Tales of Phantasia

The Good
I approached ToP thinking this wasn't going to be a good game. I was totally wrong. I love the graphics. The background images for the battles are amazing, the town art is wonderful, the sprite art is also beautiful, everything about it is amazing. The score for the game is breathtaking. If anyone has ever played Star Ocean: The Second Story will automatically feel the same about the score for this game. The battles are incredibly astounding for the SNES. They allow you to move freely around the battle area and you have the freedom to attack when you wish. Your characters also have the ability to gain battle abilities which are greater in power than the normal attacks. The story is gripping. When it comes to parts in the game where towns get destroied and a group of people die, you really start to feel bad for the heroes and anybody else who was involved.

The Bad
The only real thing that irritated me was the voice acting. I found it to be an annoying aspect to the game and it gets really annoying when a song with voice overs starts playing while you are playing the game. The opening quote really doesn't have anything to do with the game as far as I can see.

The Bottom Line
This is a definite must have for any hard core RPG player. You'll think twice about dissing another RPG of this calibur again.

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.