Tales of The World: Radiant Mythology

"Radiant, For Fans and New Gamers"

Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology, as already known, is a fan-service game. Bringing in characters from several Tales of Games in a quest alongside your main character to help fight evil and destroy it.

The graphics of this game is awesome, not too much details, but it's not crappy, you can say that its between great and good, but for a portable system, it's pretty good even though it would have been better, what I do like is the effects of the different artes used on an enemy or on yourself.

As for music/sound effects, the music sounds nice at first but gets pretty boring fast, one of the causes is the game play, which I will elaborate on after this paragraph. As for the sound effects, nothing exactly awesome out of it, the usual screams and groans here and there when attacking, and I didn't feel that it was anything special.

Now to the bad side of things, as much as this game play sounds perfect for the PSP, it gets very very boring when it just becomes repetitive, I'm talking about fetch quests. This game depends on fetch quests, and it's not different every time. And most of them are all useless side quests. But you have to do it. You know why? Because you have to keep on doing it till a new main quest comes up. As boring as it seems, it's nice and useful, as it helps level you up for the next main quest as the main quest requires some of those things. Plus, the more you do such things the more the Tales characters will like you. By what I mean, is that for each character there's like a 'liking' meter for you, the more you do successful quests and the more you get a character with you, he likes you more. As it goes on of course, this will provide a problem, as you need to train all of them so they can get more powerful and more dependable on main quests, and for some people, this will lead on to grinding a lot. And you have to make every character likes you, because if they don't they might refuse to go on a quest with you. Other bad effects of such game play are that the quests are of two kinds basically: collecting (insert number) of (insert thing) or defeating (insert number) of (insert monster name). So the music and surroundings will become quickly boring and moving around the area would be easy even blind-folded. A good thing though is that you can test with many characters till the main quest comes around and then you can choose the most good team around, another good thing is that you'll come across lots of monsters so you'll know which kind is best to fight to gain exp points and escape too much grinding. Now the game is branched to go through three cities each with it's own different area. Of course, the only things that change are: the main quest, music, surroundings, characters, items found in the shops, and difficulty of monsters. So don't expect anything like better side quests to be on the menu, which can be annoying but trust me, you'd be addicted to this game without even noticing. Even if it has so much bad effects, the game play is still addicting with its awesome battle system. It had 2D game play but it can also have 3D if you move with the analog nub, which makes dodging moves relatively easy (especially with repetitive quests, you'll memorize quickly which monster does what and how it looks when it's going to do it). Overall, as much as it looks boring, it's very very addictive.

Now to the story, basically you're a creature created from a tree...to save your world. Sounds weird right? But an awesome way to avoid the cliche of being a destined hero though, but I wished that the rest of the story would do that. Unfortunately, it does not. You're send to your world and when you wake up, you meet an another creature build from his world tree, but his world was sucked in by a monster, which is the villain in this game. He escaped to your world and helped your tree make you...wow, this sounds indecent...umm...never mind. Anyways, so ya, but amazingly, you are created on a human look but your friend is a flying cat. Anyways I won't elaborate more as I don't want to spoil. Anyways ya, so you venture to your town where you see a dictator ruling over it in a not so justice way and as suc, begins your journey to fight this evil and defeat it.

As for replay value, this game has this new game+ feature, so you can maximize your character to the most levels that this game allows to your heart's content. But by the time you're done with the game, I don't think anyone would be able to live through al those side quests all over again.

As much as it has repetitive game play, the battle system makes up for it big time and the little humor being out here and there adds up to the game's game play value. I recommend it to anyone who likes such RPGs and for people new to such stuff, rent or stay away.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 09/08/09

Game Release: Tales of The World: Radiant Mythology (US, 07/17/07)