Tales of Phantasia

Tales of Phantasia was a fun game for what it was.  It was fun going back and finally playing this game in it's entirety.  I've been a big Tales of fan since the Playstation days.  It was a big hard playing this though because it's an obvious step down from Tales of Destiny.  While I think the graphics and sound are amazing, everything else seems a bit dated.  The battle system was pretty original for the time, but I was use to the Destiny system, so Phantasia feels a bit slow and clunky.  This is probably the Tales of game with the longest battle times.

I HATE how through 80% of the game, there's only 1 Melee fighter (Cress) and your entire back of party are magic users.  The AI is NOT smart enough to use their magics they way you want it.  Actually most of the time, your AI characters just stand there while you do all the fighting.  This can become really difficult or frustrating.  You'll have to end up setting each and every move of your characters towards the end of the game when you start to fight hard bosses.

The menu system is confusing to sift through. The random encounter rate is way to high.  The story is a bit cliche but it's overall not bad.  The dungeons are very challenging, so thats good.  

I'm not saying this is a bad game, but it's very very old school in it's train of thought.  

----------Battle System----------
Tales of Phantasia is a team-based Action RPG.  You control one character, while three other characters act depending on the AI settings you give them.  The AI works on their own, but you can stop the action and que up a spell or item for them to use.  The only time you can't que up a spell or item is when there's a spell in motion.  This is really annoying because when a character begins a spell, the action pauses.  I don't think Tales of Destiny did this, and I know the modern Tales of games didn't either.  This makes the action soo much slower than it should be.  

You gain experience and levels like most RPGs.  After so many levels your characters will gain new skills and spells.  Cress is your main character, and the only real melee fighter in the group for most of the game.  He can learn a TON of skills.  Each time you use a skill in battle, it moves up a percentage until it is "Master" 100%.  Once you Master your skills, you can eventually learn special skills that combine said Mastered skills.  It's a cool system that most Tales of games eventually used.

The dungeons are full of mazes, puzzles and traps.  Some dungeons you might spend up to 2 or 3 hours in just because of the hard puzzles and confusing mazes.  There's no map function, so it's easy to get lost.  Not only that but the random encounter rate is HIGH as hell.  If you hate random encounters, then don't bother with this game.  I swear it's every 3-5 steps for a random encounter.  You can buy "Holy Bottles" that lessen the rate, but it's still every 6-8 steps.  There are a few spots of where you can actually see your enemy before battle, but they're usually crowding the screen so you can't possibly get around them.  

I hate the menu and inventory system.  This is probably the biggest draw back for the GBA.  When you go to buy a weapon, you have to open up a sub-menu over your initial menu that explains what the item is and how strong it is.  Then if you want to see if your characters can equip it, then you have to open up another menu over that.  It's a frustrating system.  The items are confusing to scroll through too.  You can reorganize the items (like all Tales of games) but it's always a pain.



----------Characters / Story----------
You play as Cress, a young swordsman.  While on a hunting trip with best friend Chester, their home town is destroyed and everyone was murdered by the dark knight Mars.  Cress and Chester vow revenge on Mars, but get betrayed by Cress' uncle and thrown in jail.  While in jail, Cress meets a young girl named Mint.  As the team escapes from prison and attempt to seek revenge of Mars, they meet Dhaos, who sends Mint and Cress into the past, leaving Chester alone to fight.

Tales of Phantasia came out about 9 months after Chrono Trigger, so time travel wasn't exactly an original plot point.  Actually neither was the opening plot (Paladins Quest), crap, there was even time travel in Paladins Quest.  Either way, the story was pretty good, the characters were ok.  It might be hard going back and playing this game because it's pretty cliched at this point, but this came out before all those cliches were cliches.

My main problem with the story is if you zone out with the dialog and don't read the last few lines of dialog, or accidentally skip some dialog, then you might be screwed into your next destination.  If you skip dialog, then there's no way to figure out what you need to do next.  In some situations, you mostly have to find a random NPC character from a random town.  There aren't alot of towns, but towns are huge with a ton of NPC characters. 

If you was a fan of the Tales of Symphonia storyline, then you'll be surprised by how huge of a connection this game has on it. I believe Phantasia was set hundreds of years before Symphonia happened, but there are alot of the same towns, same summons, and overall a ton of connections. I won't spoil them though.

----------Graphics----------
I love the graphics overall.  I can't think of to many bad thing to say about them.  The character models, from the battle system to the map is very impressive and blows Final Fantasy VI out of the water.  The world map's 3D effects are very impressive, but its locations are a bit generic, so I think Final Fantasy VI has that over it.  There's a huge variety of special attacks and moves that look amazing.  There's not a huge variety of enemies, but they're just as detailed as your playable characters.  There a few cutscenes in the game that look pretty good too.  

There are some nice over laying effects that I love.  Like for example, smoke coming out of a chimney, or snow falling from the sky.  Other examples of this are the backgrounds that scroll opposite of each other that creates a nice draw distance / fake 3D effect.  The dungeons and fields and towns also have a ton of small animals and bugs flying around.  They put a TON of detail in this game.  

----------Sound----------
Wow, the sound is pretty amazing.  I'm mostly impressed by the voice work in this game.  I'm not 100% if there was English voices in the Super Famicom, but I'm pretty sure there was Japanese voices atleast.  This game came out in December of 1995, and to have voices and so many amazing songs on a Super Famicom game, now that's impressive to me.  Ok, so the voices aren't amazing, and sound really muffled.  You can't even tell what some characters are saying, but most of the time you can.  I know people rag on the voices alot, but I thought it was a huge addiction.  There's only SOME dialog that voiced out, but it's mostly for battle cries and grunts.  There's even alot of animal sound effects and a ton of impressive sound effects of the battle.

The music impressed me the most.  There's just a TON of tracks in this game, and they're all pretty damn rememberable.  The battle theme is great, the world map music is great, the dungeon music is great.  There's really no music that annoyed or offended me, so that's good.

----------World Map----------
The world map is a standard overview map found in the likes of the 16-bit Final Fantasy games.  It honestly doesn't stray to far from that path but I have no problem with that because I love those style of world maps.  The map is in a faux-3D view like Final Fantasy VI.  Actually, when you're finally able to fly in the game, it's almost exactly that same style of 3D that Final Fantasy VI does when you fly, but better I believe.

The game flows pretty linearly.  You do hit a few spots where you get a choice between dungeons, but most of the game you can't travel very far because the only way to hop between continents is to sail.  If they want you to stay put, then they'll block you sailing.  I cost money to sail (not much really) and while the boats will dock in some places, they won't always wait.  So for one example, one boat will take you to the first continent you visit, then it leaves,so you have to run all the way north of the continent to find the other boat to travel back.  There's alot of traveling in this game by foot.  You won't gain your own independent "plane" until late in the game.

----------Time to Complete Game----------
38:44

That's the last save before the final boss (which is loooong) and the ending scene(s) which is also long and very satisfying.  After you watch the end credits and final bonus scene, you can save your game.  This allows you to restart the game with your Monster Collection and Collection Book in tact.  This isn't exactly a New Game+ feature found in the modern Tales of games but it's better than nothing.