Thread:SecondOpinion/@comment-5688420-20180607214737/@comment-5688420-20180609110457

There's a particularly interesting about how this game came to be:

The game's creator Tomoyuki Toyonaga originally wanted to end the series with III (hence why the game ended with a Tomino-esque kill-'em-all ending). However, since Fantasia was one of ACS' most popular franchises as the time (especially in Japan, where it even overshadowed Dragon Quest at one point), they wanted more profit out of the franchise as quickly as possible, so they gave Toyonaga a deadline of January 2001 to make a fourth game in the series. Keep in mind that the PS2 had just been release at the time, and ACS still wasn't sure how to tap the console's full potential yet.

With the rushed development and the circumstances that happened during its development cycle, the game turned out to be a broken mess. The massive loss off face that Toyonaga suffered feom the game's failure led to him leaving ACS in 2002. It took until 2011 for Toyonaga and the company to bury the hatchet, and it soon led to the highly successful Fantasia of the Forbidden: Ressurection.