Tales of Phantasia (GBA)
2006 Namco

In a nutshell: If you’ve played any other Tales game, just give this one a try. And if you haven’t, still give it a try. Depending on your tastes, though, you might want to go with the DeJap fan translation…

The Tales series of RPG’s is one of the longer running ones, even if it remains something of a black sheep compared to Dragon Quarrier and Final Fantasy. But for some ungodly reason, it took over ten years for the ORIGINAL installment to get a formal translation and domestic release. Of course, by that time, Phantasia had already long been available for free via emulation and a translation patch, which has to be at least part of the reason it’s warming the racks at every store in the area.

I, like a chump fanboy, of course assumed it was going to be an ultra rare cult hit thing and pre-ordered it and sprang for express shipping. I am a tool.

The first thing to wonder when a game takes this long to come out is if it’s worth the wait. And for once, it’s a pretty solid yes. The game’s fighting engine is still enjoyable, and even the somewhat dated graphics are enhanced with the Playstation release’s sprites. On the whole, this GBA adaption is something of a Frankensteinian mish mash of different editions- it uses the overworld and special effects of the SNES version, and the battle sprites and menu art of the Playstation one. A fair amount of voice has been retained… well, overdubbed anyway. The signature opening theme, however has been lopped off and replaced with an instrumental, which makes the opening montage harder to sit through. In addition, the ninja girl Suzu, who was an NPC (and looked completely different!) in the SNES edition, became playable in the PSX and this GBA port, playing something like a faster, combo-happy Cress.

I guess all this talk of ports and iterations wouldn’t be much help to someone who’s never heard of Tales of Phantasia in the first place, so a quick summary is in order. A powerful being named Daos wakes up after being sealed by the hero’s family and friends, who seem to closely mirror the eventual party’s classes and destroy’s the village while hero Cless Alvein and his friend Chester Barklight are off hunting. As young, heroic types are prone to do, they set out for revenge against the mystery attackers from the token evil empire. After some twists and turns, Cless ends up in the past, where a sizeable chunk of the story takes place as he learns more about Daos, magic, and so on with the help of Klarth(Claus) and the pink-haired, spunky witch Arche. It all comes down to a showdown in the future where we finally learn that the villain Isn’t Such A Bad Guy After All, and everything pretty much resolves happily ever after.

ToP can claim a few innovations for sure. One of the more superficial ones was being the first SFC/SNES carts to reach 48 megs and have a fully vocalized opening and ending theme. That doesn’t apply so much to the GBA port, of course, since the system was more or less a pretty girl with a horrible voice, giving us MIDI versions of everything instead. More importantly, though, it shoves aside the then-standard turn based battles in favor of something closer to a fighting game. In fact, by finding the proper item, you can actually execute Cless’s whole arsenal of moves with keypad commands rather than simply picking two or three for the quick-use slots. The remaining party members stay on AI control following vague behavior outlines ranging from “Do Nothing” to “Waste All Fucking MP On Lizardmen Twenty Levels Below You.”

Originally, Cless was the only directly-controllable character, but from the PS version on, you can change that, or even rotate him out of the party completely. Overall the group seems a bit more well rounded than before, especially considering when you get back Chester after having left him behind at the first time jump, he would rejoin at the same level he left off at and never learned ANY special attacks. Here, not only does Chester gain a set of different elemental shots, there are also some semi hidden ‘special training’ scenes that will automatically advance his levels so he can catch up to the rest of the team in power. He’s not terribly useful against close combat opponents, but his arrows can slow down and put the hurt on slow moving enemies and bosses.

For the most part, this IS the SNES game. As mentioned before, they substituted Playstation sprites where possible, but the overworld map remains a Mode 7 monstrosity. One of the more aggravating changes is the removal of the Roguelike food bag that restored HP as you walk. Instead, a Star Ocean-inspired cooking system is in place which lets you make one meal at a time (You have to get in a fight or something for the group to ‘feel hungry again’ enough for you to attempt cooking again), making the skill progress pretty slowly, when it’s easier to just stock up on Rune Bottle items, which can ‘upgrade’ all of your healing/TP restoring items to the next step up.

Overall, Tales of Phantasia holds up to the test of time very well. It’s a lot more traditional in aesthetics than some of the later games (Sorry, I don’t care for the hyper-glossy style of art used from Eternia onwards.) While lacking in some depth, it’s nice to play an RPG that doesn’t pad itself out with unecessary micromanagement, unless you plain WANT to make sure Cless gains Mastery of all his techs and can thusly combine them. There are some nice hidden item shops and such to find, and Suzu is actually a fairly well hidden hidden character while still being possible to just ‘happen’ upon.

Give it a try if you need a fix of something that’s not a Final Fantasy update, but if you hate localization the DeJap patch and SNES rom are probably the way to go. Namco seemed to handle the localization with a blunt instrument, resulting in shit like Ragnarok being translated as “Kangaroo.” Granted it’s not quite as dodgy as some of the first Super Robot Wars OG game, where I saw a few examples of text-off-the-edge. Plus Arche is still likeable even sanitized for Nintendo standards.