Final Fantasy Creator’s New JRPG Lets You Procrastinate With Its Random Encounters

Fantasian, the next game from Mistwalker, the studio founded by Final Fantasy creator, Hironobu Sakaguchi, is coming to Apple Aracde later this year. Now we’ve a new trailer finally showing off gameplay of the diorama-based JRPG, including its unique take on random encounters, called the “Dimengeon system.”

In classic JRPGs, like the ones Sakaguchi made for years at Square Enix, you leave a town, head to a dungeon, and grind through a bunch of random encounters until you get to a boss fight that furthers the story. In Fantasian, the follow-up to Mistwalker’s previous mobile game Terra Battle, players will have the option of sending enemies they meet on their journey into another dimension to be fought later. “Players can then jump into a Dimengeon when they want and enjoy the satisfaction of wiping them all out at once,” Polygon reports in a new interview with Sakaguchi.

Here it is in action:

Effectively you get to explore Fantasian’s gorgeous looking settings without annoying interruptions, and then go back later to burn through the battles and level up as necessary. I’m not sure what it says about JRPGs that some of the biggest innovations in them in recent years revolve around side-lining one of their core mechanics, but this seems like a smart way to cater to playing on smartphones.

Here’s some more info about the game:

• The story revolves around Leo, an amnesiac who loses his memory after being involved in a “massive explosion at a hybrid magic-tech factory.”
• Leo teams up with Kina, a young woman from a dusty frontier town, to try to discover their destinies together, which includes globe trotting, hopping between dimensions, and navigating the “balance of Chaos and Order.” Naturally.

• The story is told in part through “bite-sized novels” that players can explore as part of the game’s “Memory system.”
• Each environment is based on a real, handcrafted diorama that’s been photographed and 3D scanned.
• It has an airship.
• Final Fantasy composter Nobuo Uematsu is doing the music.

Mistwalker has made umber of really good JRPGs in the past, including Lost Odyssey for Xbox 360 and The Last Story for Wii. The studio’s more recent games for mobile have left me much less impressed. But maybe Fantasian can change that.