Tales of Phantasia (PlayStation) Review, Spoiler-free

Foreword

Recently, I played through Tales of Phantasia on the original PlayStation. It's been a long time coming. I first discovered the game after DeJap Translations translated the original Super Famicom game. I did play a little bit of that ROM, but stopped shortly into it. There was someone named Frogacuda on a gaming-forum I used to frequent (Cloudchaser, Xengen, Xengamers). He evangelized about the remake on PlayStation. I bought a copy on soft.himeya.com (they don't exist anymore). At the time, there was no English translation. In fact, I had never heard of translations for PlayStation-games - only for Super Famicom games and earlier. Fortunately, people were working behind the scenes in the deep, dark dungeons of the internet, and it was finally translated: the definitive version of Tales of Phantasia could be played in English.

At the time, I couldn't play the translated version on a disc playing on real PlayStation-hardware, so I used the emulator called ePSXe. I did play it for a bit on the emulator, but it didn't stick with me. It was just unappealing. The video-emulation wasn't great. The actual source-video is rendered in a very narrow resolution and then stretched to the NTSC 4:3 aspect-ratio. This never looked good on an emulator, and that was probably the main reason I stopped playing. The game was always in the back of my mind, however.

This past year, I enjoyed a renaissance in my interest in retro games, and I bought a modded PSOne off of ebay. It could play imports as well as backups; perfect. I had some trouble getting the console to play my translated ROM off a backup. I eventually realized that I had to use IMGBurn (I had tried many attempts using Daemon Tools).

I don't think I jumped into Tales of Phantasia head-first right after that, but soon after, I did. I played a good 20 to 30 hours until I got bored, and then put the game on hiatus. I then returned to it, but hit a snag: an incredibly tough boss-battle. I grinded levels for a little bit, but I could not beat the boss, and so I quit. Months later, I decided to keep trying. I grinded even more levels and changed up my strategy, and I finally beat the boss! From that point on, I was determined to finish the game at all costs, and so I did.

Like most games, it has its flaws, but it's overall an excellent piece of software. In the years since its release, countless "Tales of" games have released, and so the original game in the series has been buried under a mountain of subsequent titles. Tales of Phantasia deserves more recognition and should be on the radar of more gamers.

Difference from the original Super Famicom version

There is an extra playable character in the PlayStation-version.

They added voiced dialogue-scenes (character-skits) on the World Map.

The graphics are redone, from the sprites to the tiles themselves. The original character-designs on Super Famicom had muted colors, but the PlayStation-remake adopts a more anime-like design with each character having bright, distinctive colors.

The sounds and music are different as well, but it's up to personal taste whether they are better or worse. The Super Famicom had a legendary sound-chip and some songs actually sound better on it.

The Super Famicom original had the Food Sack system, but the PlayStation-version uses the Cooking system.

Review

What is Tales of Phantasia? On the surface, it seems like a stereotypical console-RPG from Japan, but it's so much more.

The battle-system abandons traditional, turn-based combat for a real-time system that plays more like a sidescrolling action-game than an RPG. You directly control only one character. You can manually attack, block, and jump, to an extent (more precisely with an item); and you can assign different behaviors to your party-members and even manually have them use abilities and cast spells from a menu. It is mind-blowing at first, but after tens of hours playing the game, it loses its novelty and random battles just become button-mashing fests. I must say that I still prefer the ATB of the early Final Fantasies because they offer a greater feeling of strategy and control over multiple members, and you don't have to mash buttons.

Other than the battle-system, the game is pretty much what you'd expect. You explore grid-based towns, and dungeons, buy and sell items, find secrets, and explore a polygonal 3D World Map. Tradition is not necessarily a bad thing, however. There is no need to reinvent the wheel or invent something new sometimes when it works.

What makes an RPG memorable? Part of that is the story and the characters, and this game has a very interesting story that might surprise you. It is also on the brighter spectrum of games. You have the really depressing games like Final Fantasy VI and VII, and you have the brighter games like Chrono Trigger. Tales of Phantasia does have very mature themes and moments, but it is more similar to Chrono Trigger than Final Fantasy VI. Playing Final Fantasy VI made me depressed, but Tales of Phantasia did not.

RPGs from Japan are known for their legendary soundtracks. It seems like there is no shortage of amazing composers like Nobuo Uematsu and Yasunori Mitsuda. This game features Motoi Sakuraba as its lead composer, and the soundtrack has a surprisingly diverse set of songs. There are songs that sound classical and instrumental, and others that sound metallic or electronic. It might be weird to juxtapose two distinct sound-styles s next to each other in a single videogame, but it works, and it makes sense in the larger scope of the game itself.

I used the translation done by Gemini. It is available on Romhacking.net. The translation itself is very well-done, not that I can read Japanese and thus be able to judge its accuracy. It is just well-written and doesn't have any grammar- or spelling-mistakes. The translation gives you an option to choose romanized ability-names or translated ability-names. The romanized option seeks to translate how the abilities sound in Japanese, whereas the translated ability-names do just that - translate the ability-names into their meanings into English. As cool as saying "Majinken" is, I preferred the translated ability-names. The voice-overs are intact in Japanese. I did feel some of it was overacted, like when characters were screaming, but it's typical anime-like fare.

PlayStation was not known for its beautiful 2D games, especially in North America, but I feel that it did have numerous, beautiful 2D games like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Mega Man X4, and Valkyrie Profile; Tales of Phantasia stands tall with those greats. It features completely redone sprites from the Super Famicom version. They err on the side of super-deformed cuteness, but it works, it fits the era, and I love it. I wish more modern RPGs looked like this game.

Despite all the positive things this game brings to the table, I wouldn't call this a great game that every one needs to play. It does feature the aforementioned, proverbial wall that I had to grind to get past, although I'm sure that cleverer gamers can get past it without grinding. I started to have more fun with this game when I started playing with a walkthrough. There are a lot more secrets in this game than you might think, especially later on, and because the game does ramp up in difficulty, I feel like this is one of those "strategy guide games" - one of those games where you should play alongside a great walkthrough to fully appreciate it and not be frustrated.

Tales of Phantasia was a wondrous tale of fantasy that made me think about the reality of our world and how we could make it a better place for ourselves and our children.