This column is unusually hard for me to write at times, since for a game to qualify, it’s got to have made a lasting imprint on me personally, or in what I look for in entertainment. Being old isn’t really a prerequisite, but most of the titles I think of when considering games that had a lingering effect on me are ones I played when I was a kid. I started and lost steam on a couple entries since the last, then this one popped into my head. Well, the theme song did. And now it won’t… get… the hell out.
Tales of Phantasia was the first game that I played under a fan translation patch, and even if some people think the DeJap translation (which come to think of it probably isn’t the classiest team name either) was needlessly crude at points, that’s the version that stuck with me over the years. Maybe the novelty of an ‘uncensored’ console RPG was a factor baiting me along, but I remember being engrossed in it pretty much from beginning to end, and at the time, actually thought the end boss’s heel-face turn was interesting and tragic instead of kind of out of left field and unneeded like I probably would have thought if I had played it in a more jaded mindset. If you’ve been following for a long time, you probably remember that I even went so far as to make a little character shrine to the mage of the group, Arche Klaine. If anyone was wondering why I took that down, it was a mix of realizing how lame that sort of thing was, and one of the artists I asked permission from laying a massive guilt trip on me for using a bunch of random pictures from Japanese artists I didn’t know the source of and lacked the linguistic chops to ask even if I did.
Phantasia was pretty damned innovative as SNES RPGs went. It was released on a very large cartridge for the time, mostly to accommodate all of the digitized voice included within. Not only were there the usual assortment of battle-cries and shouting of attack names, but ToP boasted a full on title theme song with vocals and everything. It was mostly just a bunch of samples of in-engine sprites walking around, fighting, and what you could loosely call ‘cutscenes’ (like Arche slowly floating off a balcony on her broomstick in glorious 16×16 sprite form). Still, for a pre-Playstation game, it was pretty damned impressive, and it wasn’t too bad of a song, either.
Flash and noise aside, Tales of Phantasia was a damn solid game with a battle system that abandoned turn based combat in favor of giving you direct control of your party (mostly, anyway), providing an engaging new way to hit monsters with swords. There is still a sort of turn based ‘rhythm’ in place, but your turns are based around the more tangible factor of how quickly say, Cless can run back and forth to attack, or how fast the mage characters can chant a spell. You can close the distance with the enemy if you want to get away from hitting and running, going toe to toe to keep a nasty enemy like a Hellmaster hit-stunned. The remaining three characters are under AI control, and like many modern games that do so, they have a handful of behaviors you can set, such as “All-out attack” or “Conserve TP.” Thoughtfully, you can actually go into the menus and disable specific spells to keep the CPU from wasting MP or spamming ineffective attacks. Hell, even Persona 3 wouldn’t let you do that.
It goes deeper than that still. Assuming direct control over other party members lets you call on their techs and spells directly, some having pretty different play styles or tricks inherent to them. I found that Klaus/Klarth would use his giant spellbook as a shield often when placed at the front of the party, slowing up some of the more aggressive little baddies while the others prepared spells, and Arche’s position floating slightly above the rest of the party can often spare her damage that wipes out the others. Once, playing at a friend’s house, the party was wiped during a boss battle, and Arche was left alone, slowly bludgeoning the boss to death by herself while we sat there laughing our asses off at the boss’s inability to fight back. You might call it a bug or exploit, I think it counts as a strategy.
ToP spawned a whole slew of sequels, but admittedly, as obsessed as I was with the first one, I’m way behind on the Tales series. It seems to have done an amazing job of keeping up its par of quality, with each installment getting favorable to raving reviews. The Star Ocean series originated from the same team a while later, with a similar real-time action battle system and overall ‘flavor.’ Phantasia itself saw a few re-releases but didn’t see legit release in the States until late in the GBA’s lifetime, which I gladly snapped up, even though I’m not wild about the changes made to it. The Roguelike-like food bags the original used for regaining health in the dungeons were replaced with a cooking system, a la Star Ocean, and the game seemed bizarrely crash prone for a freaking Game Boy game. (At first I thought it was by ‘well loved’ GBA acting up, but the same freezing and crashing happened on my DS Lite after I upgraded.) Tragically, that opening theme song was also axed, even though they kept the “sprites acting out scenes” aspect of it. The sprites used came from the touched up PS1 version and look much nicer in that they actually look like their character artwork. Speaking of, the character designs in ToP come from the pen of the awesome Kosuke Fujishima, and I’ve always liked the way the guy can create beautiful characters without crossing the line into outright CLAMP like girlishness.
Tales of Phantasia was something of a glimpse ahead of what would become de rigeur in future RPGs (or games in general, really.) Noted artists, voice talents, a battle system that seems to foreshadow the “sort of in control” scheme Persona 3, FFXII and XIII use to put you in charge of one character directly and the rest of the party indirectly. You could probably argue that the cutscene and side-conversation laden PS1 version is the definitive version of the game, but that DeJap Translations version is always going to be the Tales of Phantasia I remember. By extension, MY Klaus is named Klarth and likes to speculate that an underage girl “fucks like a tiger”; and my Arche drinks more than she can handle and shyly hides from the Unicorn (who appears only to pure girls) because “There was this guy, one time and…”
What did I take away from it personally? Well, it did inspire me to wonder what it would be like to make a dream RPG that took the active battle system to its ultimate conclusion and replaced all the random encounters with all-out King of Fighters or BlazBlue style battles with involved combo systems and being able to tag in your sidelined party members. It certainly got me thinking outside the box of what a particular genre has to be like, which made trying out other off the wall takes on the RPG like Knights in the Nightmare a no brainer. It certainly made going back to bog standard RPGs difficult.