A nice little throwback to the nostalgic days of yore, where a group of adventurers take on the big bad evil.
And what a beginning it is! From the instant Phantasia begins, you are thrown back to the glory days of the SNES, when every third title was an RPG, filled with colorful characters and elaborate plots that always seemed to center on the resurrection of some purely evil king/lord/demigod hell-bent on wiping out reality if it can’t rule the world. Enter into the scene an unlikely band of heroes who seek out elemental spirits/crystals/weapons, and you’ve got yourself a game! At the time Phantasia was released, it had to compete with Squaresoft and Enix’s onslaught of RPG titles, and so the developers created its own unique battle system to set it apart.
Instead of the standard turn-based, inactive style of combat, Phantasia featured a quasi-real-time battle sequence. You control the main character, a sword wielding teen named Cress, while the AI handles your party members. The battle field is planar (as you might expect from a GBA game), and you either run to the left or the right to face your enemy. You have standard attacks, or you can use the directional pad to unleash a secret technique. The battles seem to be fast-paced, at least until your fellow party members unleash a spell. For some reason, this causes all action to stop while it carries out a short animation sequence. When your party members start casting several spells at once, or a single spell over and over again, this can get pretty frustrating. Add to that the obligatory pause and pose at the end of a battle, and getting into random encounters really starts to bog the game down.
The story itself is pretty fantastic, especially considering the game’s age. An evil king is sent into the future, where it is brought down by a group of heroes. Time passes, and the king is resurrected, and during the ensuing battle, Cress is sent back into the past, where he must gather up elemental spirits in order to face the king with magic, which is nonexistent in his own time. Along the way, he’ll right minor wrongs and get involved with the lives of the townspeople he encounters, because that’s what all stalwart adventurers do.
This is a pretty entertaining title, and well worth adding to your collection if you’re a Tales fan!