Tales of Phantasia (1995)

Preliminary: After something like Suikoden, this very-good-for-SNES Look is... really paling :-X Il ove the fast walk though and it is really cute as are the water animations. Let's see how the combat holds up. I love how disproportionate you are on the world map :-p

Honestly tho the Look is impressive in some ways. These full buildings with clear signs and the way the shops are titled at top as you enter. And great music.

Interesting this definitely has the FF mindset with its menu's look and mechanics as well as the way you level up your techs. I always like an additional grind. I am a bit iffy about the battle system but it's alreayd growing on me, especially with thist ech early. Usually 2 RPGs in a row is rough but this might just fit right, especially now that I'm in the era I fully expect long games with great music and great content that will take me weeks to finish not just days. As long as they warrant putting that time in.

Well that was a very lovely sun-kissed beginning and then harsh af beginning part 2 lol. I like it. I'm in

Early Game

Yesss we went from beautiful sun-reflecting waters day to rainy depressing death everywhere night I love it. And the music to match the mood change.

I'm very iffy about the Food mechanic, but it hasn't affect me yet? I love that the game actually tells you where, say, your uncle's house is etc., actually guides you unlike the earlier JRPGs and action-adventure games.

The human sprites are quite lackluster (and strangely-lit) for its time, but the settings are great and cozy adn animations are great and the settings are very well-lit/created. This image shows all this quite well imo

Argh not generically "dungeon"-y dungeon music, and the combat is kinda getting more and more meh to me but it's decent enough. And I've been on an RPG kick with Suikoden so it's fulfilling that hook/drive.

They really did a great job with the setting sprites in this.

And yessss the hype music as we set our plan to go avenge countless people we knew's lives. Straight out of a C64 game (well until the voice came in). I love it so much.

The battle encounter rate is a bit too high for this statue puzzle mindset. Ironic that this has a better inventory management (late SNES FF style) than Suikoden had, but still. Something feels a bit amiss in these dungeons, or lacking. The puzzles are just meh and the music is dungeon-y and the sprites aren't as excellent as the outside world.

Each tiem I think this might be a 3/4 star and RPG Replay tag and move on, it hits me with another beautiful scene

Still, something feels lacking/empty in this and I tihnk it's just that I got a taste of the next gen, and this came a little too late. Which is sad because it has a nice mix of Chrono Trigger and FF6 vibes so far. And the music continues to be an absolute highlight. I hope the draw/Feel/hook gets stronger soon. I wonder how different I would view it had it been released a year sooner (or when I am returning to the RPG Replay list some day).

Yeaaaa no it's time to move on. The frequency of this HellLord battle (which despite being overtrained thanks to fast forward, I have to run from) during this simple/bland move-rock-to-rift puzzle officially pushed me over the limit. Most of the Sound and Look are great, and the Play is mostly solid and worth giving another go, but not only is it missing something, but it has irritating elements that are bogging it down.

Look: 8.5/10

Sound: 8.5/10

Play: 7.5/10 As much as I want to give this higher because they did pull off that combat quite well and there are many QoL features, the fact is a) gameplay aspects are what wound up irritating me, especially the random battle frequency juxtaposed with the boring puzzles and b) those QoL features shoudl be expected by this point (late 95).

Feel: 7.5/10 Loved the beginning. If this had been a game I rented back in the day, this would stick out for sure. Even tho I probly wouldn't have ever gotten far haha

Attachment: 7.5/10 I am very likely to return, in spite of everything. Oh me and RPGs/action-adventures/platformers.

Overall: 7.9/10 So close to a 4. It'll likely rise on future tries.

Completion: The area with the damaging haze from the Magic Realm and the HellLord battles

Playtime: 3h 30m

I've never seen a game do so little with so many resources at its disposal. This was apparently a later gen port without any expectation of being an enhanced one. It has tons of unique art assets, plus a choice of gameplay and story elements to prune from the larger console releases, and only one significant technical hurdle: make the real time combat function. Sadly, Phantasia (GBA) doesn't deliver a full bodied experience despite the advantageous circumstances.

Honestly, I'm a bit disgusted? That's not a typical feeling I get from games, but I can't really say 'disappointed' because the bar was reasonable. This is a pitiful offering.

The gravity well that drags every other element down is the combat. The software slowdown is atrocious. The animations on spells are so lengthy it impacts the game's balance: why use the right tool if the game becomes less fun?. Worst of all, what breaks the game entirely is the lack of 'block' animation on enemies, replaced by Super Armor rng. This effectively turns off the action elements, with any challenging enemy instead requiring raw, grinding math to overcome. A particularly bad grind due to low impact leveling, whereas story bosses will often unlock stores that sell equipment capable of doubling or tripling your stats.

It screams of developers afraid of making a fun, perhaps easier, but replayable game. Taking this fresh concept and fitting it back in the box of 'epic' scale console RPGs. Like playing checkers with Chess pieces or installing Borderlands.

Having not played the original or remastered titles, the pacing is whack. The first half of the roughly 60 hour experience is a tight-enough three act. Once you're past your first two bottle necks in the prologue (yes, there are two grind based bottlenecks in the first two hours of the game), it generally unkinks and gets expressive and full of character until the world trekking story resolves itself.

But then it doesn't stop, stretching on, reusing the same tropes you've seen, new characters but the same calls to action. I'm sure this is an inherited problem being a port, but I'd like to think someone genuinely wanted to play this without consciously 'settling'. It's hurt further through intense grinds (try beating the game without Pluto on Battle2/Hard) and a sudden shift toward labyrinthine dungeon design.

The redeeming element here could be the raw playtime quantity. If you were, particularly, a child in the RPG gold rush era, and you got this on a birthday, it would last you till Christmas, no matter how long that was. I respect that, I respect that this was trying to fit 10 gallons of whisky in a 5 gallon bucket, but the end result should still be worth drinking.

Phantasia easily qualifies for the 'Pain' tier of games. It's not the worst, and if it wasn't a double threat of both technical and content issues my outlook would be radically different, but I also can imagine that if there was more to scrape off the floor with this one we would have seen a second English port by now. I wrote a while back about a truly horrible game, one you should avoid even if you had a good reason to try it, Phantasia rests right on top of that level of bad. If you want an entry point to this series, just skip to a good one.

I played through this at least twice in the late 90s or early 2000s, possibly even 3 times. My rom has 2 different saves but I am not sure if the 1st file is my 1st time through the game; it does not have all optional high end stuff and the party levels range from 78 to 87.

The other save is my ultimate playthrough with everything done. However my excalibur sword vanished somehow. This greatly bugged me back then and has kept bugging for the past 20 years. Even though the sword is only slightly better than the 2nd best weapon and I in no way need it, I still want it. I could play through the game again or I could try save state hacking. I absolutely love this game; it is definitely in my top 5 SNES games of all time, rivaling Chrono Trigger for best SNES rpg. Excellent story, characters and gameplay. I find the more action oriented combat more fun than traditional turn based, and the game has a good level of challenge in the right aspects (namely challenging combat, easy to figure out where to go next and lack of highly obscure secrets).

My final stats:

Main: level 99 with Bahamut's tail axe, golden armor, blue line shield, gold helm, hyper gauntlets, gorgon amulet and mental ring. Short range skills : tiger teeth and teleport (bladestorm, dual kick, magma rift and soul wave are also maxed). Long range skills: soul edge and mecha blade (psion bolt, lionheart, phoenix, and lightning bolt are maxed). I like multi hit attacks to stunlock enemies and cheap hit and run style attacks.

Cleric: level 91 with blue crystal rod, star cloak, shield ring, star cap, cute mittens, mental ring and mana earrings. She is set up for endurance healing and buffing.

Summoner: level 88 with seventh sun (far from his most powerful weapon but it significantly boosts the run stat so maybe I used it for fleeing. I do have his namco gamer book), star cloak, shield ring, star cap, diamond ring, mystical rune. Half casting time for spamming high damage summons, though I have the AI set to conserve mana for random battles and disabled the weaker summons.

Mage: level 87 with star broom, star cloak, shield ring, mage ribbon, cute mittens, fairy ring and mystical rune. Again set up to spam nukes, with mana conservation for random battles and weak spells disabled.

Archer: level 55 with berserker bow, gaia armor, shield ring, rare gauntlet, nightmare and battle rune. I only used him when I had to.