Tales of Phantasia

It's kinda funny that the first game in the "Tales of" series that hit any country outside of Japan was Tales of Destiny for Playstation, seeing as how this game is just as advanced, if you ignore that high resolution cut scenes and music are present in the other games. I highly recommend downloading the fan-translated ROM of the SNES version of this game, rather than getting the dubbed version, released not too long ago on Game Boy Advanced (the dubbing is atrocious, and they replaced the intro with some crappy little jingle). This Winter, Tales of Destiny is going to be re-released on PS2 in Japan. Hopefully we'll be seeing it hit stateside, seeing as how it's just as great as Tales of Phantasia. For anyone who wants to play an RPG that actually has some life to it, that isn't the same old stale crap, I highly recommend this series.

Tales of Phantasia was made for the Super Nintendo. It was probably the first and maybe the only Snes game to have a full length j-pop song (The Dream Will Not Die, sung by Yokari Yoshida) as well as a voice cast for its> characters. Game play is a mix of side-scroller/battle screen. Mixing elements of Street Fighter (being able to do special moves with the d-pad and buttons that you learn along your quest) as well as Final Fantasy (casting spells and using items to heal yourself) some of the aspects of the game bare a resemblence to Squaresoft's "Secret of Mana."

In T.o.P. your task is to protect the Tree of Life, those who're hungry for power who abuse Mana are causing the tree to die. You get a sword that alows you to travel through time. Also some of the Elemental Spirits seem to've been borrowed from S.o.M. Shade, Sylph, Gnome, and Undine are used in the game to cast spells upon your foes. The Harpees in this game look alot like the ones in Seiken Densetsu 3 (Secret of Mana 2 that was never released in the USA) Plus the fact that the main villain, Dhaos, is trying to create a Mana Seed to save his home planet.

All so very intriguing.

There are rumors that Squaresoft was working on the game then decided to sell what they already had to Namco instead of completing it themselves. This is a great game but I doubt you're going to find it anywhere other than on the net as a emulated rom file. And those are also becoming scarce. This game is classic, the storyline and especially the end dialogue is enough to bring a tear to my eye. I guess maybe I'm just one of those wierdos who gets uber-passionate over old video games.

If you played T.o.P. and liked it I reccomend that you play Final Fantasy Adventure for the gameboy (the prequel to Secret of Mana, also refered to as Mystic Quest), then Secret of Mana, Seiken Densetsu 3, and Legend of Mana for the Playstation. In my opinion those were the best RPG games ever made. Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross were good too, but I have a soft spot for the Mana game series.