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

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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)...

There's nowhere I can't reach.

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.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by Acacia

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...

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Originally Posted by Onyx

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...

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Originally Posted by Rocca

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.

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

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.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Originally Posted by Rocca

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.

FELIPE NO