Tales of Phantasia
 

Well, the game finally made it to North America, in a disappointing way, but at least Nintendo bothered to spend the time translating a poorly ported version, which should deserve a thumb-up...

For those of you who have already played the SNES version translated by Dejap, Tales of Phantasia should be familiar to you. It is probably one of the best games in the series and could also be said a game that surpasses some Final Fantasy games during that era. It contains an engaging story with a fabulous collection of soundtracks composed by Sakuraba (ie. Fighting of the Spirit well known by those who played Tales of Symphonia, which was first heard in Tales of Phantasia).

Unfortunately, when Namco decided to release their highly valued RPG on the GBA by downgrading the Linear Battle System's speed and music quality, squeezing everything into a 128M cart, some aspects of the game that used to shine do not stand out as bright anymore. This not-so-great plan is further crippled when Nintendo decided to localize the game here by removing any sexual or alcohol related materials presented in the Japanese version (for the sake of a 10+ age rating), and replacing horrible English voiceworks for certain parts ot the game (ie. Morrison, "It ends, HYEAA!! INdigNAtion~!!"). Other issues such as lack of space for equipment names in the menu (ie. "sword" is shortened to "swor") which weren't a problem in the Japanese version also stood out in the English release.

Nevertheless, the fact that this game is released here already means a lot to people who eagerly anticipate the classic that they haven't had the chance to play for almost 10 years. Although flaws continue to persist, those who never played the game or those who wanted to check out the official translation should definitely buy this long lost gem.

Here are some sources to look at if you are still deciding on whether or not you should buy the game:

IGN review (read it at your own risk, 'cause the review doesn't really know what he's talking about): http://gameboy.ign.com/articles/692/692370p1.html

The official Tales of Phantasia website: http://phantasia.gameboy.com/launch/index.html

GameFAQ's link on Tales of Phantasia:
http://www.gamefaqs.com/portable/gba...me/582247.html

I'd much rather see the PSX version being localized, since it was a much more reliable port, and it improved on some of the more slacking parts in the SNES version. I don't see why they'd want to release the GBA version, and especially in some rather poor quality, but it's still a chance to finally see this cool game in english. I won't be getting it though, since I've played through the original a few times, and I'm also following the animeova, which supposedly ended a few days ago.

I just want to point out that Fighting of the Spirit is one of the tracks confirmed to have been composed by Shinji Tamura.

Anyway, I've played the Dejap translation so I see no need to get this game. I've heard some people from other boards say it feels like a fan translation done by one guy in his spare time. That's pretty sad, now we know Nintendo didn't pay for this one...

ToP is already out? Damn, I've gotta go get it.

Anyway, I've noticed that there are ENGLISH voices. And they don't sound too spectacular (also mentioned in first post). The voices sound like they'd be in SotN.

It comes out next week.

If you go to the official website's spell and skill sections and watch the videos, you can get a general feel of the English voice acting... honestly speaking, Nintendo should just keep the original Japanese voice instead of spending the time doing a mediocore job at dubbing some scripts in there. All the characters' personalities are lost (especially Mint and Arche) through the poor voices (Mint sounds like she's around 40 or something)...

Not to mention that there is a 99.9% chance of the theme song being completely removed. I actually enjoyed listening to the crap quality song on the SNES one, even though the GBA one sounds even worse (as in, I wouldn't mind listening to the GBA one either).

I hope they don't remove the song though, I mean, they didn't do that with Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance (ending theme), right?

Unfortunately SuperDK, the theme song has been removed and replaced by a world map music... not only that, the sound test mode with all the bgm, voice actings, sound effects was also removed (it was there in the Japanese version)... so I don't know if I should praise Nintendo for bringing this game over, or bash it for doing such a poor job at localizing it, deleting some great contents that were there in the Japanese version.

I was really happy when I heard that Tales of Phantasia is FINALLY getting a American version, but, from what I saw and heard, I probably won't be getting it, even though it's a handheld version.

But, if it's popular enough, perhaps they'll port the PSX version! I always wanted to see the anime sequences and world map cut-scenes in the gameplay itself.

That might happen only if two conditions are met:

1. ToP sells well here
2. ToP PSX version is ported onto PSP in Japan and Sony decides to localize it by translating the game all over again so that Nintendo won't complain about copyrights and such...

Damn, well...maybe I'll just import the damn thing and just play it along with the DeJap one. I could get both GBA ones, but that'd be a complete waste of money. I don't like how Nintendo always takes out stuff (especially the sound test...which is exactly what they did with ToS).

Did Nintendo themselves do the port? It's odd... Tales of Symphonia was an awesome port that easily matches the Japanese version (if you don't count the unvoiced skits). I'm thinking that a third party company did the translation.

I was going to buy a GBA specifically for TOP, but after hearing Cless -> Cress and Klarth -> CLAUS (?!?!?!) I predicted there would be much more I'd be unhappy with. And I was right. The voicing is ridiculous (No, I'm not a Japanese voice fan. I love the TOS and TOL English voicing.) and the font is just plain ugly (and it causes the name cropping too).

Now I hear there are tons of bugs (including mistakes in the instruction manual) and misspellings ("Arch").

I'm usually not one to bash a game, but I don't think anyone can disagree with me that it's a bad localization.

Oh, about the Cress thing, it doesn't bother me too much. I think it was supposed to be a pun (Mint and Cress... get it?) but Namco knows that fans have accepted "Cless" and "Klarth" for the past so many years. Calling a guy the name of a plant just doesn't feel right, and "Claus" is associated with Santa Claus.
In Tales of Rebirth, one could argue that Veigue and Claire are to be interpretted as Vague and Clear, but that's just ridiculous...

*sighs* i think they should have put phantasia out as a ps2　or gamecube game...and spent more time fixing bugs, doing a proper translation, and making it look good...
o well...at least my wallet will be spare ^_~

on a completely different note, does anyone know if Tales of Rebirth or Tales of Abyss will be released in the US?
(i think it'd be a dumb choice if it wasn't released, but hey, i love the tales series, so it's a biased opinion:p )

I played the SNES version, and I loved everything about it except the goddamn encounter rates. They're worse than SMT. Eventually, I just couldn't take it anymore.

By some stroke of luck, if the encounter rates have been lowered in this version, then I'll pick it up, regardless of the translation.

The encounter rate isn't that high in the SNES version, unless you are talking about Morlia Gallery... but if you bothered to go through all the side quests, there's one item that can permanently reduce or raise the encounter rate... which really helps if you are tired of fighting.

Since this port is based on the SNES version with PSX's sprites and spell effects for characters, I believe the encounter rate is the same as the SNES version...

The problem is that you only get that encounter reducing item way too late. It isn't until the Morlia gallery, iirc, which is the lat sidequest for most people. You'll just have to keep a healthy stock of Holy bottles, although they still give encounters, but at least it's a rather normal rate.

As for a Tales of Rebirth release, while I personally doubt it, some people believe that it'll depend on the sales for Legendia (as long as they don't base it on the awful ToP port). I don't believe that we'll see ToR, but ToA if the sales are good.

I never thought we'd end up getting Tales of Phantasia, especially since the GBA port has been out since 2003 in Japan. I remember playing a SNES rom a while back. I didn't get too far back then because its always been a lot harder for me to play console games with the keyboard (thats why I recently broke down and bought a controller).

I'm still really hoping that Phantasia Productions will be able to fan-translate the superior Playstation version.

I'm just hoping that getting the GBA version will push me into playing my copies of Tales of Destiny and Symphonia (and probably push me into getting Legendia even sooner).

ToP just isn't ToP without comments like "I bet she fucks like a tiger!". I damn near wet myself laughing when I saw that part. And how Klarth can use pornographic magazines as weapons.

And let's not forget the scene where Arche was orgasming over Cless... rofl.

No, actually, I've noticed that as well. The Mint and Crest part as well. :P haha.

Double Post:
Strange, but if I had to choose between R and A, I would easily pick R. Which wouldn't be a choice that everyone would love since it's obvious Abyss would appeal better to the general RPG public, even moreso to Symphonia fans. Too bad though, if there are any RPG's from Japan that deserve the big bump to the states, it's those two.

I could only imagine what horrible songs they'd replace Every Little Thing & Bump of Chicken by. Legendia's orchestrated theme was just fine.

And Phantasia's already out? This coincides perfectly with my trip to Toronto on Wednesday. Now I'll have something to play in the train. :)

As much as I hated Rebirth's storyline, I still wanna see it getting localized first before Abyss, PS2 needs a 2D RPG dammit, and Rebirth is the perfect choice. If Namco doesn't wanna distribute it, they can let Atlus do the job :D

As for Phantasia, Gamespot gave it a 7.2, IGN gave it a 7.5 (not that I care so much about those reviews or anything)... but they valued the story and praised the soundtrack, which are fair opinions. Apparently the reviews didn't comment much on the voice acting, but I'm glad they can look over that and focus on what's good about it.

I'm happy that TOP was finally released in the US even if it's not the Playstation version. That's the version I played and I greatly enjoyed it. I'll probably play the GBA version at some point.

Played this on the train for a few hours yesterday morning. It's...alright, but I already knew it was the lesser of all three Phantasias. Still though, it's not half bad if you forget about the whole Short/Long Range Tech system which is kind of lame. Also, if memory serves me right, I remember going through the Super Famicom Phantasia with no troubles at all, but I died once or twice in this one right before the Dhaos scene. Maybe I was just getting lazy, but either the game got a little harder to play or I just sucked that day.

No, it's not just you, I died when I got pincered by some enemy... it's not that the game has gotten harder, it's probably because Cless has a much longer vulnerable time for enemy to attack after he strikes, as the enemy recovers faster than Cless withdrawing his sword for defense and the next action.

i emailed nintendo about how they literally sodomized ToP, and they just spewed a bunch of crap about how there's so many hardware limits when porting a game to the GBA from the Playstation, and they they did everything according to what the die-hard fans hoped for. WTF? did i miss something here?

One gets the feeling that, if Nintendo had released the SNES cart in the States when it came out, that the same problems would have been present. We saw the same thing with FFV; compare its commercial release stateside to the fan-translated one. Why Nintendo isn't as good at altering game content as rabid fan groups I never will understand.

The reason that the game was a GBA release is clear, though; in the minds of the marketing people, there's no room for 2D games on 3D platforms ( I know there are exceptions, but I'm talking generalities). The GBA is, by and large, a 2D platform.

I just wish they'd removed the voice acting entirely. I hated the original Japanese voices, and the American ones, though an improvement because they can be understood, are still pretty crappy. Better to have silence than poorly sampled dialoge any day.