#Tales of phantasia walkthrough snes series#

The game is really long for something from the SNES era, especially a game with action elements. The thing is, they had plenty of plot and events without the fillers like a high encounter rate and some of the fetch-questing. The fact that the game forces additional random encounters at points (there's a couple of places where you specifically need to collect random drops, and a sequence where monsters are visible and seek you out) doesn't help this issue.

#Tales of phantasia walkthrough snes series#

That makes a lot of sense from an action/rpg perspective and that's also a series where I found the system tiring after a while. Apparently the team that made this later left and went on to work on the Star Ocean series. There's too much grinding necessary and too high an encounter rate (especially in old areas where the enemies die in one hit anyway) if you don't really love the battles. I think part of my problem is that the game's style and length means it's not enough to tolerate the battle system, you need to love it. Also, the same button is used for 'attack' and 'slide away from the enemy', which means that it's actually very difficult to just beat something to death-the game will insist that some of your attacks are actually attempts to dodge. Essentially, every battle is a 2D fighter game, a la Street Fighter, only you have a relatively limited moveset (there are only two buttons and the cross-key the shoulder buttons are used to direct your allies) and the battle is constantly pausing to display your allies' spell effects. There's a general lack of tutorial, which makes it hard to guess what you're supposed to press to achieve what effect. The battle system is unusual and takes some getting used to, especially since it feels very slow and clunky. Despite the story being relatively generic, but they put a lot of time into inter-party character interaction, and the characters do get actual personalities. They also use a number of the same tropes as those games, like the multi-generational heroes and the hidden elf village. The map screen and town graphics reminded me of the SNES Lufia games. (And in the end, we discover that better communication could have averted the entire plot. Poorly-used plot-hole-filled time-travel and heavy-handed environmentalist themes abound, and pretty much all of it has been seen before and done better elsewhere. Oh, and it's fading from the world because stupid humans are draining it for 'magitech'. But it's trope-ier than that: Mana is produced by a great tree, which is dying. I think I've heard this before.in every Mana game and plenty of others.

The spirits are sustained by magic, so this is an issue for them. In the past, you discover that there's a power called 'magic', but it's disappearing. To escape his wrath when he’s freed, Cress and Mint are sent to the past. He escaped to the future and was sealed by Cress, Chester and Mint's parents.

We quickly learn that Dhaos apparently came from the far past, where a group of warriors had nearly defeated him. The first game in the Tales series of action-rpgs, Tales of Phantasia was first officially localized when it was remade for the GBA. In classic jrpg tradition, this doesn't lead to anything good. Young Cress just received a pendent from his father, a well-regarded swordsman. A dozen years ago, a group of warriors sealed the evil king Dhaos using a pendent.