myself was also dabbling in programming as a game creator. And then fast forward, you look at the team that adjusted the difficulty: you have two programmers and myself, so I think a lot of the encounters were designed with almost the programmer type of logic and the three of us thought it was great.”

Indeed, the game’s bosses are almost like puzzles to solve rather than an enemy to overcome purely through grinding for experience, providing a welcome mental challenge. “It wasn’t so much that we targeted a certain audience,” says Sakaguchi, “as this was the byproduct of three programming-minded individuals coming together and creating a game we thought was really fun.”

Fantasian also features plenty of Final Fantasy references and similarities, and I wondered if these too were simply a byproduct of Sakaguchi’s game design. Perhaps the clearest parallel is Fantasian’s two-part structure, which was directly inspired by Sakaguchi re-playing Final Fantasy 6 with his colleagues, taking him back to a “really fun experience”.

“I think of how the world [of Final Fantasy 6] just kind of shifts very suddenly, or transports you to another type of world, and then all of a sudden there’s a sci-fi kind of element,” says Sakaguchi. “It really pulls you into a different feeling or different emotion. That variety of elements, I think, is what really comprises what I find really fun, being tugged around.”

Making Fantasian, then, was this “very honest feeling that simply translated into something tangible”. He continues: “When I played Final Fantasy 6 again, it brought me back to an old version of myself, a very honest version of myself, and it’s a similar feeling that is evoked in Fantasian. I wasn’t necessarily trying to make the game more alike or bring it closer to Final Fantasy, as much as it was an honest expression.”

He suggests that had he continued with the pixel art style of Final Fantasy 6 into Final Fantasy 7 on the SNES, it likely would have resulted in something like Fantasian. Visually, though, Fantasian is distinct owing to the use of real diorama models through which digital characters explore by way of a fixed camera perspective. Again, the visuals blur the line between an older aesthetic and a new technique.

“I wasn’t necessarily trying to make the game more alike or bring it closer to Final Fantasy, as much as it was an honest expression.”

“There was certainly a lot of trial and error, but it gave us the opportunity to interact with these very skilled diorama artisans,” says Sakaguchi. “To be quite honest, I think the result was much better than I expected when we had embarked on this type of visual expression in the context of a video game. Dioramas really provided a kind of warmth and artisanal quality… You could feel these artists poured into each set, each stage.”

The decision to use dioramas doesn’t easily lend itself to camera rotation, leading to the use of fixed perspectives. For the turn-based battles, though, this was something Sakaguchi decided upon early in development. “I think a lot of modern games tend to favour a real-time type of combat, whereas I think a more honest expression of what I was trying to do was the turn type of mechanic,” he says. “If I had taken that mechanic from 30 years ago and brought it into the present day as is, that would not have worked as a game.”

This resulted in both the Skill Trajectory and the Dimengeon System mechanics: the former a method of aiming spells to attack different enemies, the latter a way of collecting random battles into a pot to be battled at player discretion. Turn-based, random battles were a huge part of the earlier Final Fantasy games; with Fantasian, Sakaguchi evolved them further with a simple solution to the frustration of frequent interruptions.

For Sakaguchi, a core definition of the Final Fantasy games is “the idea to always use the most cutting-edge technology we have available to us at the time” and a “desire to challenge the status quo”. He adds: “Another point is also having a very strong story as a backbone, whether it’s through the world, setting, or the characters. There’s almost a sense of melancholy, which perhaps could be unique to JRPGs as a genre. The stories that Japanese developers create, perhaps, will always have something unique in that essence.”

“There’s almost a sense of melancholy, which perhaps could be unique to JRPGs as a genre.”

These ideas ring true for Fantasian too, to a degree. Its graphics may not exactly be cutting-edge, but they utilise a unique technique, and its plot does have a sense of world-ending melancholy that’s typical of the genre. I wondered, then, how Sakaguchi would define the RPG genre now, what it means to create an RPG in 2025?

Again, he mentions the latest technology. “Nvidia has announced their latest 5090 graphics card and the evolution of graphical expression is going to continue to expand,” says Sakaguchi. “So an experience that fully takes advantage of what the 5090 can offer, you could argue, is an RPG geared for 2025, and it could probably create the same kind of wave, or almost social phenomenon, as [Black Myth] Wukong did.”

He continues: “Fantasian, on the other hand, is much more of an old style experience. And it still, I think, stands for one interpretation of what an RPG can be. So another way to look at RPGs in 2025 is this diversity of experiences players have at their fingertips.”

Remakes can also follow that pattern of utilising the latest technology, and as a result the development team for such a project would be quite different to an original game, Sakaguchi muses. “I imagine it would focus a lot more on the technical artistry to create that experience for the present day,” he says. “I think there’s something amazing to be said about that and the Final Fantasy 7 series is perhaps one of the best interpretations of how you take an experience and then bring the graphical expression into the present day.”

However, Sakaguchi himself is looking forwards rather than to remakes of the past. “The type of team I like to direct and work with in terms of making a game, it’s almost the same, in my opinion, to have a full remake versus making something brand new,” he says. “So if at all possible, I would like to continue giving birth to something new and bringing these different worlds to life as much as possible before I perish.”

The flip side of that is game preservation, to ensure the history of games – in which Sakaguchi plays a huge part with the Final Fantasy series – isn’t lost. Sakaguchi acknowledges the “transition of an era” now the industry is around 50 years old and agrees it “makes sense to look back and talk about this so-called history of what this industry has done”. And while contexts and audiences have changed, developers can take “ideas from the past and, in a way, interpret them so that modern audiences can feel closer to what emotions and experiences were evoked” previously.

“I would like to continue giving birth to something new and bringing these different worlds to life as much as possible before I perish.”

What, then, about the future? How does Sakaguchi see the industry growing in 2025? He speculates about the assistance of AI, though is careful to specify its precise use.

“One of the most important resources in game development is the amount of time it takes to really prepare to make a game of a certain caliber, a certain scope, whether it’s the character animations, the models, before a game can take shape there is an immense amount of preparation work that needs to happen, and that has only increased as time has gone on,” says Sakaguchi.

“I want to be careful with my words here, but I think the use of AI to assist the prep work is something that could perhaps really improve the game industry and what we can express because the development cycles right now, I think, are what take so many resources out of the entire game budget.”

Sakaguchi is cautious with his words here – the use of AI in game development is a divisive topic ranging from Google prototypes to voice actors losing their livelihoods – but when I specify whether he believes games are about human creation, Sakaguchi agrees.

Fantasian was meant to be Sakaguchi’s final fantasy, but it seems he can’t sit still. He’s rumoured to be working on a new game along with celebrated longtime Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu, confirming to Famitsu the script has been written, though remains tight-lipped on it still. Will this game also blend past and future into a new present? We’ll have to wait and see.