 This series has spanned over 20 years and is still going strong today, but it all started way back in 1995 with Tales of Fantasia, made for the Super Famicom by Wolf Team, who then became Namco Tale Studios before merging with Bandai Namco Studios. Yep, that's right. No Squaresoft or Enix here. But this game still went a long way in shaping how a JRPG could look, sound, and play. The Super Famicom Edition was never localized and the game never officially made it to North America until the Game Boy Advance remake in 2006, but the original Tales title has remained hugely popular in Japan over the years where it's received all sorts of remakes for PlayStation, PSP, and iOS. The game even got a four-part anime series and a supporting manga. But for this video, we're just talking about regular old Tales of Fantasia for Super Famicom using the fan-made English translation. So what is it about this game that makes it stand out? Well, considering it's a role-playing game, this combat system here looks pretty weird right off the bat with the hex going on here. It's random battles as you might expect, but they take place on a 2D plane from a side vantage point, and the action is all in real time. The dev team called it the Linear Motion Battle System, and despite having up to four party members, you only control the main character, class Alvane. You press Y to select a target, and you press A to attack with your sword, but you can also hold up and press A for a jab that's useful to keep enemies at a distance. And you press B to access the technique attacks, which are governed by tech points, and most of which are learned just by leveling. You can also buy them at certain points in the game, or learn them from certain characters you meet. You can equip four of these at a time, two short range and two long range, and they work the same way as the melee attack where pressing B alone does one attack, and B while holding up does another attack, with longer short range of course depending on your distance from the enemy. As you can tell, Kles is a melee fighter, so his best techniques are sword attacks, but he is capable of learning buffs and stuff that can recover HP among other things. What's really cool is that once Kles reaches a certain level, he can learn combinations. For example, you can combine Bladestorm, which is a flurry of sword attacks, with a lightning bolt, a commonly used long range attack that does a bunch of damage. To push this mechanic further, you can also buy the combo command, albeit for a ton of money, which allows Kles to use street fighter style commands to use any tech in the game, including combinations. You can go nuts with this feature, and it's really cool, and it definitely goes a long way towards setting this game apart. Although I have to say, some of the more advanced combos are freaking impossible to pull off consistently. Of course there's the other characters in your party too, and they're just kinda, you know, along for the ride in terms of combat anyway. There's Mint who uses healing magic, Clarth who summons spirits, and Arch who uses attack magic. Occasionally, there's also Chester, an archer, but for the most part, your best party is a melee character surrounded by three AI-controlled magicians. And yes, the first thing you gotta do when you get a new party member is head to the menu screen and make adjustments, just to make sure they don't blow all their tech points in a meaningless fight. It kinda sucks that you're ultimately at the mercy of the computer AI here, but the game does offer a modicum of control to help mitigate some of the frustration. Not enough control for my liking personally, but still, you can shut certain spells off at least. Anyway, those other three characters level up and learn spells just as any other RPG characters do, so there's not a lot of new stuff there. Most of the innovation is reserved for Kles. One thing I find odd when playing Tales of Fantasia is the flow of each battle, it just feels uneven. The action can get so fast and furious, but then stop out of nowhere as someone in your party casts a spell. And believe me, you can end up using a ton of tech points without even meaning to. The camera is also odd, since your characters are kinda awkwardly anchored to their spots on the battlefield. You'll do a long range attack with Kles, and then he just kinda shuffles his way back to where he was. There's random battles here too, as I mentioned, and that's fine, since there's items that can limit how often you fight. But when you do decide to fight, these regular battles can really drag, it gets kind of annoying. Don't get me wrong, I do really admire how different this battle system is compared to other 16-bit JRPGs, I just wish the random battles were structured to be a bit more streamlined. Okay, so why all the fighting, what's going on here? Well, you start out right away in a massive battle against a powerful sorcerer king named King Douse, where he takes the opportunity to travel in time several years into the future to escape, only to immediately be met by the direct descendants of the people he was just fighting. Whoops, and he's sealed away with two magic pendants. And of course, years go by, and someone evil is out to find the pendants and bring Douse back for nefarious purposes. There's quite a bit more time travel here, bouncing back to 100 years in the past, to 50 years in the future, but the story is reasonably well-told and keeps things focused. What makes Tales of Vantage a standout in the story department is the English translation, and all the dialogue here, it's pretty crude, and reads like something I may have enjoyed when I was 12, but now, I can't help but roll my eyes at some of the attempts at humor. Yeah, I know that's probably an unpopular opinion, and I risk coming across as snooty, but humor, of course, is entirely subjective, and I just didn't find a lot of the humor here all that funny, but maybe you might, so don't let that stop you. What I do appreciate about the dialogue is that it does a great job creating such distinct personalities, so that's well done, and the overall story is pretty memorable, all told. I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about the graphics and music here, right away we're given spoken dialogue at the title screen. And a song complete with vocals? Wow, are you freaking kidding me? The music throughout the entire game is really impressive. It's one of those soundtracks that's worth listening to, just on its own even if you're not playing the game, and check out the voice samples used with each character's spell. The visuals are also really impressive. This is one of the five or six best looking games on the Super Nintendo period. Of course, it helps that this game is 48 megabits, which was gigantic at the time, but the dev team did a tremendous job making great use of all that extra space. Every town and dungeon looks unique, and I especially love all the subtle touches here and there like the reflections in the water. This is one of those games where the closer you look, the more you'll notice. So yeah, the Super Nintendo edition of Tales of Fantasia has some hugely redeeming qualities that make this well worth playing today. I can't speak for the Game Boy Advance PlayStation or later versions of the game, I'm just speaking for how this game compares to its peers at the time, like Seiken Densetsu 3, Front Mission Gun Hazard, Bahamut Lagoon, that sort of stuff. And it does compare favorably. It's a beautiful looking game with a great soundtrack, but I will say where Tales of Fantasia falls a bit short is in the pacing of the combat. The game is extremely grind heavy, and that's fine since there's items that help prevent random battles, but still when you are stuck on those battles, they tend to drag and drag and drag. And also like I said, the dialogue is kind of crude and silly and not for everyone. So yeah, Tales of Fantasia's strengths are obvious, but just be aware of those two aspects because they could be deal breakers for you, but other than that, this is well worth playing. And I wanna thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.