Collection essentials #274: Tales of Phantasia (SNES)

Here we have the birth of a popular JRPG series known as “Tales of”, one that I’m quite fond of and that I’ll be talking about from time to time in this series. The first game was developed by a team at a company called Telenet Japan. They secured revered arcade developer Namco (famous for Pac-Man among other things) as a publisher, and Namco wound up having some input on the final product as well. Years down the road Namco would become majority shareholder of the Tales development team and therefore the series is credited as their own even though in a way they didn’t originally come up with it. (All that corporate history is pretty complicated and I did my best to present a simplified summary for this little post)

Anyways, while Tales of Phantasia is a JRPG much like Final Fantasy or Dragon Warrior with the same story-driven structure and many similar mechanics, it immediately stands out from its peers in the genre in a big way: instead of turn-based battles, fights in Tales of Phantasia are live action on a 2D plane. Battles are initiated much like in those other RPGs, featuring “random battles” when outside of towns that have a chance to trigger out of the blue when taking a step. But when you’re whisked away to the battle screen, you need to actively run around and strike your foes in real time rather than select commands from a menu. It’s a refreshing twist. The game features “party members” much like other RPGs, as your main character has friends with various abilities who join in on the adventure and fight alongside them. Since controlling four characters in real time at once would be silly, you only actually control the main character, but you can manage their AI in a menu screen to dictate how they behave in battle. 

The main character of the game is a teenage boy named Cress (or “Cless” depending on what translation you’re playing) who goes off hunting with his friend Chester, and then upon returning to their small village, they find the entire place destroyed and many of the people killed. Also at the beginning of the game we are shown a scene of an evil sorcerer named Dhaos who is fighting a group of heroes and gets magically sealed away. As Cress travels looking for help, he makes friends along the way, and to no surprise he winds up clashing with the evil Dhaos and his minions. The game features a sort of medieval high fantasy setting with influence from Norse mythology.

Tales games are known for having a colorful cast of characters with a lot of fun dialogue between them. There’s some of that here, particular with the spunky teenage half-elf girl on a flying broom named Arche, but I’d say later games in the series deliver much more in this area.

This is one of the largest games in the entire SNES library in terms of the amount of data on the cartridge. Part of this is the use of actual voice acting. When you turn on the cartridge, you’re immediately greeted with a line of spoken dialogue, followed by an intro scene that plays music with an actual vocalist. When you start a new game you get a scene with actual voices, and the characters throughout the game voice lines during and at the end of battle as well. All the voices are a bit muffled to reduce the file size so it could all fit on the cartridge. Voices in video games weren’t anything new, but this was one of the first RPGs to utilize them in this way.

The game only released in Japan. This was likely due to the fact that console RPGs were still quite a niche genre in the early-to-mid ‘90s, as well as the game releasing rather late in the SNES lifespan. This was also one of the earliest RPGs to receive a fan translation patch, in the early 2000s. The translation was controversial, as the translator took some liberties with the dialogue, and one scene in particular was made very inappropriate with some words that I’m not going to quote. 

Tales of Phantasia has been remade multiple times on other systems. I actually haven’t ever played through this original SNES version because the remakes are better, though they are different in some ways so there is merit to checking out the original release. I actually didn’t even own this version until this year, when I realized “Yeah I really probably should have this first release in a series I’m a fan of for this favorite console of mine”. A very significant release that I’m declaring an essential.