Tales of the Tales – the story of the Tales of – #1 Tales of Phantasia series

In search of interesting, but not too well -known games, I came across those of the popular Tales series. There were enough of them for me to decide not only to tell about them, but to make a certain challenge for myself. Why not write the story of the creation of the Tales series from the first to the last, moreover, there are only 31 games and 16 of them the main license plates? Almost like a final box, only without promises every half a year to make her story the series. For those who are somehow not familiar with Tales, this is the legendary JRPG series, which has begun its path with SNES of the prefix and has survived to this day. Each part of it is usually an independent history in the new world and is in no way connected with the previous. In fact, this is the main and main competitor to Namco Fantasy, which, unlike the brainchild of Square Enix, does not even think to slide off.

Opening on PSX. Funny fact: the song is called “The Dream Will Not End”, and in Final Fantasy X there is a composition with the name “Someday the Dream Will End”.

So, our story begins with Nihon Telenet, a developer and publisher of games that has released all mediocrity for home computers since 1983. There is nothing special to tell about them, except that they were covered by various brands, the names of which will probably not say anything to anyone, but the merit of the company is primarily in the fact that they decided to create a new team of developers, which was called Wolf Team. Without thinking twice, these guys, immediately began to burn and after a few months they rolled out the game Valis, a platformer about a schoolgirl with super -resistances who fights evil. Oh, this time of schoolgirls, sailor and evil. The game was accepted warmly and was discanied by three more continuations from this studio and one with an Hentaychik from Eants. Such a success cheered the team and they demanded more independence from Telenet, which did not object and soon new games rained down, including for the SEGA consoles, the most famous of which can be called the Zan and Arcus series. And everything would go well, but Telenet decided to combine Wolf Team commands and his other subsidiary Lasersoft, which resulted in restructuring and discontent, as a result of which the head of Wolf Team Masahiro Akishino left, taking with him several people. Their fate is foggy and uninteresting, but in Wolf Team our attention can be attracted by the young programmer Youshiharu Gotanda, in his free time he wrote the Tale Phantasia novel about the events that are told from three points of view, from three different characters about the villain of Daos. He once shared his enthusiasts with his colleagues and they enthusiastically invited him to transfer his work to Snes game rails, to which the programmer agreed.

Wolf Team began to look for https://gamblingdata.net/casinos/666-casino/ an external major publisher, which was Namco, and it seems that everything is fine and you can proceed to JRPG dreams, but all the best has its own fee. Namco began to interfere in the production of the game, impose its vision, a bunch of content was cut out, including three branches of the narrative, only the one for the peasant. This, in turn, raised a wave of discontent of the developers and ended with the fact that Yoshiharu Gotanda left the company and founded Tri-Ace where all Namco dissatisfied with the policy began to flock. Unlike other outcasts, Tri-Ace did not disappear, but on the contrary, she began to intensively issue hits like Star Ocean, Valkyrie Profile and even lit up in the creation of the Final Fantasy XIII-2, but this is a story for a completely different blog. We are interested in what happened to Wolf Team and their project. And there they hastily gained new employees and finished the development of the game. The end of 1995 went to the game market, Tales of Phantasia, which became one of the revolutionary games of that time and the beginning for the famous game series.

Original cover of Tales of Phantasia. It is interesting that the horse has eight legs on the cover, although there are four of them in the game and rollers on PSX.

When Tales of Phantasia on Snes came out, it was a real boom, Crysis of that time. She was the first to use a 48-megaby cartridge and scored it with innovations. Firstly, the graphics at that time for JRPG are very nothing, there are reflections in the water in the game, and not static, but honestly (well, or almost honestly) interacting with the environment. The character can run through a puddle and it will be visible in it quite clearly and in dynamics, there are cool riddles associated with reflections and the game shines with this more than once in the plot. The shadows here are not just gray spots, they carefully repeat the outlines of the object and cover on the models of the heroes when they run under some kind of tree. It all looks pretty good, especially when I played other JRPG on SNES and you know what to expect from the console. Secondly, the game has partial voice acting, some kind of fireball, a hero with pathos shouts its name, and in addition to standard background music, to which Motoi Sakuraba and Shinji Tamura composers attached their hands, you can even hear vocals. The song was performed by Yukari Yoshida and is called “The Dream Will Never Die”, I will post it below for familiarization. With such happiness, none of the Final Fantasy on Snes could boast of and it was definitely success. He was fixed by the plot, characters and gameplay, about which we will now mention in more detail.

I could write that the whole story is based on Scandinavian mythology, as they usually say about the game, but that would be a strong exaggeration. The fact is that we will learn about the gods somewhere in the second half of the game. Not only are there only three of them there, they do not particularly affect the atmosphere, so from Scandinavian mythology we get their names, a mini -evisence of Iggdrasil and one Valkyrie with a sad horse, which appears in a pair of scenes. Fantasy begins with a vigorous Mahach, where a certain four heroes defeat his opponent and he will be transferred over time and space, falling directly into a trap arranged by four other heroes who seal him in the tomb. Unfortunately, they will not let us play for anyone here, so we humbly look and do not understand anything, the meaning of this action will come to us only to the middle of the game. In the meantime, we are introduced to the main character, his family, a friend of Chester and a boar, whom we go to hunt. During the hunt, an alarming bell from the village and our brave hunters rush back, but, alas, late. Enemies burned their native hut, killed the parents of the peasant and the younger sister of Chester. And although the tie was already a cliche during the time of SNES, nevertheless correctly selected music and a well -set video can break through a tear. In the course of the plot, in order to take revenge on the villain who did this, we will have to travel both in space and in time, this is of course not Chrono Triger, the future can only get into the plot and the future, but there is no opportunity to visit the old places and find out how to do his inhabitants of years after fifty. The story turned out to be good, it cannot be called a masterpiece, 10 out of 10, but you don’t feel any irritation. The main villain is an ambiguous guy and, understanding the reasons for his behavior, you begin to sympathize with him. True, they talk about this only at the end, and before that we will only have to suspect.

The gender of the game you do not even suspect that here is Scandinavian mythology until you meet the Valkyrie, or rather, until it says that she is Valkyrie.

But still, the cherry on the cake is the main characters, there are only five of them in the SNES version: the swordsman of Korus Elbein, Hilery Mint Addenid and archer Chester Burchalid are the heroes of the present, the magician Archie Klein and the Clarus Fest. Leicester-Heroes of the past, PSX also added Kunoiti Fujibayati Suzu, and in the PSP version-the swordsman Rondolin E. Effenberg. The main characters of the Corses and Mint are such standard knights with a sword and a HILLER not only by profession, but also by nature, while the game itself does not forget to joke about this. In the PSX version, for example, when the heroes saw a girl in trouble, they began to make fun of the Korus: “Come on a knight in shining armor, your way out”, “Show your heroic things,” and when the fight began to save the girl alone. Well, as they gave, they just threw it and stood aside while he was dealing with the problem. Clort is the oldest of the participants (he is 29 years old), loves to attach it, narcissistic and draws over the Korus, asking who he likes more, min or Archie, which introduces a 17-year-old guy with paint. But the largest lulzogeneter here is Archie, the developers were clearly inspired by Lolita Nabokov when it was created and it seems to go further. She likes to use diminutive-mesmerizing words, pester adult men with ambiguous sentences, falls into funny situations, and the scene in the cabin of the ship mildly surprised me. While the ship went from one city to another, the heroes decided to relax in the bar, as the approximate young teenagers of Kors and Mint sat at the table and just looked like Clarus, along with the newly acquainted girl, thumped in a black and with anxiety on Archie, who did the same, but alone (and she is also 17 years old). As a result, they went to sleep, Archie in the salad, if he was, and Clarce continues the fun until Archie begins to moan through the dream with the phrases “Do not touch me there”, “What a hut of the Korus”, which leads to the extreme degree of awakening the surrounding others. There are a lot of such situations in the game, and the developers do not disdain not only the established rules, but also the fourth wall. Two NPCs are sitting in one of the castles, one of them says that it is time to change background music in the castle, and the other claims that it is quite anything for herself. Another cool situation, when you activate one of the traps, the dart gets behind the hero and it falls as if death, but instead of the expected end of the game, Korus gets up a little lower than the back and gives out “Game Over my ass”. The PSX version has the opportunity to talk on the world map and discuss where to move and even there are funny moments and skirmishes.

Our main characters, whose Camo will have been overlooked more than once in the next parts of the series.

Our main characters, whose Camo will have been overlooked more than once in the next parts of the series.