I have fond memories of Kartia: The Word of Fate, even though I never got around to finishing either facet of the game back in the day. Jake Alley’s glowing retrospective suggests that those warm recollections are, in fact, on the mark. So that’s nice.
What’s not-so-nice is the fact that Atlus hasn’t made the game available for purchase on PlayStation Network. That’s just gosh-darned criminal.
Somewhere in between nice and not-so-nice is Yoshitaka’s promotional art for the game, as seen above. I can’t figure that dude out. Sometimes his work is jaw-dropping. Other times it looks like he didn’t even have his eyes open. Unfortunately, Kartia’s art leans more toward the latter.
Kartia is one of my favorite SRPGs; The character development was incredibly solid as another note of what makes it so compelling. It’s nice to see a right up of this Atlus Gem; I was actually a fan of the ridiculous hair on the sprites though. I thought it added a weird charm because it’s really not something you’d ever see. But some of them were pretty ugly, I mean Ely’s design was awful.
Hopefully people will take some time to play this game!
I’m still waiting for someone to explain to me why every TRPG doesn’t have a two player mode. Seriously, what’s the excuse?
Oh, and Kartia is also the only game I know of which tried to model actual character sprites off Amano’s art as accurately as possible. The results were… kinda weird.
One of the few games plugged endlessly by Goog on RPGamer back in the day. I can safely say if anyone can get their hands on this game then they’d better do so. Kartia is an absolutely great game, and could definitely stand to get a little more attention.
At the time of its release, I was a 12-year-old coming fresh off of Saga Frontier and Azure Dreams (both released earlier that year) and I couldn’t afford my own copy of Kartia. Instead I was pinching my pennies for the hard-hitters that were coming out in the following months (Parasite Eve, Tales of Destiny, Xenogears, Musashi) and I never got around to Kartia until 2002 or so.
I wish the article were a bit longer! After all, when this came out the TRPG was a rising star, what with this game following Vandal Hearts and FFT. Anyway, nice write-up!
Huh, I somehow never came across a description of this games unusual magic system before. It sounds pretty darn awesome.
I could never get into this one too much, something about the art kinda threw me. I did like the way the systems worked though!