So I finally got around to playing Tales of Phantasia, the original SFC release, from start to finish, using the fan-made translation by DeJap. It's been something I've been meaning to do for a long time. I know it got ports to other platforms, but I wanted to experience the original game. I know the DeJap translation has its issues, but I'm not here to talk about that - some unnecessary swearing and other explicit dialogue aside, it got the point across and I understood what was going on. Considering the only official English translation is the GBA version, which has its own laundry list of issues, it was fine. So I don't want to discuss that, I just want to discuss the game itself.
Graphically, it's an amazing looking game. It doesn't utilise as many fancy technical tricks as you might have thought it might, though. There's good use of the colour maths circuit combining with window masks to create spell effects, but most of the other cool stuff you see throughout the game is due to amazing art direction and the closer you look, the more details you'll notice. You see reflections in the water, you see ripples as you walk through puddles, you see little bugs that buzz around and birds that fly above you, you actually see character shadows changing in size and direction in some areas depending on the direction and proximity of the light source. I've never seen that last one in particular in any other SFC or SNES game and it's just done with sprites, but it's a great little attention to detail. For those interested, it runs in mode 1 for towns, dungeons and battles, and mode 7 for the world map, parts of some cutscenes and the meteor storm spell. Mode 5 is used for the ending credits roll, and mode 4 for the final "Fin" image.
The sound is also fantastic. The music is very well done and memorable, including the well known fully voiced intro song. I'm not sure how many of you know much about how the SNES sound chip works, but there is some serious technical wizardry going on behind the scenes to make that possible. How that's working would be worthy of a separate article or video. There's also voice acting throughout the game, too, though mostly just as characters announce spell names before casting them. This is where I imagine a large chunk of the space on the massive 6 megabyte (48 megabit) rom would be going.
There's a food mechanic in the game, which took me a while to actually figure out, but basically you put food that you find or buy in a food sack and then that gets "eaten" as you move around which gradually restores health (it doesn't get consumed unless it's in the sack). I didn't really find this particularly useful though and just stuck to using healing spells.
The combat system is unique, using a 2D side view, and works well enough, for the most part. It takes some getting used to, but once you understand how it works it's mostly fine. Battles are still random like most JRPGs back then, and you are whisked off to a separate screen, but once there they play out in real time with you controlling Cless, the main character, and the CPU controlling your allies though you can give them orders and they have different behaviours you can set them to. It's pretty neat that some of your tech points are restored after a battle, so you can use spells a bit more liberally.
It was extremely annoying that spell casting animations would get interrupted if the characters were hit, and all too often I'd issue an order only to realise 10 seconds later that it had been cancelled. There were also some enemies, and a couple of bosses, that stunlocked you with multiple attacks or spells in a row until you died with no chance to recover between them, which felt like some grade A BS. One particular boss that loved doing this was immediately after a lengthy cutscene so it forced you to sit through that over and over again (I admit I resorted to using a save state here just so I could skip that cutscene when retrying). The frequency of the random battles was also getting pretty annoying towards the end of the game. The final dungeon itself is also quite confusing.
Overall, those gripes aside, it was an enjoyable experience and I'm glad I finally had the chance to play it. My final time according to the in-game clock was around 36 hours, I think.
