Tales of Phantasia

"One of the best RPGs the GBA has to offer."

The Tales series is a more niche RPG series much like Lunar, Star Ocean and Suikoden. Tales of Symphonia ended up being more than niche and become a pretty popular game. Namco saw this and decided to put Tales of Phantasia on another Nintendo system- the Game Boy Advance. Tales of Phantasia was actually a Super Nintendo game but it never reached overseas. It was then remade on the PlayStation and this game is a port of that. I've never actually played the version on the SNES or PSX so I can't tell you exactly how sloppy this port was. From what I can garner, this port wasn't very good but the game itself was fantastic. I had no real gripes with this game as a stand-alone game seeing as how I didn't have any previous biases about this game. Tales of Symphonia is one of my all time favorite games and is the reason I got this game. This game is very similar in many aspects. MANY of the same terms are integrated into this game such as summons, cities, spells and the battle system is extremely similar. Lloyd and Cress have nearly identical move sets.

The storyline is actually quite cliche, especially early on. As a huge RPG fan that doesn't bother me that much as each story always has something to make them different. The main character is Cress and he and his best friend Chester go out to go hunting but when they return to the town…. it is destroyed! You'll eventually go on a mission to find out who dun' it and stop that person. You will travel through time which is always cool. I really liked all the characters in this game. In addition to Cress and Chester there is Mint, the pure healer, Claus, the rational summoner and Arche the rambunctious, carefree mage. There's also Suzu, the ninja girl but you get her late in the game. I felt the characters interacted with each other very well much like in Tales of Symphonia. The storyline itself, like I said earlier, starts out cliche but it doesn't really stay that way. The storyline is basically you trying to stop Dhaos and you have to travel through the times to achieve this. Dhaos is actually one of the better villains out there because his motives are revealed and he has character. The storyline was a little slow at times but like other Tales games, it holds your attention for the vast majority of the game.

The game play to his game is much slower than Symphonia's but it's still quite fun. This game is not turn based like Final Fantasy. When you enter a battle you'll have a 2-D area in which you attack the enemy by actually controlling your character. Up to four people on your side are at the screen at a time. You can set the computer allies to whatever strategy you like. For example, you can make them use magic a lot, use magic sparingly, guard, make them long range attackers. You can also “shut off” abilities you don't want the characters to use. This works well because let's say you face a fire boss. Naturally fire will heal it so it then becomes best to shut off fire spells to prevent the computer allies from accidentally healing the enemy. It also works to shut off weak abilities that don't do much damage and has since been replaced by more powerful spells. If you're playing as Cress, you can just attack with your sword or you can use the B button and a direction to perform skills. If you use skills enough you can also use skill combos by the same method. This is an RPG so HP, TP, experience, stats and levels are very much a part of this game. The game play is very fun and pretty fast paced for a SNES RPG.

Graphically the game is very good. Nice backgrounds, nice scenery blah blah blah but besides that one thing that impressed me was how the characters looked. You could see each character very well and you could see their expressions and wincing. I was impressed. The voice acting was a little irritating though and hearing them shout the name of their attack over and over got a tad repetitive. The sound track to this game was still quite good. Each town had a different them and different types of boss fights had different themes to go with them. The soundtrack wasn't outstanding but it was good. Overall I would have to say this game is well worth the investment. It's one of the best RPGs on the Game Boy Advance and if you were a fan of Tales of Symphonia you will definitely like this.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 08/08/06, Updated 01/02/07