-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Game Title: Tales of Phantasia
Platform: Ipad
Developer: Namco Bandai Games
Publisher: Namco Bandai Games
Genre: Role Playing
Age Rating: N/A
Release Date: 24th September 2013 (Japan), 23rd January 2014 (North America)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Game Score: 2.5/10
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Summery:
On the IPad, Tales of Phantasia becomes a tale on how Namco successfully destroys an old school RPG classic.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Namco's Tales of Phantasia has had it's fare share of remakes on the PlayStation, Gameboy Advance and the PlayStation Portable. This first Tales of game originally came out on the Super Nintendo in Japan whilst the platform was near it's final hours. While the only way to play the Super Nintendo and PlayStation versions was by Emulators with an English Translation patch. The Game Boy Advance version although flawed was the only chance that many western games would be able to experience the first chapter of the Tales Saga. Bandai Namco now takes Tales of Phantasia by rehashing the PSP Full Voice Edition release with the use Touch Screen controls for the Ipad devices. The ending result is a total disaster to all english speaking gamers who just wanted to properly experience the first game in this beloved RPG series.
Let's begin with what made Tales of Phantasia a fantastic game back in 1995. For those who never played it, Tales of Phantasia tells the story of young swordsman Cress Albane who one day spots a mysterious spirit inside of a withered tree and things turn bad for our hero once his village is destroyed and his stolen gem awakens an evil lord named Dhaos who aims to inflict terror upon mankind. Cress and his other companion travel through time and space to be able to undo the evils of men and end Dhaos reign. For 1995 Tales of Phantasia was epic for it's time showing conflicts between the evils of people and their selfish ambitions can do and the games other characters like Chester, Mint, Arche, Claus and the young ninja girl Suzu are enjoyable to provide humour at some stages of the game. This version of the game at least improves on the laughable translation that the GBA version was noted for making it somewhat closer to the Japanese original, plus you won't get some of liberates with the dialogue on the boat scene.
With the great story and characters out of the way it's time to discuss the complete number of issues that you'll experience with this version of Tales of Phantasia but first the basic stuff. Tales of Phantasia throws in segments where you either explore dungeons, fight monsters and go to towns to rest up and heal as well purchase equipment for your next quest, you'll also sidequests that can be found by talking to NPC's. Everything that is accounted for in the PlayStation and GameBoy Advance releases of the game are all present here. If you all want full coverage on the gameplay of Tales of Phantasia then you should check out my reviews on the SNES, PSOne and GBA versions.
Exploring each of the towns and dungeons is decent but however controlling your character around becomes a chore to handle. Like I said the game is entirely controlled using the Touch Screen so you control your character's movement by dragging your finger on the screen. Handling your movement is an issue because your character runs to fast to get any precision making it difficult to get used to. It becomes a real pain where you need to move blocks because it's automatic when you get close to one since there is no action button. You won't just have frustrations with character movement during exploration or solving puzzles but during the Mech Boy Racing Minigame which becomes nearly impossible to beat with this control set up. You'll either be hitting walls quite often or entering doors when you don't even want to or accidentally moving objects when they're placed correctly.
The touch controls fairs even worse during the random encounters and let me tell you, they did nothing about the battle rates and they can be just as annoying when battles interrupt you during a puzzle. To be able to do attacks you Touch certain parts of the screen to even do normal slashes, thrusts or perform Arte techniques. Not only is it frustrating to get used to but you also have to deal with your character having to return to his position after attacking, sure you could drag your finger to get him to attack again or do other things like reversing party formation or targeting other enemies on the screen but though it doesn't help much. This is where playing the game with an actual controller would be helpful but it's not to be, it's games like this where the game designers regret ever taking a action game (or an Action RPG in this case) and then destroying it with imprecise touch controls. It's why you'd best play the other versions of the game with an actual controller instead.
If you fought the controls could make this game terrible then how about increasing the difficulty to make the later fights play in between Hard and Mania Modes but there's no option to change the difficulty at anytime which is a serious issue for first time players. Twisting the back stabbing mess and I'm going to let this sink this into your brains is that Tales of Phantasia on the iOS is a Free to download game and the game uses in-app purchases like Miracle Orbs which bring your party back to life whenever they die in battle or EXP boosting items to speed up the grinding process. So much wrong went into this design choice but however you can try and ignore the app purchases cause at least the stable recovery and weapon shops at least use Gald earned in battles even if though the prices have increased, however the increased difficulty and the terrible controls will force players to relay on in-app purchases to be able to get any progress. Miracle Orbs costs about $ 1.99 which in UK funds that would be £ 1.49 while Lamp Orbs and EXP boosting items cost 99 cents while in UK funds that's 49p each.
The biggest offence with this port of Tales of Phantasia is that it requires that you be online at all times to even play, it's an extremely dimwitted design choice when you consider that Tales of Phantasia and future instalments in the series are usually Single Player and shouldn't be forced to be on servers to even function. Furthermore there's only one Save Slot that you can use and I'm sure that's bound to upset other players who want to use multiple files and get this, all Save Points in the game have been removed. That's another awful design choice because the majority of the Save Points are located near bosses or major events so if you get a Game Over you'll be forced to restart from which you last manually saved and I do mean manually saved because the game randomly auto saves temporally if you wish to return any time and it becomes deleted after use. That forces to redo segments that they have played through and because of the outrageous design choices, increased difficulty and horrible gameplay controls makes Tales of Phantasia almost unplayable on the IPad.
The only thing positive about the game is the presentation which is based on the PSP Full Voice Edition. All events in the game are actually voiced but only using the Japanese Audio most of the voices subtitled aside from battles. The graphics on the environments are similar to the PSP counterpart with nicely drawn battle backgrounds and redrawn sprites ripped off from it, however it's showing it's age with some pixelation on the Ipad's resolution. You will have to deal with some game crashes as if the game wasn't polished enough for it's release but I think some of the recent patches fixed the issue. What I seriously hate is that they removed the skit sequences for it's release which are small sequences where characters chat among each other about either events or idol conversions that relate to other characters in the party, it honestly doesn't feel like a Tales of game without one. Another terrible choice was to replace the opening theme tune with an uninspiring track which leaves only disappointment. Speaking of the opening, the quality on that is a bit awful looking on the Ipad. If this was a English released game in 1998 for the PSOne then that's understandable, however this is 2014 where Tales of Xillia's English release had the opening theme tune untouched alongside other Japanese video games that follow this rule by other companies and it's inexcusable for Bandai Namco to have removed the skits and changed the opening music.
As I stand for this game, Tales of Phantasia is my kind of J-RPG that I enjoy playing through for it's great characters and story, a battle system that make the game feel more like an action game with numerous sidequests and character storylines made this and other games in the series one of the strongest kinds of games in the genre. It's such a sad fate for Tales of Phantasia to have been tarnished on Ipad devices much like other RPG's like Square Enix's Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest and Chrono Trigger games or too any video game franchise that ended up on those things. Thankfully for European gamers such as myself we do not need to suffer through this mess of a port and to anyone that wants to experience the first Tale in the franchise should either play the English SNES reproduction which can be found in small quantities or the GBA version cause even that's a good game if you put aside the English Translation on it. This version is more of a Tale of how Bandai Namco successfully destroys a old school RPG classic. Any of the Japanese and English GBA releases are far better then this broken mess of a port. We should be thankful of the company as they know that this game is awful and they planning to remove the game from the App Store in America and shutting down it's servers just like they already did in Japan. Hopefully in the future Bandai Namco will release Tales of Phantasia on either XBox Live Arcade for the XBox 360 or XBox One, PlayStation Network for either the PS3 and PS4 or the Nintendo Eshop for Nintendo 3DS and the Nintendo Wii U instead. That way gamers (not to mention gamers in the West) would finally be able to see what the original Tale that started it all is like.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Good Points:
---------------------
1. It's Tales of Phantasia and it's for free....for the most part and it does feature a somewhat better translation
The Bad Points:
---------------------
1. Very Imprecise controls and it's very frustrating to handle
2. Use of micro transactions is ridiculous and the removing of some Save Points makes progressing nearly impossible
3. No Opening song or Skits unlike in the Japanese Versions
4. Frequent Game Crashes
5. It requires the Ipad Tablet to always be online in order to play it
6. They should have just ported the PSOne or PSP versions for PlayStation Network instead
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reviewed by: Anthony Hayball (AQWBlaZer91)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------