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A great Tales game gone bad...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: August 20, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Before I got Tales of Phantasia in March 2006, I didn't know anything about it. This is the first game in the series, and of course it's a port of the original SFC version. Coming from that, you'd think it'd be alright, but it's not.

To start off with, the "voices" in this game are horrible! Absolutely the worse. You can't understand what they say half the time, and they just sound really bad. It wouldn't have killed whoever localized this to get a few decent VAs. The story was a good one, but with a few errors, this also includes the "voices". It changed Ragnarok to "Kangaroo". Wow...what a mistake. To make things worse, they butchered Klarth's name, changing it to Claus. EWW!

The battle system is a fairly good one. Sure, you don't get Maunal mode until late in the game, but it's alright. Some of the tech names are wrong (Glaive and "Judgment"), and of course there are those darn spell pauses. If you can handle that, then it's ok.

The characters are pretty good. You have Cress, your traditional knight, Mint, your traditional healer, Chester, your archer, Arche your primary spellcaster (among other things...), Klarth, your other spellcaster, and Suzu, a ninja, but she's optional. Personally, I absolutely fell in love with Mint. This may be a crappy English port, but at least they did SOME things right.

Overall, it's not a bad game. If you can endure the horrible "voices", kinda slow battle system, and horrible dubbing then it's pretty decent. So, I give the English version of Tales of Phantasia a 3 out of 5. It's something a new Tales fan should try out. After all, this IS the sequel to Tales of Symphonia.

Tales of Phantasia

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: August 08, 2008
Author: Amazon User

For the first game in the series, this was quite the bang. It spawned an entire series, and with good reason.

Back in the SNES days when it was released it was quite fun, but since then it has had a number of remakes made, including one for the GBA. Tales of Phantasia is a great RPG to have for your GBA simply because it is fun. The battles may seem slow and clunky when compared to more recent Tales titles, but there is still much fun to be had. The spell and summon animations are quite nice, and overall the graphics for the GBA are too shabby. It's not hard on the eyes at all.

The game, of course, includes a number of side quests and other staples of the Tales series, such as cooking. So even when the main quest is over, the player still has a number of things to do.

Additionally, the game has an exceptional soundtrack given that it is from the SNES era. Motoi Sakuraba and Shinji Tamura both worked on this soundtrack to make some quite beautiful musical that helped to make the story and game a much better experience.

The story itself may not be something that will blow the player our of the water, but it is still interesting. The characters are also interesting and it's amusing to watch them interact with each other in this adventure as they all learn about each other.

Overall, I give this game a 3 because it doesn't do anything spectacular, but it is good enough to stand on it's own in today's day and age of gaming.

Play the original if you can!

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: April 09, 2008
Author: Amazon User

It is fun. It is different. It has an interesting story. It seems great except for a couple of things. For one thing the combat is laggy. Sure you can get used to it as you play the game, but if you sit down and actually play the original for the SNES, or watch videos of it you will see how completely different the combat feels and even looks compared to this one. The characters look dubbed down from the original game. Actually the entire game looks worse than the orignial. Did it have to be tha way? I mean is the GBA incapable of matching the graphics of the SNES? I doubt it! That's why i feel like this game was rushed and not taken care of. The developers had time to add extras, but did not have time to make the game look and play as good as the orignial? Cmon now. If you haven't played the original you won't even care about all of this. I am telling you though, if you want to really play the first "legends of" game, then go out of your way to download an emulator and play the original game in all it's glory on your home computer. Or even better, buy yourself a famicom and buy the Japanese import. You can read translation guides for the guide of the internet as you play to see what is going on. Even that I believe would be more genuine then this sad rushed game.

Tales of Phantasia: A Tale of Time Travel & Revenge

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: July 23, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Reviewed for Big Boss Games By: TRC

Tales of Phantasia is a tale of the past, present and the future.

For the first time in the USA, Tales of Phantasia is gracing our shores with a quest of revenge and time travel. This is the first installment of the "Tales of ..." series from Namco.

You start out as Cress, a young boy, and his friend go on a hunting trip, only to find that when they get back that their town is in ruins and everyone is dead.

This game has been the most fun I have ever had with GBA system. Tales of Phantasia has enough action and adventure to keep you glued to your GBA for 70+ hours.

The battle system takes some getting used to. You must assign your special attacks to certain button combinations, for instance: up, down, left or right plus B or B by itself will perform the special attack that you have assigned.

You can assign the same move to all the button combos if you want to. For standard attacks you will press up, down, left or right plus the A button or the A button by itself.

You can stop the action in the middle of an attack to give your team orders. Like you notice that you are almost dead, so you stop the action to tell your healer to cast a spell that heals your wounds.

Scores:
Graphics - They are great for the GBA, 8/10.

Sound and Music - The voice acting in the beginning of the game hooked me in for the long haul 70+ hours of musical bliss, 8/10.

Gameplay ? Battle system is perfect. Puzzles were tough enough for you to rejoice after you figured them out, 10/10.

Overall ? The most enjoyable game to grace my GBA, 10/10. Perfect score! Run don?t walk to get this game.

Great then, and great now

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: June 21, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Tales of Phantasia spawned a whole series of games back in the 90's, though it never reached the kind of household name popularity like Final Fantasy or even the Mana series. That aside, Tales of Phantasia lives again for the GBA, and be glad it does, for it was great then, and it's still great now. Playing as a teenager named Cress, you are on a pretty standard RPG mission that features pretty standard RPG elements. Don't knock it for that though, considering this was originally first released back in the early 90's, and despite many of the RPG cliches, Tales of Phantasia is still fun to play. The game's battle system isn't the typical turn based style either, but instead a real time, action themed style that puts you in direct control of Cress. This, along with the incredibly lengthy quest, imaginitive dungeons, and plenty of secrets and side quests, are reason enough to pick up Tales of Phantasia. The only downsides to the game are the incredible amount of random battles, and the game's graphics really show their age. All that aside, Tales of Phantasia is a smashing, classic RPG that is worth picking up for your GBA if you missed out on it when it first came out, and it's lengthy quest alone will make RPG nuts happy.

A Definite Classic

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: February 05, 2007
Author: Amazon User

To start I would like to remind everyone reading this that a lot of companies are taking advantage of the GBA to re-release some of their older line-up. These games don't have all of the flashy graphics that newer GBA games have but more often than not make up for it in gameplay. But it gives those of us who grew up in that generation of gaming history a chance to re-live the classics in a more modern form. Besides, how many us still have an original NES that we need to blow on or jam something on top of the game itself to get it to work? I know I'm tired of messing with it...

Anyway, this game IS one of those classics, so don't expect great graphics. And the voice-acting, yes voice-acting, isn't that great. This game originally came out for the Super Famicom and never made it stateside. But you may know of the other titles in this series. Tales of Destiny (PS1), Tales of Destiny 2 (PS1), Tales of Legendia (PS2), Tales of Symphonia (GC) and Tales of the Abyss (PS2), this one being the first.

And if you're into role-playing games, than this would be a perfect fit to your collection. This game provides hours of questing, summoning, mini-quests and even cooking! While not as extravagant as Star Ocean, the cooking element adds a nice twist to the healing aspect of the game. Plus the main character Cress, can earn moves while leveling up and then in turn level up those skills simply by using them in combat. Once you have mastered some skills, you will be able to use combo skills from books that are found throughout the game.

Some of the dungeons are easy to get lost in, but for the most part it moved at a good pace. The battle sequences are side-scrolling in real-time, but you can issue commands when you want while the battle pauses, also similar to Star Ocean. The other three members of your party are computer-controlled, but the characters AI can be tweaked to your liking. Like if Claus is summoning too often or unnecessarily, you can tell him to save his magic. Oh and you can switch control to whichever character you want. There are well over 100 enemies to defeat and add to your monster list and for the item collectors you get a book that lets you know how many of items you have found within the game.

So all in all I was very pleased with this title. I love to have a good, interactive story to take with me and get into. I just ordered the newest one, Tales of the Abyss for the PS2 and can't wait to see how far this franchise has come. Oh and P.S., someone tell Square Enix to take a lesson from Namco and release Star Ocean for the GBA or DS! We're still missing that one in the States!!

Casual Gamer

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 10
Date: September 09, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I own a nintendo simply for the Zelda series. I happened to find a gameboy in my workplace that some kid left behind and decided to purchase a game for it. This game surprised me with many, many hours of entertainment. Just when I think I have it beat the game gives me another epic quest to go on. I even played it for 30 hours lying on the beach of Curacao on my honeymoon! There is some hidden adult humor in it also; the kind to fly over a kids head but make a more muture person chuckle. A massive RPG thats fun for all ages, cant go wrong with that!

A WONDERFUL MASTERPIECE!!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 9
Date: April 20, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This is a great game! You can battle monsters without the use of menus. Cool! You can equip weapons, shields, accessories,etc. that you have. Pretty good, right? You can also cook stuff that restore health and mana points(points needed for skills). This is very similar to "Tales of Symphonia", which is excellent. The gameplay is good. So is the sound. The graphic is a little no good,but it doesn't really affect the game that much.
This game is worth the money. Check it out!!!

Wonderful Port! What took so long?!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 12 / 13
Date: April 05, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Tales of Phantasia really should have been exported when it was originally released. However, releasing it for the GBA has really been worth the wait. (Thank you, Nintendo, for re-releasing so many great games from Atari-SNES for the GBA! I love you!)

Had it been released originally, I would have definetly snatched this up. Considering all the kids (now adults) I knew at the time who also played RPG's, I know that this would have been ranked as one of thier favorites.
Just to prove my point, I called the friends I could get a hold of and told them to buy this game. They're pretty enthusiastic. ^_^

Don't listen to the young'uns who can't handle anything not rendered in 3D: Tales of Phantasia may not be the most gut-ripping, jaw dropping, adrenaline pumping game around, but it makes up for it in pure fun and good old-fashioned 2D RPG goodness.
Add voice overs, nice (and cute) main character sprites and animations, decent music, good graphics (wonderful for the time it came out; aged pretty well!) and real time battles to the mix, and you start wondering why more games didn't use this formula. It really brings the story and the games itself to life.
the game itself can get a little buggy--
-occasional pops and skips in the sound in some areas at one point of the game
-pressing the A button in front of an NPC didn't do anything, once. Left, came back, worked the second time.

However, I'm a forgiving person. Porting things to the GBA isn't nearly as clean a process as people seem to think it is. It also wasn't nearly enough to stop me from playing.

5 stars, for being impossible to put down for the past 3 days.

FANTABULOUS!!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 7
Date: March 25, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This is a great game! You can battle monsters without the use of menus. Cool! You can equip weapons, shields, accessories,etc. that you have. Pretty good, right? You can also cook stuff that restore health and mana points(points needed for skills). This is very similar to "Tales of Symphonia", which is excellent. The gameplay is good. So is the sound. The graphic is a little no good,but it doesn't really affect the game that much.
This game is worth the money. Check it out at once!

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