Fantasian Part Two Release Date Set For This Week

A Fantasian Part Two release date has just been revealed by Hironobu Sakaguchi's Mistwalker studio. The follow-up to the handcrafted diorama JRPG, which is currently exclusive to the Apple Arcade subscription service, is set to launch before the week is out, with a release date penciled in for Friday, August 13.

Fantasian was finally released to the public in early April after years of teases and trailers. The title garnered rave reviews, but its story wasn't complete. Last week, Hironobu Sakaguchi teased on Twitter that work on the Fantasian Part Two was almost complete.

In game development terms, this rarely indicates that a release is just a few short days away. And given how long it took for the Fantasian Part One to release since its initial announcement, it's unsurprising to think why most took the tweet as simply meaning the game might show up before the end of the year.

Ultimately, however, Sakaguchi's teases were today confirmed to mean that the week wouldn't end without the much-loved game getting a massive update. The news will presumably cause the reworking of some weekend plans for those who expected the follow-up to be a few months away at best.

Fantasian Part Two is supposedly double the size of the original. You might want to think about putting those work holiday requests in now if you're particularly invested in seeing the story through to its conclusion.

Mistwalker, the company in charge of the game's development, is headed by Hironobu Sakaguchi: the creator of Square Enix's long-running Final Fantasy series. It also features music from long-time collaborator Nobuo Uematsu.

Although the team has carried on his JRPG legacy with titles like Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey, and The Last Story on consoles in the past, Fantasian is the team's first traditional JRPG in around 10 years. It tells the story of a world-hopping young man named Leo and swaps out the stationary backgrounds of the PS1-era JRPGs Sakaguchi oversaw in the 90s for 3D models placed on intricately detailed and handcrafted dioramas.

Fantasian is available for free through Apple Arcade on most iOS and MacOS devices.