TALES OF PHANTASIA WALKTHROUGH SNES SERIES

Armatization comes into play here – a fusion of sorts which combines your health bar and abilities with that of one of your Seraph partners. It takes hours and hours of gameplay before encounters start getting interesting, but eventually you’ll be meeting with enemies able to take your entire health bar in a single swipe. Early on combat is overly easy, amounting to you only having to press the Circle button over and over until you win. It’s strange because whereas so many Tales games I’ve played in the past have given me reasons to fear and revere the big enemies, the Lord of Calamity’s story is a bit of a wet fart which can be surmised as “He lost everything so he’s going to take everything else away.” This wouldn’t be so bad if there wasn’t genuinely a sizeable section of the game dedicated to discovering what actually made him into such a bad guy.īut of course, Tales of Zestiria has some beautiful moments too, particularly during combat. Seriously, that’s his name, about as subtle as naming him Lucifer, King of Hell. There are four “Trials” for Sorey to complete in order to make him stronger, there are pals to meet who are lifted straight from the book of anime archetypes (moody character, dipsy character, someone with a deep secret in their past, etc.) and there is a big bad guy with a big evil name to beat the crap out of – the Lord of Calamity. The story pretty much continues on this path of predictability. To continue this cliché, you’ll find that a girl Sorey becomes fond of early on is a Princess.

The main character is always mildly special for some reason, they have amnesia or something similar. Tales games have a habit of going straight to cliché openings. It’s not long before Sorey’s casual day-to-day life gets rudely interrupted and he's forced to leave his humble, peaceful village of spirits with his best friend Mikleo. Sorey was raised with them and has a high “resonance”, which basically means he can see them while other people can’t. The pretense is that you play as Sorey, a ruin fanatic who happens to live in a village of Seraphim, also referred to as Seraph, a race of human-like spirits who command elemental powers and go about the world entirely invisible to normal humans. After hours and hours of play I have to say that Zestiria is an experience which I’m still not sold on, despite the fact that I totally intend to play more and more of it. It's not the latter, I can tell you for sure, but likewise it’s hardly a JRPG masterpiece, either.

TALES OF PHANTASIA WALKTHROUGH SNES SERIES

The big question is, is Tales of Zestiria, the latest in the series and first to hit PS4, a fantastic JRPG, or just an anime-themed cash grab? Fast forward to the present day and the Tales series isn’t doing much to reinvent itself anymore, instead sticking to tried and true styles of gameplay and level design.

It really was almost like a fighting game combat system was placed in a JRPG shell and it worked marvelously.

When Tales of Phantasia debuted on the SNES, its use of voice clips and real-time action combat was unheard of, especially within the JRPG space.

Review copy provided by publisher.īy all accounts, the Tales series is possibly the most progressive and inventive among JRPGs.

Developer/Publisher: Bandai Namco Studios&tri-Crescendo/Bandai Namco Entertainment.

Tales of phantasia walkthrough snes