I don’t have much to say about Tales of Phantasia beyond what was written in this article, so… good night and good luck.
6 thoughts on “GameSpite Journal 10: Tales of Phantasia”
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I don’t have much to say about Tales of Phantasia beyond what was written in this article, so… good night and good luck.
Comments are closed.
While the Tales series has been uneven in terms of quality, I wouldn’t say that the general trend has been down. Unless you speak solely of creativity, at which point I will heartily agree.
Anyway, Tales of Symphonia and Tales of the Abyss are two of the best ones we got. Vesperia is good, if a little long, and Graces f, to this point, has been quite good (and shakes a few series staples up a bit).
The only official form we got Phantasia in is the GBA port, which starts incompetently but gets better. It still doesn’t approach the excellent PSX remake on which it is based, however.
I’ve always had some sort of interest in the Tales series because of the battle system, but Tales of Phantasia is the only one I’ve ever beaten. The series has always been pretty anime in one way or another, but the series debut was at its most restrained in that respect, the protagonists more likable and easier to relate to than the idiots and jerks of later games.
And yeah, all those voice clips and the song were pretty impressive for a Super Famicom cart. Pity said song got axed in the GBA port’s localization (along with the sound test =( ), but to be fair its GBA remix was a hate crime against eardrums.
I would go as far to say that every GBA soundtrack was hampered because the speaker quality was terrible to begin with.
Speakers had nothing to do with it. The GBA hardware lacked the built-in sound chip that made the SNES so amazing, so all audio was sampled… and since the carts were so small (ROM-size-wise) the samples were really low quality. SNES music, on the other hand, was internally generated by the hardware and augmented by samples.
Besides sound quality what else was compromised in the GBA version?
The series peaked with Symphonia, I’d say. I need a decent storyline to keep me going, and the Tales series is really lacking in that area. I do check out anything by Team Symphonia, though.
I played quite a bit of Phantasia on my GB Micro while on vacation awhile back. Couldn’t see a darn thing, with the chunky sprites and tiny screen. Still a pretty charming game.