Tales of Phantasia

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.