Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Keith Schleicher

The “Tales” series from Namco Bandai is a bit of an anomaly, almost like the Final Fantasy games.  Each game in the series has similar aspects like the story and gameplay, but each of the games has different characters and a different storyline.  What if you tried to combine those characters into a single game?  Square has done something like this, in combination with Disney characters, with the Kingdom Hearts games.  Namco Bandai attempts to mish-mash the characters from Tales of Symphonia, Tales of the Abyss, and more in Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology.

In Tales of the World, you wake up not knowing who you are.  A creature named Mormo, that looks like a flying cat, starts talking to you.  You find out that you are in the land of Terresia and that you are a Descender, a person born of the World Tree and commissioned to protect it.  Mormo also informs you that the Devourer is coming.  The Devourer is trying to take over the world by destroying the World Tree.  You two band together to protect the World Tree and start taking quests to save the world.

Tales of the World contains hand-drawn graphics for character interactions and 3D graphics for the environments and battle sequences.  The hand-drawn characters have a distinct anime feel to them, but it’s nothing different from what you see on the cover of the Tales games or during the conversations in the Tales games.  The character expressions do change depending on their emotions, but most of the time these expressions can be a bit over the top.  They also don’t have that many different faces.  The main town and world map is also drawn, but there isn’t any animation showing any kind of activity.

The environments themselves are drab and grey.  You’ll experience quite a bit of pop-up while playing.  Granted, there is a fog that helps to mask that fact, but it is a bit distracting, even though you are going into some dark areas.  There is also a lack of variety in the areas with the background textures and the creatures you fight against.  In combat a few nice particle effects get displayed, especially during the casting of spells.  The areas within the town are very small and barely fill the PSP screen, so you don’t feel a sense of scale with the size of the town.  The areas you travel to are also very sparse, with hardly any activity from NPCs.

The music in the game is catchy, even if it sounds like a lot of other RPGs.  The music intensifies when in a combat, while it is a bit more leisurely and relaxed while walking around town and talking to the different characters.  A little fanfare goes off when you complete a quest or when you finish a battle successfully.  These seem pretty standard, but they are catchy enough that they feel a little different from other RPGs.

The voice acting feels like it has been phoned in.  While you do have the grim remorse character and the bubbly and perky character, they don’t seem to have any kind of changes to the way their voices are presented.  A little more variety would have been appreciated.  The sayings used after finishing a battle sound especially corny.  Still, there is a lot of dialogue in the game, and while not everything is spoken, a good majority of the text is.

With an RPG, most of the maintenance of your party is done within menus.  This is very true of Tales of the World.  You select items with X and cancel with Circle, while the D-pad controls the cursor.  However, Tales of the World is an action RPG where you fight to win your battles.  This makes the game more interesting, and makes getting the controls right a higher priority.

Using the analog nub, you run across the screen while the D-pad lets you dash, jump, and select your target.  The X button does a normal attack, while Circle performs magic.  The Square button guards against attacks, and Triangle brings up your battle menu.  The R button changes your target on the screen.  You can use the D-pad in conjunction with X to perform different attacks, with circle to perform different guard functions, and with Circle to shortcut different spells.

The biggest problem with the game is that most of the creatures can be destroyed by guarding against them and then hitting X three times for a three-hit attack.  While you will still lose some hit points, you can be very successful using this tactic throughout the game.

When you first start Tales of the World, you actually create your character.  The only problem with this is that there aren’t that many options to choose from.  You can make slight changes to your hairstyle, skin color, hair color, and voice, but there are only about three to five options for each.

As you start out the game you find out about a group called Ad Libitum.  This group has a way to get out of the main city of Aility.  Apparently the leader of the city feels that others are trying to get in so that they can steal the power of the World Tree.  Once you come in, you can’t get out, and vice versa.  This is putting a strain on the people who live in the city since they aren’t able to get the supplies that they need.  Here is where your quest starts.  You become an errand boy.

Of course, since Ad Libitum is a secret society (that you learn about less than five minutes after you are born), they won’t trust you with just any mission.  You have to perform fetch quests and the equivalent of rat killing.  Yes, you become a well paid FedEx runner with some amazing extermination skills.  Of course, just because you find something, it doesn’t mean you can get it.  Items like rocks and potatoes need to be extracted using the correct kind of tool.  Not only that, but you have to purchase the tool, and the tool only lasts for one use.  This gets annoying quickly as it seems that every fetch quest you are on requires some sort of special tool.  You can’t use the “copper pickaxe” to gather herbs, you need the “copper sickle.”

This would be fine if the combat was any fun.  You can have a party of up to four characters, but most characters won’t join you until you get enough fame points.  To get enough fame points, you need to go solo and complete the boring fetch quests or extermination quests.  Since this is an action RPG you actually move the character around, but your character can only move in a straight line, and you can win most battles by blocking and then button mashing against the opponent.  You can only carry up to 15 units of an item, so having enough healing gels for the boss battles can be tricky, but most battles don’t take much skill or require much more than effective blocking and a three attack move.

Once you do get more people in your party, the game does get better.  You can change the strategy of your team as well as plan out a unison attack.  The attack has all party members work together in one powerful attack against the enemies.  You can even assign which attack the members of your party will use in a unison attack.  Other than this, the game isn’t much better than your standard RPG.

You do have a class to your character, but one nice thing about Tales of the World is that it does let you change the class.  It might not be something that you want to do, but it is available.

You do get to learn a lot about the characters through dialogue sessions between quests while perusing around town.  Some of these can be entertaining, while others are downright annoying.  They do add to the personality of the characters in the game though.

Tales of the World also includes its crafting system that is similar to other Tales titles.  You can cook food by taking ingredient and combining them.  You need to get the right recipe first.  You can use or to create raw materials to enhance your weapons and armor.  You can create jewelry that will enhance your clothes.  You can also create items like gels, keys, and sickles.

Tales of the World claims to have over 300 quests.  While I don’t doubt that number, when three quarters of those quests are boring fetch quests, it really detracts from the fun factor of the game.  Many of the quests don’t take very long either, with some easily accomplished in five to ten minutes.

There is an online option available in Tales of the World, but it won’t see much usage.  You can trade items you have with friends who have Tales of the World as well.  However, you can only do this in ad-hoc mode, so if you don’t have any friends close by with a PSP and a copy of the game, this feature won’t do you much good.

Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology could have been an entertaining action RPG.  Instead Tales falls victim to other traps that have caused casualties in the RPG arena.  With boring quests that really don’t make you feel like you are a part of saving the world, there isn’t any real excitement to the game.  If you are a huge fan of all of the previous Tales games, you might want to take a look at Tales of the World to see how the characters interact with each other.  However, you really aren’t going to be missing out by taking a pass on this game.

Gaming Trend Score

63

1. Graphics: 72
2. Audio: 78
3. Controls: 58
4. Gameplay: 54
5. Value/Replay: 64
6. OVERALL:63