Tales Of Phantasia Classic

I remember that I saw a preview of it in a game magazine as a kid, and it looked really cool, but ended up being a casualty of the budgetary constraints that RPG's of the time were subject to (that is, nobody wanted to spend the money to properly translate even the more popular titles, much less such a text-heavy monster as ToP). I was mildly disappointed, but then, years later, with the advent of fan translation, I finally got the chance to sit down with it. As I understand it, the more lurid bits were a bit of artistic license by the fan translators, I guess it was the style at the time.

But it really was an ambitious bit of storytelling for its time. Without spoiling too much, it is one of those "we chased the villain into a time warp and now we're stuck here" kind of stories at first, but it gets pretty convoluted by the end. And remember, this would have been right before Chrono Trigger came out, too, so time travelling in video games was kind of a new thing. Storytelling in games had not left the excuse "save the princess" plots behind for long, at that point.

If I understand correctly, the producer of ToP now works with a Square-Enix affiliated studio. I wonder if Cless and Co. will see any action in the near future?

Time traveling in video games was a new thing? The first Final Fantasy had time travel. There were other NES games with time travel and earlier SNES games than ToP. Chrono Trigger didn't invent time travel storylines in video games, it just did it better than most (including ToP), and probably was one of the first where you could travel around through time at will, but I don't think you can do that in ToP anyway, so I don't really know what you mean.

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Originally Posted by Lord Golbez

Time traveling in video games was a new thing? The first Final Fantasy had time travel. There were other NES games with time travel and earlier SNES games than ToP. Chrono Trigger didn't invent time travel storylines in video games, it just did it better than most (including ToP), and probably was one of the first where you could travel around through time at will, but I don't think you can do that in ToP anyway, so I don't really know what you mean.

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Hm...you may be right

It doesn't occur to me as much that FF1 has time travel, since it happens only at the end of the game (is it still possible to spoil FF1 30 years after the fact?), and it doesn't really affect much except for the one dungeon there at the end. But technically, yes, it has time travel.

What other games are you referring to? This almost seems like its own thread to me.

There was an NES game called Time Lord where each level you jump to a different era of time. Not a very famous game, but my brother had it and it was one of the first things that came to mind when you said time travel in video games was new. Also, Lost Vikings, which is a great puzzle platformer, had time travel, and I think it came before CT or TOP. There's an RPG called Paladin's Quest that has time travel in a small part of the plot. Turtles in Time. There's plenty more but I don't know every example offhand.

I think there may be an argument to be made regarding time travel as a gimmick in a game versus time travel being part of the overarching story of a game. FF1 could go either way but I think most other games just did it because it sounded cool. Not a lot of games put much thought into it, especially in a consequential way

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Originally Posted by TouristOperator

If I understand correctly, the producer of ToP now works with a Square-Enix affiliated studio. I wonder if Cless and Co. will see any action in the near future?

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The events around the original game's development led to the splintering of three key developers from Wolf Team to form Tri-Ace, which Enix has published for since they came about, but Bamco actually owns the rights to ToP, so Cless never shows up in any Tri-Ace material. Various characters from the game do appear in other Tales titles, though. :D

Did you happen to play the PSX remake, by chance? A fan translation of that was completed some years back as well, and it feels much better than the original release.

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Originally Posted by TouristOperator

Did you happen to play the PSX remake, by chance? A fan translation of that was completed some years back as well, and it feels much better than the original release.

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Yeah, actually I did play through it. You are not lying.

That crab tho... [frustrated face]

After seeing the advances in the PSX version I am beyond sad Cross Edition isn't getting a fan translation. I don't know what changes have been made other than the graphical update and new character, but I want it soooo bad. ; -;

I played the GBA version of Phantasia (not a fan translation, it was an official localization) and enjoyed it far more than the Final Fantasy game I was playing at the time as the combat was much more interactive and the story just felt...better. It's probably still my favorite Tales game, though I am likely heavily biased considering it's also the first one I played. I even wrote a fanfic for it, and have always wanted to cosplay Arche at some point as she's my favorite character.

I'm also just going to copy this from wikipedia because it's pretty interesting:

Tales of Phantasia was developed by members of "Wolf Team", a studio originally created by Telenet Japan. The story was based on an unpublished Japanese novel called Tale Phantasia (テイルファンタジア Teiru Fantajia), written by the game's total programmer Yoshiharu Gotanda.^[18] The world was primarily based around Norse mythology, science fiction elements were incorporated, and some names were taken from the works of Michael Moorcock and H. P. Lovecraft to accommodate fans of western fantasy fiction.^[19][20] Many changes were made to Gotanda's original story, including the title, character names, and the omission of several proposed scenarios.^[21] Due to poor experiences with their parent company, the team sought a different publisher for their title. After unsuccessfully pitching the project to Enix, they secured a publishing contract with Namco.^[22]

tri-Ace, Inc. (株式会社トライエース Kabushiki Gaisha Toraiēsu) is a Japanese video game development company formed in March 1995 by former Telenet Japan employees Yoshiharu Gotanda (programmer, current tri-Ace President), Masaki Norimoto (game designer) and Joe Asanuma (director). The name is a play on words regarding the "three aces" who formed the company. Most of tri-Ace's games have been published by Square Enix (formerly Enix). The group exclusively makes role-playing video games, and is known for giving their games action-packed battle systems and deep skill systems. This trademark style began when the founders of tri-Ace originally worked for Telenet Japan's Wolfteam, and had created Tales of Phantasia. This game, published by Namco, is a precursor to tri-Ace's own Star Ocean games in several ways; e.g., an action battle system where the player controls one character and AI controls others in the party and special battle skills that the player can assign to different buttons. Besides the Star Ocean series, they also released Valkyrie Profile in 1999. Their 2010 release of Resonance of Fate, was taken to Sega publishing.

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Originally Posted by TouristOperator

If I understand correctly, the producer of ToP now works with a Square-Enix affiliated studio. I wonder if Cless and Co. will see any action in the near future?

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So that should elaborate on the former. As for the latter a sequel, Tales of Phantasia: Narikiri Dungeon, was released for the Game Boy Color on November 10, 2000. It was the first game in the Narikiri Dungeon series. A remake of the sequel, Tales of Phantasia: Narikiri Dungeon X, was released on August 5, 2010 for the PlayStation Portable. Unfortunately they are both only available in Japan as far as I know. Though Tales of Symphoina (which is localized) is a VERY distant prequel to Tales of Phantasia, and some members of the Phantasia cast do appear in other Tales games such as Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology (also localized). Arche's route in Tales of Fandom 2 is translated on youtube as well if you want to watch that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRyp...7v9mQ17Bp420IK

Studio Istoria is what I was referencing, and it appears to be run by someone named Hideo Baba, so yeah, I was completely misguided in my assumption.

THE MORE YOU KNOW