Tales of Phantasia

"A real classic."

Tales of Phantasia, a Namco rpg, was released in Japan back in 1994, for the Super Famicom. It was never released stateside, and I have no idea why. It’s a great game.

The version of ToP that I played to write this review was the Japanese rom, patched with the translation by DeJap, rendering the game into English.

Graphics 10: The game’s graphics are great. They’re very sharply drawn, and there are lots of great effects used like transparency. The character designs, while kind of quirky-looking, are nevertheless very detailed, especially in battle, and are large and pleasant to look at. The backgrounds used in the game are also great, and in terms of sheer attention to detail, it rivals games like Chrono Trigger, which also had sweet graphics. The style used in ToP, though, is somewhat darker than that of CT, and I think that’s better, because the latter often used overly-bright colors. Overall, excellent graphics.

Music 8: The game’s music is kind of a mixed bag; some of the songs are very good, while others are just plain boring. I’m pleased, however, to say that most of the songs featured in this game are really good. The game’s intro features a J-Pop song, complete with lyrics, which is pretty good, and the rest of the tunes, such as the town themes, manage to set the mood nicely without being too over-the-top [Lufia 1 comes to mind…] or overbearing. The actual music’s recording is very high-quality and doesn’t even sound like synth sometimes. The game’s battle theme—while some may beg to differ on this point—was, I think, very good, and didn’t get repetitive or dull. The boss theme is a different story, and is actually one of this game’s few ‘bad’ tracks, it’s just not as effective as the battle music and is rather annoying. The world map themes—the music changes as the game progresses—were each superb, and overall, I think the music of this game is really very nice; the only thing that dragged the score down a bit was that some of the songs, especially many of the dungeon themes and their ilk, sound a bit dull and unmemorable, but those are a small minority.

Sound Effects 4: Okay, there are essentially two types of sound effects in this game. The standard sounds, and the voice acting.

The standard sounds are pretty basic rpg-type sound effects, you know, sword-slashes and so forth, but in this game they sound oddly artificial. This can’t be my emulator because other games, like FF6, still retain their more realistic sounds. In this game, the sword-slashes have an odd ‘beep’ to them, a strange sound that is decidedly not metallic. It’s really hard to explain, but you’ll see it if you play the game. All the sounds from physical attacks in this game, be they melee or magical or whatever, sound strangely out of place and very, very unrealistic, to the point where I almost got a headache from listening to characters hitting each other with their swords and hearing nothing but a sort of ‘dull beep’—I can’t find words to describe this odd phenomenon.
The voice acting is similarly—I hate to say ‘badly done’, but, maybe ‘sloppy’—the most VA in the game occurs during the prologue. A voice reads a quote to you [in Japanese], and then a female voice sings the game’s theme song, also in Japanese. The voice acting in this game, though, is very staticky and dull—it sounds exactly like something heard through a telephone or something, but with even more static. I guess I should attribute this to the format—I don’t think the Super Famicom was really designed with this in mind, and maybe its processor can’t pull off high-quality VA. It could also just be the cartridge format, but many N64 games, like Zelda, seem to have perfectly acceptable instances of voice acting, but anyway, the voice acting problem in this game is actually bothersome—the opening song is so ‘blurry’-sounding that, even though I don’t speak Japanese, I think even someone who does might have difficulty understanding just what the hell this singer is trying to say. The voice acting which occurs in battle—characters cry out when they attack, and shout out the names of their special skills—is similarly muffled, to the point where I think overall the game might have been better had they left the voice acting out entirely.
Both of these sound issues are a little nitpicky, so I’m leaving the overall score as 4—slightly below average.

Plot 9: The plot is actually quite good, especially for a 16-bit game. It’s very well written—though this might just be the fan translation I’m using; I’m sure if Namco actually released this game for us back in ’94, it would have the qualities of Breath of Fire II; and it’s maturely done and not clichéd. The game’s prologue concerns a group of heroes who attack and nearly kill a force of evil. They manage to seal him away, and then the scene cuts to the actual game—You’re a guy named Cless, you know, a typical blond swordsman, and you live in the village of Totus. You have a friend called Chester, [typical blue-haired sidekick], and so one fateful morning you decide to go out into the convenient nearby forest to hunt wild boars. You find one and kill it—it’s your first boss, basically—and are heading back when suddenly you hear a distress signal from the town, and when you get there, something has gone in and killed everyone. Chester stays behind to bury the dead and give them his respects, and you prepare to journey to the next town, to try and find out exactly what’s happened….

Well, it gets better, eventually. The plot actually has at least one totally unexpected twist, and it manages to break the pattern of predictability that plagues so many games of its time, heck, even modern games. The plot actually manages to drive you forward to the end, which is always a good thing.

As for character development—it’s probably not the best, but it, again, doesn’t fall into the odd pattern followed in games like Chrono Trigger and FF7 (where characters join your party, immediately develop a little, leave your party, join you again, this time for good, and then develops some more,) but instead manages to, well, avert that problem by basically letting you have all the game’s main characters with you at all times, a’la Lunar, but still manages to keep it all fresh and interesting. The dynamics between characters are pretty good, and they each have their own distinctive character, but again I might attribute this to the translation. I would have liked a bit more dialogue, but there’s still an awful lot, especially for this type of cartridge-based game.

Gameplay 8: Very unique. In the game, you can control only one character directly, and that character is Cless. Other characters’ skills can still be used outside of combat, but once combat starts, the game no longer resembles similar games.

The design is modeled on a fighting game, basically: your characters and the monsters are placed on a one-dimensional playing field, meaning you can only move left or right across it to get closer to or farther away from enemies. Your other characters are controlled by the game’s AI, while Cless can be controlled by you. Pressing the A button results in Cless running toward the closest enemy, and then striking at it with his sword. You can use the A-button in combination with other buttons like up or down to do different things, like stab, take running jumps, or whatever. Once he is next to an enemy, you can continually hit A for him to slash, over and over again.

Pressing B lets him use one of several skills that he can have ‘equipped’ at the moment, in two types, one being short-ranged, and another being long-ranged. B in combination with the arrow keys lets him also use more skills, and you can use the directional pad to move him closer or farther away from enemies to use these skills.
Hitting Y pauses the action and gives you a small menu that lets you use items, tell other party members to use their own skills, change the AI setup for other party members [Like in Star Ocean 2], or tell other party members to move to another part of the battlefield.

Running away from combat is sort of strange, though;, you have to move Cless all the way to the left edge of the screen and then hold down the L button, whereupon a timer appears telling you how many seconds it will take to escape. Bleah. They should have just added ‘run’ to the Y-button menu.

If all this sounds too simplistic, that might be a flaw, but I find it very refreshing. The game is more focused than Star Ocean since everything takes place in the one dimension, and it’s more exciting than Final Fantasy because there’s a random sort of element in the battles; you don’t just hit A when your turn comes up. It’s pretty good, the only problem being that the game can become very easy at times.

Character advancement occurs through experience points, with a standard leveling system. When you level, sometimes you gain a special skill, the kind you can use with B, and if you use this skill in battle, with each use, its ‘learn percentage’ increases by one. When this reaches one hundred, you are ‘proficient’ in that skill, and if you’re proficient with two or more skills, you can sometimes use special skills that combine the powers of both.

Statistics are handled by a system of HP and TP, with HP being your standard hit points, and TP standing for toilet—I mean, tech points. Every time you use a skill, you consume TP, but after battles end you gain TP, proportional to your level. This is to encourage you to use your skills more often, but it’s kind of annoying because in some senses it makes an already easy game even easier. At high levels the amount of TP recovered seems a bit disproportionate.

The game’s menu system is well-designed and similar to other games of this genre, with a few cool exceptions; like in Star Ocean 2, you can change the name of any character you want, and there’s a special formation sub-screen where you can change the point on the one-dimensional line where your characters stand during combat.

There’s a cool feature called the ‘food sack’. Essentially, if you have a ‘food’ item [more on those coming up], you can put it into your ‘sack’ and it will count as so many units of food. Then, as you walk, these units of food are gradually added to your HP: it’s basically a way to slowly eat things instead of doing it all at once. The thing is, I don’t really see very much point in this at all, so I rarely use it, except when I’m walking across damage tiles or something. But, if you usually forget to or can’t be bothered to use the menu periodically, just fill up your food sack and go.

I have one small irk with this game, and that is the item-management screen. This game has an insane number of items, an insane number of them. For example, you might have a basic healing item; they’re called ‘apple gummies’ in this game, which in itself is weird, but anyway. Then you have ‘bread’, and ‘apples’ [not the gummies], ‘beef’, ‘chicken’, probably ‘fish’, though I haven’t seen any, ‘steak’, probably some vegetables though I haven’t seen any of those either, and don’t forget ‘cheese’, and, inexplicably, ‘creamy cheese’….it’s insane. At least it isn’t quite as bad as Star Ocean 2….God, that game must have had thousands of food items alone….but it’s still very, very annoying. This means that your item screens are usually huge and unwieldy. Also, this is an odd bug or something, but when you pick up a new item, it doesn’t go to the end of the list, it randomly gets stuck at random somewhere in your list. There are a few sorting items, e.g. ‘battle items first’, ‘food items first’, and ‘misc items first’, which basically seems to cover all those normal items like apple gummies. Thus, wading through all this crap can sometimes become a chore. What they should have done was had a separate item screen for each type of item, and a separate screen exclusively for ‘new’ items, then there wouldn’t be any confusion. Anyway, that’s a pretty small flaw, but it still bothers me. Games like Earthbound got away with tons and tons of very similar items, e.g. ‘hamburger’, ‘fries’, ‘pizza’….but Earthbound severely limited your inventory space, meaning that you couldn’t freak out with this sort of thing. I’m sure having tons of different items adds ‘meat’ to the game, [in a manner of speaking…], but it also adds unnecessary confusion.

Overall, this game’s gameplay [heh] is quite good, except for two things: it’s incredible ease due to its slightly simplistic battle engine [and it’s odd habit of restoring your TP a lot] and the unwieldy items menu.

To Buy or Rent?: Well, I doubt this game can be rented anymore, but I’d recommend downloading the ROM image [with a translation patch] to see how you like it. If you really like it, are a 1337 g4m3r and have an actual Super Famicom [or whatever sort of mod chip you need], buy it, use a copier and a translation patch, and play it on your television. Or not. But by all means, the game’s excellent.

Replayability: Well, this being a relatively linear rpg, you probably won’t pick it up immediately after beating it to play through again, but there’s no glaring flaw in the game’s design to not make you want to play though the game more than once. I’m pretty sure that there aren’t many secrets, like special dungeons or locked characters or anything—but then again, I’m not using a walkthrough [I only use those when I’m stuck, and I’m not, this game’s pretty easy] so what do I know?

The Bottom Line: If you appreciate classic RPGs at all, get this. If you’re a Star Ocean fan, or have played Tales of Destiny or one of this game’s other sequels, get this, and even if you sit in the dark in your room and play nothing but Final Fantasy 8, you might still like this game.

Score Calculations: How I calculated the score and stuff:

Graphics 10

Music 8
Sound Effects 4
Total = 6
*These two scores are averaged

Plot 9

Gameplay 8

Total=33/4
=8.25, rounding down,

Overall Score: 8. A great game.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 07/26/02, Updated 07/26/02