Tales of Destiny

"Creators made no effort to improve on their SNES hit Tales of Phantasia."

Tales of Destiny (PS)

This looks almost exactly like Tales of Phantasia. For some reason however I just didnt like this as much as ToP. The hero here is Spahn, a country boy with no brains but a strong will and the special ability to hear the swordian voices. Swordians are living swords. Most of the character have a swordian which grows in power the more it is used. The story revolves around the destruction of the world using the ''Eye of Atimony'' or something like that which has the power to resurrect a very powerful weapon. The eye gets stolen... twice... and finally it is used to summon the great weapon. The swordians and the masters unite to destroy the final weapon and everything is then hunky dory. The characters are extremely stupid in the game. I mean there is almost no feeling everyone is just there for really no clear reason. Whats the deal with the swordians? why can only certain people hear them? why are they so stupid yet so strong? I think I am beginging to understand something about myself as I finished this game. I dont like stupid people. I mean comon, how can a stupid person become strong and how the hell can a stupid person save anyone through stupidity and I am not talking about Spahn either. The stupidest characters were the bad guys led by the king of utter stupidity Leon who would have been slapped like a bitch all day long on any realistic plane of existance... And lets face it, when the bad guys are stupid, then the story is not going to be good. The plot was predictable and the parts that were not predictable were just plane stupid and too random. We dont even meet the main villian in this game till the very end and we dont know a thing about him or it. Very lame.

STORY:(2/10) - I played this after Xenosaga 1 and man was it a let down. Boy makes a few friends. Everyone save the world. No real story or drama other than that. Characters really have no character and there really wasnt anything memorable about the game. It was obviously over dramatized which made it even worse. See characters backgrounds... orphan, orphan, orphan, orphan, clueless country boy, wanderer, rich guy, confused lady, nut bag, tournament champion, girl with amnesia, man with amnesia... my god how lame...

GAMEPLAY:(5/10) - The gameplay is exactly like ToP from the snes except they took out a lot features. There was no summoning and they removed the short/long range attacks. A lot of items were the same. There wasnt as much customization and secret items in this one, at least I couldnt find anything, not that I wanted to. The system was not bad but lack of new features and customization, along with way too many encounters makes game play very boring.

GRAPHICS:(3/10) - Made in 1997... same year FFVII came out... it has SNES graphics... not good for its time frame. No effort was made to improve on the snes game ToP which came out in 1994!

MUSIC/SOUND:(6/10) - I didnt find anything annoying in this nor was there any good toons to remember. Average.

Voice Acting:(7/10) - Speech is in japanese. Very very little speech but what was there sounded fine to me but then again I understood jack.

Replay Value:(1/10) - Ya right.

OVERALL:(2/10) - I re-iterate... story weighs very heavily with me. I cant enjoy a long game if there is nothing to bite into.

My Wishes : Get a real writer.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 07/05/03, Updated 07/05/03