phantasiablog

I’ve found myself playing another Tales of game, this time the Tales of  Phantasia (ToP) remake (from SFC, the first Tales game) on the PSX. I don’t know, I guess you could call me a Tales fan.  I’ve played some of Phantasia (SFC) and beaten Symphonia, Eternia (Destiny 2 US) and Abyss.  Whenever I play these games, I question myself and my enjoyment of the game, “what is it that is making me come back to play more, exactly?” Most of the time it feels like I’m in a confused state of addiction when I’m trying to discern this.  Is it the reward systems? The music, graphics, story or the characters?  Well, I have some ideas as to why I play the games by now.

Have sunk in about 10 hours into Phantasia.  There is a dungeon called the Lone Cave where miasma is fucking up the valley and pissing off the wind spirit, Sylph.  In this dungeon the miasma is like a poison effect on your party, there are also enemies that inflict poison in this area.  Playing through this part I recall why I enjoy playing RPGs.  I’m trudging through, dragging boulders over these miasma-chemical filled holes and my party continues to take plenty of damage from the miasma, poison and the battles (I have the hard rank turned on).  Healing after every battle, cooking food to heal up and nearing the end of the dungeon, I run out of HP and TP (MP) restoration items.   I enjoy progressing just by barely hanging on. I want to see my party members fall mid-battle due to poison, that would be dandy.

But I wonder if I can enjoy this ‘hanging on’ feeling at every part of the game, maybe if I play hastily and recklessly if an area has easier enemies than others. Or is it that I should pick the right challenges, the right enemies to fight, when the design of the game shows me what strategy I can forge to progress tooth and nail.  If I feel unchallenged, the game becomes a chore and I start chugging holy bottles so I have less encounters.  “Fuck this, these enemies are annoying to fight and don’t give good enough EXP.”  Ultimately, I just want to see what the game has to offer.  I think what intrigues me about these kinds of games is the discovery of methods for progressing efficiently. With the Tales of games, there’s always some redeeming quality I find in them, that will average out into a good experience.

With ToP PSX, I rather enjoy the sprited artwork/animation and character and enemy designs.  The game has a colorful and genuine aesthetic that I like.  Has a kind of anime feel to it.  The battle system is OKAY, it was adopted after Tales of Destiny’s system, so it does not use the first clunky system.  It is functional but pretty simple.  Battle consists of keeping enemies at bay with the fighter, blocking and queueing up spells (or setting up a shortcut).  Some strategy comes into play with what skills you want the fighter (Cless) to use.  But there isn’t a whole lot to think about.  It is still satisfying, I find.

Anyway.  I just formed a pact with Efreet and have to form pacts with the other 3 spirits before I can head back into Morlia cave. I turned off hard rank in there because the difference is night and day in some parts of the games, but comfortably more challenging in others.  The fire demons can cast explosion but dispensing of them was easy enough.  Efreet was a push over, but he did get one casting of Explosion off that nearly wiped out my party.

I recall playing the game on the SFC so many years ago, it had an epic feel to the game that rivaled FF3 and Chrono Trigger because I had surpassed one of the game’s climaxes. … Are these pseudo review posts any good?  lol.   Grats if you read all this.

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