Although it deviates from the series, Tales is a wonderful job-quest style RPG with lots to find/kill/forge/cook.
Polished look and feel, slick battle mechanic, lots of cooking, forging and questing to do, minimal tedium of running around looking for the 'right person to talk to' or the 'right monster to kill'.
The bad:
If you were hoping for another Tales sweeping epic with a grand storyline, this isn't it.
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Taken as it is, without comparing it to anything that came before, Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology is truly great. They got most of what I want to see in a fetch-quest RPG, without many of the annoyances found in other games of this sort. Rather than give you a detailed review of the game, which can be found on other sites, I'll just show my top-eight list of "stuff that bugs the crap out of me in an RPG", and then discuss it in terms whether or not Radiant Mythology has handled it.
8) No story, or a generic one
How many times have you had to play through the standard plotline of "you are an orphan, your parents were killed by some evil guy, so you set out to kill said guy and save the world at the same time"?
Or, "you awake with no memory of where you came from, but there's evil afoot, and only you can stop it"?
Unfortunately, Radiant Mythology follows suit, by offering up a pretty lame excuse for you to go hacking and slashing: The town mayor has prohibited everyone from leaving (because there is some Steven King-like beast devouring everything in sight outside town), but you discover a fighter's guild that can take quests to get stuff the people need. Ho hum. But, at least there *is* a story, populated with characters from the series. The quests are menial (find three potatoes, kill a bat, make five sandwiches), but the sheer number (around 300) and variety of them keeps things fresh. As well, you get to choose from a list of them, so you can avoid the ones that look incredibly bad if you wish.
7) No idea what to do or where to go next
Can't happen here. Radiant Mythology has provided you with a little talking sprite, who pretty much keeps you up to date on what you need to do, by re-hashing what you have to do as soon as you step into the dungeon. As well, if you need to kill a certain beast but don't know what it looks like, don't worry. The sprite-helper will pop up when the right monster is there and say something helpful like "Hey, there's that beast we're supposed to kill!"
While in town, when you need to talk to a certain person or go to a certain place to trigger a plot advance, you'll see an exclamation mark hovering over whoever or wherever you need to go to next, so no tedious remembering of names or locations. Better still, a library book in your posession contains a detailed description of the current quest. So, no more of the tedious trudging through a town, going to each and every stinking house to talk to each and every stinking person to find the exact one to advance the story....
6) My wrists are on fire from the convoluted button mapping in battle!!!
Not gonna happen here. Very simple battle mechanic, but enough variety to make it fun. Battles are real-time, and you can run around all you want, and include many combos with a two-key pattern. Simple, fun, exciting, satisfying combat. Not the tediously boring party of four, all lined up waiting for a turn. Your co-questors operate independently, with you setting up ahead of time how they will behave in battle. Some of this looks complicated at first, but it really isn't at all, once you start using it.
5) I feel like I'm walking around a set made of cardboard cutout scenery.
There is, unfortunately, a hazy fog not too far away from wherever you are looking, but what scenery is visible is detailed and crisp. You get a definite sense you are 'somewhere' when you are walking around a dungeon, as opposed to simply wandering a maze of monotonous twisty passages. The perspective is similar to that found in Fable or Morrowind, a behind-the-character perspective with a surprisingly very smooth frame rate, and minimal load times. All this serves to immerse you into the dungeon experience quite nicely.
4) Every two steps I have another random encounter!
Not here, you won't. Random encounters are blissfully gone from Tales, replaced with the much more interesting mechanic of having the beasties running around the maze with you, allowing you to avoid doing battle if you want to by simply running past them.
3) Each battle takes forever!
Not here it won't. In Tales, a typical encounter lasts 6-12 seconds. Minimal load times when switching to battle means your encounters are quick and painless, for the most part. Add in the fact that you can avoid battling most monsters as you run through the maze, and the game is incredibly fast-paced.
2) Once I'm done a quest, I have to back-track all the way out to get to town.
Oh no you don't! As soon as a quest objective is complete, Tales offers you the option to warp back to town, right to the very person who offered you the quest. No muss, no fuss, no slogging back-tracking out of a dungeon. Oh why can't all RPGs be like this????
1) All I do is kill kill kill. Isn't there anything else in this world?
Yes there is! In Tales, they included the very popular item forging, cooking mechanics. Using a wide wide variety of herbs and meats, you can create all sorts of wonderful meals and dishes to serve up at the right moment in the dungeon. Or, you can hone your skills as a blacksmith, forging new weapon upgrades and armor, using gems and stones you have mined from the dungeons. Like in real life, you will earn experience and get better at doing these things by....doing them. A welcome diversion from the sometime-tedious questing and killing.
In summary, this is a well-designed, slick RPG that moves you along quickly, without the tedious random encounters, backtracking, or hunting for the right person to talk to. Although it doesn't have the epic feel of other Tales games, it does serve up a very easy-to-swallow helping of fetch-quest dungeon crawling, with a side dish of cooking and forging to spice things up. It's sort of like Mana Tree meets Harvest Moon, but without the farming.