Fantasian

A story is a system of information, wherein language is used to manufacture experience and catharsis. A video game is no different, though it is perhaps a more elaborate system that does the manufacturing, and the kinds of catharsis we can obtain are (maybe?) more numerous and diverse. Through story-telling structures and conventions, like good old cause and effect, we learn more about the intentions, the interiority, and the fates of various characters, whose decisions (which might be our own decisions) are therein a depiction of a kind of conceit, and also a kind of ideology. Plot development is therefore a “reward” of sorts for continuing to play, in the same way, I suppose, it’s a reward when you keep turning the pages in a book. But additional to this is the added satisfaction of “watching the numbers go up” that accompanies the grinding of levels and battling of monsters. These two meta-structures are both inherently linked and also kind of weirdly isolated from one another — video games, maybe uniquely (?) are telling multiple stories at once. The numbers story. The story story. And your story, the one you experience for yourself when you play.

Fantasian thus wants to be at least two things, if not actually more like three or four things; there is, actually, a “right” way to play it. A canon of correct choices and completed quests that the characters, in their own world, actually did. There’s the numbers game — the fulfillment of the right quests, the attainment of the best gear, etc. And there’s that other, more nebulous personal marker of “did I have a good time?”. Fantasian is a JRPG. It is many ships in one bottle.

There is a lot that is good and important and meaningful about Fantasian. I am surprised that it is an actual game. At various points, it seems to lean wholly into being an RPG of the type and kind and style one would have found on the PS1 in the mid-to-late 90s. The navigation of its world, the ways in which interaction, interiority, and the passage of time and consequence are mediated, all harken very specifically to a certain well-loved series of fantasy role-playing games. This is true even of its central marketing gimmick, its diorama backgrounds -- which are incredibly cool but also definitely a surface-level, textural gimmick. It is interesting in a way to see the specific aesthetic conceits of those 90s PlayStation games taken to a further logical point, if not an endpoint, perhaps, then a point further along on the wire than they actually got during that time. For this reason, Fantasian is really good! I wish more people would play it, and I worry it will one day disappear when the Apple Arcade experiment runs out of steam. It’s almost like a glimpse at what could have been, what could still be if commerce were different. The specific content is as endearing and motivating as anything produced by this genre both in its current form and during the 90s generation (like the battles, the bosses, the quests, the “end-game” material consisting of all of those things), in good ways and sometimes not-so-great ways; it both reaffirms that it is not a “phone game” while sometimes lapsing into the kind of deliberately time-wasting, plot-blocking stuff that almost definitely screams “phone game”. But if we take this on its own, disentangling it from the nostalgia that almost certainly got its budget green-lit by Apple, there is a very excellent RPG here, thoroughly planned and considered by a staff of excellent, pedigreed RPG-makers, that would possibly be vaster but not necessarily better were it on any other console, or if it had the budget and staff of that other series.

I play a lot of these kinds of games — that we call Japanese Role-Playing Games, even though for a bunch of reasons I don’t really like that name. A thing happens when you identify closely with a product. We don’t all love to admit it, but the truth is, you really do start to take on the traits, the worldview, the ideology of those things. To be a gamer, as much as it pains me to admit, actually really means something — what that something is, we’re still in the “finding out” phase, I think. For what it’s worth, I've realized this: for mechanical, technical, gameplay-design reasons, JRPGs are about gathering together a group of friends in order to save the world and preserve a status quo. As a way of uniting text and texture, of being about something, this means that friendship, effort, and victory are very much the point, the conceit of these stories. And so I see the major thread and moral ideology of my life reflected in them and also realize that, in no small way, this is probably where and how I derived those values. It is so trite that we make jokes about it on the internet, but it is no less true — the real treasure is the friends we make along the way. And though the journey may be a long one, no journey is too long when it’s with the people that you love. And so, Fantasian is indeed a JRPG, and it is lovely and excellent, and courageous. Sakaguchi is a lover, and I see that now, having finished Fantasian. To Sakaguchi and his team at Mistwalker, who have been telling us this story for more than a generation, who have given us text after text imploring us not to lose hope, to look for romance around us, I can only say, “thank you”. If we care about each other and do our best to be kind, the fantasy doesn’t have to end.