Tales of Phantasia is originally an Super Famicom JRPG (one of my favorite era/genre combinations in video games) which was ported to the Playstation and then Game Boy Advance. The story focuses on Cress and his friends, the (mostly) descendants of heroes on a quest to finish the job their ancestors were unable to finish.
This (brief) review is focused on the GBA port, which is the first official English version of the game, so it may or may not apply to all versions. I'm honestly not sure. I'll treat it like I would any other handheld port of an SNES game, which seems fair to me. By that, I mean that I'll compare it by the same standard I would one of its peers on the Super Famicom/SNES, and other ports of its peers in similar genres.
So what are the pros and cons to this one?
- Pros
- Fantastically fun battle system that makes you think not just in terms of casting times, but also spacial distance between you and your enemies, the formation of your team, and the position of your enemies (some fly while others are on the ground).
- Cheesy yet ultimately satisfying characters and stories. If you love JRPG tropes, you'll like this part of the game a lot.
- Good level of difficulty and fun battle system makes grinding rewarding rather than tiresome.
- Really cool voice work (seriously) for the time.
- Cons
- Weak soundtrack that fails to impress or be memorable at all.
- Graphically unimpressive compared to it's peers. I really don't like the chibi style of character sprites that are used in the game, and I feel like these sprites are even closer to the super deformed extreme chibi style that I really loathe.
- Lazy and boring user interface.
- Random encounter rate is far too high, and running can frequently be very challenging when you are pincered (at least half of battles start with you being pincered). This can get very frustrating when you're trying to get back to a safe spot to heal/save.
*EDIT: I am liking Tales of Phantasia more and more as I've played it a lot over the weekend. It struck me while playing it how much like a fighting game the battle system is, and how little like an RPG that it is. Once figuring that out, the combat has gotten even more fun, and I actually enjoy the high encounter rate due to how much I love the combat. Once I approached it like I would Street Fighter with Super Smash style inputs, considering startup, active, and recovery frames, combo mechanics, juggling, and zoning, I've grown quite fond of this one. I'm bumping it up to a 8.2 out of 10, thus making it good rather than above average.
My tv-based game that I'm working through on the Pi is Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster Busts Loose. Based on one of my favorite tv shows as a kid, Buster Bunny Busts Loose (BBBL) is an SNES platformer developed by Konami.
- Pros
- Decent music
- Nice variety of levels to play
- Nostalgia (won't apply to everyone)
- Cons
- Poor controls and uncertain hitboxes
- Poor graphics for the time
- Far too much memorization required to beat levels. There's frequently zero reaction time to prepare for things, so you have to know them ahead of time. A bit of repetition in games is ok, but it seems like you're either cakewalking or being forced to memorize long stretches of level just to survive. Good games generally walk closer to intuitive level design and give the player a chance to adapt to changes rather than be killed immediately.
*EDIT: After playing it a bit more over the weekend, it's not as bad as I thought. The memorization problem appears to be only on the 2nd level (train), so I'll give it a bit more credit. 6/10
-TRO
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