FANTASIAN

Hironobu Sakaguchi reveals the painstaking work behind Mistwalker’s new hand-crafted RPG

There’s a refrain common among developers who’ve broken free from the triple-A space to make indie games or shift their focus to mobile platforms. Big ships turn slowly, as they say, and the faster speed of iteration – and the shorter turnaround between conception and release – is a big part of the appeal of moving away from blockbuster development. Hironobu Sakaguchi’s studio Mistwalker has enjoyed some success on mobile with the Terra Battle games: small-scale tile-based tactical RPGs. But the studio has spent the past three years developing Apple Arcade exclusive Fantasian, a lavish production that ostentatiously harks back to Sakaguchi’s genre roots, down to its typically expansive Nobuo Uematsu soundtrack.

“Handcrafted dioramas that you can touch through the screen… I think it’s a real synergy between mediums”

Though its priorities for the service seem to have shifted recently, this is still a coup for Apple: it’s the kind of game that might well attract a new wave of subscribers. Development began, Sakaguchi tells us, when two industry colleagues at Apple pitched Arcade to him over dinner. He’d been revisiting Final Fantasy VI, which reminded him of his affection for classic RPGs – and that’s what the platform holder was after. But Sakaguchi didn’t want to lean on past glories. “It’s a classic RPG in the sense that you go to different towns, you collect info from the different NPCs, go and traverse dungeons and have random encounters,” he says. “But even back from the Final Fantasy days, we always strove to include something new and push the status quo.”