The Good

• The start is perfect
• Character creation is fun
• The introductory story text is very nice
• Choosing a starter kit is great, and the options are flavorful and exciting
• Choosing a starting location is amazing
• Guns (musket and flintlock) are very well balanced as an expensive but powerful early game option
• Mugging Illager caravans to loot their gunpowder is awesome
• 0 starting mana makes choosing to become a wizard with Irons very interesting
• World Gen is generally very good. Pleasant to look at, and reasonable to traverse
• Healing overhaul is well done
• The method of getting to the Nether and back is excellent and immersive
• Immersive Gateways is amazing
• No natural mob spawns is an inspired choice
• Soundtrack is one of the only ones that feels fitting and sounds good, without playing too much
• Realms RPG skeleton blocks are great for an optional easy fight
• Illagers are balanced well to provide a challenge in the early game that can be overcome
• MCA is implemented well, especially with Numismatic Overhaul
• Natural structure spawns include a nice variety
• Dynamic lights is a must, and integration with the lantern curio slot is very nice
• FleshZ, saddle recipes, etc are nice QOL
• The tree-felling mod plus fast leaf decay works great
• Traversable Leaves is excellent
• Smelting broken tools and armor down works great
• World Gen and server tick performance seems very stable
• Callable Horses, Horseman, Carry on…

The Bad

• Progression tied to exploration
• Specific nether tree required for Hexerei drying racks (why can’t we just use normal drying racks?!) Hexerei in general is always a huge pain in the ***…
• Material tiers tied to buying a blueprint from villagers
• Map to the main quest must be purchased from villagers
• Mid-late game recipes are overly complex and mutli-staged
• Maybe some people like these, but I prefer single step crafting like vanilla. This ruins the pace of late-game for me.
• Diamonds were bad enough, but the Arcane Cloth recipe is a sin against game design.
• Recipes are generally designed from attempting to make random rare items useful, but without alternatives, this turns many recipes into annoying fetch quests for particular items, relying on luck to get the world gen needed for the right items.
• Hexerei recipes are tedious and cannot be automated. You will spend many hours sitting in front of a mortar and pestle or cauldron, manually refilling slots one by one.
• Please remove Hexerei, this mod is never good in any modpack
• Mild case of Ice-and-Fire-itus: some enemies that can be run into immediately are far too strong to fight in the early game. Enemy progression should be gated better to prevent running into enemies like this until the player has reached mid game at least.
• This includes: some desert kobold minibosses, shrimp miniboss that spawns on beaches
• Frequent crashes
• FPS is not always very stable
• Game often hangs for a minute when joining a world
• Aleki’s Nifty Ships is too involved and tedious, and not very fun to use.
• This should be replaced with Small Ships
• Structures and POIs too rare (you can travel for hours without running into anything notable in certain biomes, especially forests and jungles)
• Alex’s Mobs has not been configured enough
• Everyone hates mosquitos, disable these.
• Anacondas are a bit too strong to run into early game, and realistically shouldn’t attack people unprovoked anyway.
• Disable Seagulls stealing items
• Why do jungles spawn creepers constantly? And why do they look like weird deer?
• Backpack mod literally cannot be accessed without removing it and placing it on the ground? Useless.
• This should be replaced with pretty much ANY other backpack mod.
• Minecarts are left vanilla, meaning they are slow and not a viable method of transport
• Some mod to add faster tracks would go a long way here
• Bountiful is a worthless mod and should be removed

The mid

• Overgeared: in depth blacksmithing.
• Map atlases requiring a constant supply of paper is a bit tedious, though immersive
• Luckily, tree felling + stripping bark from logs + paper recipe from bark means its always doable
• I personally would probably just prefer to have Xaero’s minimap tied to having a map in a bauble slot, or have the Map Atlas not require constant paper
• Currently, you can turn paper into maps 1-to-1 using a compass. There is also a config option to allow Map Atlases to accept paper directly. You could cut out this pointless middle step by enabling that config option.
• “You cannot sleep in such a horrible place” mod is fine
• Knapping stones to get stone tools is immersive, I may slightly favor it over vanilla. The mechanic is never used again, however
• Enchanting gems are whatever. The recipes are a bit tedious, but the concept is neat.
• The questlines are nice enough, but I do hope to see them expanded in the future.
• Epic Knights adds a bit too much bloat. Too many armors that do the same thing, and too many aesthetic-only options. This makes it difficult to figure out which armors are better than others, and which ones come with a load.
• Without some kind of nutrition or Spice of Life mod, Farmer’s delight and its addons feel somewhat like bloat here. I have no incentive to eat a variety of foods instead of just spamming the most efficient option.
• These alternate horse controls are nice when traveling long distances to be able to keep moving while in an inventory, but otherwise can be much more inconvenient. Horses keep their last momentum, so if you dismount when a horse is going full speed, the next time you remount, the horse will immediately take off in whatever random direction it is now facing. Not very immersive, mostly just an inconvenience.
• Torch recipes are odd. The main recipe now uses straw, which is a bit tedious to collect considering how many you need. The other recipe, just placing a stick on a campfire, is practically free by comparison. Overall, I’m not sure these recipes really add much to the gameplay. The vanilla recipe would work just fine.
• Better Combat is once again failing to provide any value compared to vanilla
• The partial keepInventory setup is nice, however the enemy progression is still nowhere near good enough to prevent deaths that feel unfair. Until that improves, proper keepInventory is a must.
• Seasons still don’t fit very well into Minecraft

Fantasia is different from other modpacks in the fact it has an extremely clear vision of what it wants the game to feel like, and I think it's extremely important to point out it does this without shaders. The start is very slow, but in a good way, it really gives you the time to relax and base build, letting you take things at your own pace. The work on the Overgeared mod makes the entire pack's tool crafting system REALLY stand out and makes progressing to each tool tier feel like a meaningful achievement. The combat is highly tuned using Better Combat as a base, but again, puts so much work into making it just feel right. This pack is especially fun in a multiplayer setting, where you have multiple friends taking on multiple classes/roles. Highly recommended.

For a modpack in beta this already has a lot more to offer than most modern modpacks that tend to go overboard with kitchen sink features instead of curating the modpack around a specific experience. For Fantasia, that experience is a Skyrim-like experience. I'd argue this does more to lean into the fantasy experience for minecraft modpacks with a more limited and curated selection than most prior fantasy modpacks that mostly rely on quests for pushing the experience. Meanwhile this modpack is more roleplay related (though I haven't really gotten into the roleplay aspect of the modpack quite yet since I'm not really used to MCA or how to really interact with the NPCs).

For the pros it starts off pretty simple, it's got an immersion that won't make you rip your hair out with how tedious it is. Like a lighter version of Terrafirmacraft (which I do enjoy as well). The Overgeared Smithing System has become one of my favorite ways of crafting armor through forging (and I think the Sewing Table is a part of Overgeared too). Speaking of armors, I fell in love with the Epic Knights mod thanks to this modpack. I'm BEGGING for people to make more addons for epic knights to add more types of armors. The combat is pretty good, though admittedly full block isn't a thing in this modpack, instead having a block/parry window. Though admittedly the biggest thing for me is the character customization. You can forge your own builds, your own armors, even create your own character through MCA's Character Creator.

Admittedly there is more that I haven't fully explored yet. But I want to get to some of the small downsides that are most likely to be resolved or ARE going to be resolved soon. First off is the dragon shaped elephant in the room, or to put it better, the lack of said dragon. Ice and Fire is noticably NOT a part of this modpack, mainly because the original mod is.... pretty much abandoned by its original devs. That and anyone who has played with the old mod will know that one teeny, tiny little problem the Ice and Fire mod had was... well... TOO MANY DRAGONS!!! Yeah, the old mod had a problem with too many super destructive village and base destroying dragons spawning all over, which kind of overshadowed all the old planned aspects of the mod that may or may not come in the new Ice and Fire mod. Speaking of which, there are confirmed plans to add Ice and Fire 2 to Fantasia when that mod eventually releases. Which for those of us currently playing in a dragonless world, we're probably getting the Skyrim before Alduin came back experience.

Biggest elephant in the room out of the way, now for the rest of my minor gripes that are eventually going to get resolved the more the modpack progresses in development. Such as the limited playability of fantasy races aside from trying to make your chosen fantasy race in the MCA creator, which does admittedly have its limits. There is also the fact that most of the late game tiers are locked off due to the fact anything diamond and above hasn't been finished yet. So, so far the highest you'll get is steel. Which I don't really mind since Steel has a LOT of customization options, and my only concern is what kind of customization will be available to diamond to netherite tier armor. Then comes my last minor complaint, the surprising lack of furniture. I mean I know Mr. Crayfish's stuff is an auto nope due to being mostly modern era, but I'm surprised Macaw's stuff isn't part of the modpack since it adds a LOT of furniture related items, including roofs, stairs, fences, and even bridges. Also I personally wouldn't mind even more Farmers Delight addons so I can be spoiled with food, glorious food.... now I'm wondering if there is a way to do a proper chef roleplay where all your food isn't just in storage but can be sold to villagers or be directly fed to them.

Other than those minor complaints, I'll whole heartedly recommend playing this modpack. It may be in beta, but it is one good beta.

This RPG pack is unlike any other that I have played. It attempts to make itself standout through its mod selection and gameplay changes. It doesn't try to overwhelm you with complex mods or a progression system, and has good game balance. At the moment it is incomplete, but it gets updates quite frequently, and I am excited to see the final product.

It is truly one of the best modpacks ever made, and by far my favorite one. Everything about it is so well made the aesthetics are beautiful and the progression (the parts that are finished) is so good and the performance is good, but I do have a super PC so I cant be for sure. The only problem I have with it is that the story and progression is not finished yet, but how well made it is makes up for that. The best part is that its getting consistent updates and its not just adding to the story and progression. I truly recommend it to anyone, not just people that like these kind of modpacks, it is the most underrated modpack I have ever played.