Hello and welcome back to my wee slice of heaven where I can talk about my favourite genre of games, JRPGs. In the run up to the release of Tales of Xillia, on August 9th, I’ve dedicated these blogs to the “Tales of” series. As per my last one where I splurged about my favourite game of all time Tales of Symphonia, I promised that I would start where it all began. Enter Tales of Phantasia.
Our story begins in a quiet village of Toltus, where two friends, Cress and Chester decide to go on a hunting trip in the nearby forest. Not long after they enter, the village bell rings indicating trouble of some sort. When our young heroes return to the village, they find it in ruins and there are corpses everywhere.
Meet the original heroes of time… before Link does his journey in The Legend of Zelda, Ocarina of Time!
As a result of this, Cress hurries away to his Uncle’s home, realising that the pillagers were after his pendant, leaving Chester to bury the dead.
What’s so special about his pendant? Well, this pendant is used to seal away the Evil Demon King Dhaos, a very powerful being, who has the ability to travel through time.
As a result of this, Cress, Chester and Mint must travel through time and defeat Dhaos with the help of Claus, a human with the ability to form pacts with summoning spirits and Arche (my favourite character in this game) a half-elf and many others. Meet the original heroes of time… before Link does his journey in The Legend of Zelda, Ocarina of Time!
It has been suggested that there is a link between both Tales of Phantasia and Tales of Symphonia. The reasoning for this is that Suzu Fujibayashi, a playable character in the Gameboy Advance version has the same last name as the Ninja-Summoner, Sheena Fujibayashi in Symphonia. One of Sheena’s costume titles in the game enables her to wear the garb of the Ninja Village chief, which looks remarkably similar to Suzu’s garment.
In the climax of the final battle, Dhaos beseeches to his homeworld of Derris-Kharlan, to give him additional power, which the planet gives him, this in turn transforms him to give him the look of an Angel of the Church of Martel, the Goddess and Spirt of the Mana tree in both games.
Derris-Kharlan is also the mentioned in both games… coincidence? Lots of them!
Anyway enough of the story! Let’s move onto the battles! It takes a while to get used to them because they are only in two dimensions, and for a large portion of the game you are stuck on Semi-Auto Mode, until you find a Technical Ring, which enables Manual Mode.
Characters can move left or right, jump, defend, use artes and attack. The only exception to this rule is Arche. She flys about on a broom, casting all manner of spells at the beasties that think that they can screw you over. If you plan on having a go at this game, and you’ve had a go at the other games… take plenty of Orange Gels with you! Your TP doesn’t recover when you attack an enemy, I learnt that the hard way and died. A lot. At the first boss. Ok I sucked alright? I’m slaughtering everything now, so it’s all good!
The story in itself requires not one, not two but three jumps through time in order to complete the game, but as per usual, there is so much more to this game than the main story. There are titles to get, spells to find, collectors and enemy books to complete. All in all if you’re looking to aim for 100% in this game, you’re looking at at least 80 hours.
If you don’t want to dedicate 80 hours of hard work and a whole lot of fun to this game, watch the OVA, it’s only 4 episodes long and gives you a brief overview of the game.
In other Tales news, Hideo Baba, the head honcho of the series has confirmed a remake of Tales of Symphonia and Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the new World scheduled for early 2014 release, on the PS3. Roll on 2014! I can’t wait to get my mits on that! Take a look at the video:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgMBLBLzJXo[/youtube]
Join me next time as I talk about Tales of Vesperia.
…to be continued…
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