Tales of Phantasia

The Good
There were so many implementations that went into this game. The graphics were 48-bit and only one game shares that which is Star Ocean also made by the same group of people. Tales of Phantasia, has engaging driven storyline, which places you with a weapons master named Cless, who has a variety of moves to learn, pair that up with a healer, a magician, and archer, and you got yourself a team of combatants to face against the horrid multitudes of monsters.

The combat interface is simple, it's set in a sidescrolling mode rather than isometric, and you press the corresponding buttons to do a move or combo it up with a special. There's many possibilities.

The music score is one of the best and sometimes very catchy and melodic. Especially when the composer is Motoi Sakuraba. The game features a special option menu to listen to all the sounds and music of the game. A full mixer set and equalizer to play with the music.

There are many comical reliefs in the game that'll keep you laughing and entertained. Most of it is sexual innuendo jokes and puberty lessons. It's more anime-ish with the reactions showing up as a tear or angry red face anime style.

The Bad
With most RPGs its an annoying gripe; random encounters, every 3-4 seconds you'll run into one, and there usually the same type of monsters in that area. It gets harder down the road to the point where the monsters are hitting you with petrify spells.

The combat layout is lousy, most of the time in the side scroller your character will get stuck behind the others and get pummelled relentlessly until he dies. Some monsters attack alot faster than most and can daze your character alot, and it's really hard to get him out of that situation.

There is some voice acting, but not alot and they sound like blips here and there. Not much, though I heard the PS version of it went overboard...

The Bottom Line
A great adventure RPG game worth having either in the original cartridge (good luck with finding one) or through emulators you can experience the joys of playing this magnificent game. It'll keep you on your toes and challenge your wits and reactions to situations. The music score is a keeper and have their own soundtrack somewhere in Japan. Remember this is the same publishers who've done Star Ocean series. So you know this game is worth it!

The Good
I really liked the addition of the cooking part of the game and the change to a different title, as opposed to that long way of using a skill over and over again to master it.

It finally came over here to North America, its only been 11 years since it was finally distributed (I am not counting DeJap's SNES translation).

The Bad
The game lacks a lot of things the original version had.

First off, the battle program is not really that great, its a lot harder than the original, and the game is a bit choppy sometimes in a battle scene. Ironically the original had one programmer doing almost all of the programming (Yoshiharu Gotanda, that is) and the original still had better programming, even though this version had 5 programmers.

Characters were smaller in the original, and were a lot better refined, you would think that they would be better, but they are not (Than again all the graphics crew went to Tri-Ace). Only the dungeons and cities look like the original SNES version, characters do not look like it at all.

The sound itself is still great, and is still composed by the two out of three composers from when this game was originally developed (Motoi Sakuraba and Shinji Tamura) , but you can really tell that sound is lacking the expertise of Hiroya Hatsushiba's sound programming ability.

The Bottom Line
Always good to try the original of the Tales Series. The original game is better if you want to play it, but any diehard should still buy the game for Game Boy Advance, as it is a real good thing to add to a collection.

The Good
This game has if not the best, than one of the best graphics, Towns looked like they should, the graphics really set the mood.

The music composition for this game will blow you away. There is no better composing team than that of Motoi Sakuraba and Shinji Tamura.

The battle system is unique, while it is action like Secret of Mana, but still the attacks are randomly generated by the programming, like Final Fantasy.

This game pushed the Super Famicom to its limits with memory, music programming, and graphics. It is a 48 Megabit cartridge, Star Ocean is the only other RPG that has this cartridge.

The Bad
The AI sometimes got annoying, there was nothing worse than casting a spell that was of the strength of a monster you were fighting (casting ice spell on an ice creature, yeah that would be the day).

The programming was good, except for fighting Gnome, where you have not even half a second to attack him before you cant hit him again, or when Maxwell can kill you with a molecular attack by driving right over everyone.

The speech system was particularly annoying at times.

The fact that the geniuses behind the game quit the company after it was released, and the went to Tri-Ace.

The Bottom Line
This game is unique in many ways, the battle system in particular. Any RPG player should play this, its got amazing everything, for a Super Famicom game.