Tales of Phantasia Review

In our head all games still have 2D backgrounds.

Still, marvellously you could be completely oblivious to all this history, significance and nostalgia and still have a good time with Tales of Phantasia. Let's start with the positive as it always makes us chirpy when Namco and Nintendo go out on a date. The battle system we're all so enjoying in the PSP's Tales of Eternia at the moment was birthed here. You take direct control of protagonist Cress, directing his various strikes using the attack button in combination with the d-pad. His skill set obviously balloons as the game progresses until there is a pleasing level of freedom in choosing your approach to battles.

It's then possible to chain special moves off of regular strikes to create your own combos while your companion CPU-controlled characters support you with magic and cuteness. The animations, predictably for a 1995 SNES game, are beautiful and will make you feel young and a bit innocent again. However, long term, while the action-orientated twitch fighting should go some way to dull the inevitable irritation of the magnanimous battling - on which the game relies just a little too heavily to flesh out the hours of play - it doesn't. Almost unavoidably over a game twenty hours in length, you eventually settle in to hammering through the battles, dispensing with thinking strategy in favour of simply getting through each encounter as quickly as possible, turning what was initially a sweet invention into sour grind. Likewise, there are problems with the system, such as pauses before your comrades perform spells, stuttering slow and responsive controls and over-long victory poses that soon serve to frustrate as much as they ever inspired.

You'd think beating the master of hell would yield more than 12 exp and a fiver.

The plot is short and sweet and, in its intelligible brevity, beats its grandchild Eternia's overblown complexities hands down. It's also pleasingly open, allowing numerous sub-quests to be undertaken at once and exploration of pretty much anywhere you feel the inclination to visit. Perhaps it's because we're used to developer hand-holding these days but the lack of any quick menu reference of current quest objectives can leave you overwhelmed and lost - unsure of quite where you're meant to be headed, what you're meant to be collecting or to whom you need to be speaking at any point. You could always pay close attention during conversations and jot down any key place names on a scrap of paper to stay on top of things as, arguably, true freedom like this comes with some responsibility. But really, we're making excuses here for a design omission.

Indeed, under the surface there are many such oversights that show this game's true age. Many of the problems surround interface issues - elements of the series that have been subsequently ironed out by Namco, but which are recreated here in their full original messiness. Key information, such as how much money you currently have, is buried under confusingly inaccessible menus. Likewise, the translation, considering it took so long to get here, is rough around the edges lacking much of the sparkle and flair that the unofficial fan efforts display. Predictably it panders to a younger audience losing much of the salacious cheekiness of the original Japanese although such cuts in original content are balanced by new additions (new quests and the sizeable cooking section). In transposition from SNES to GBA the audio of the game suffers too with tinny dialogue, quiet effects and badly reproduced music.