This was a BIG game, particularly for the platform I played it on. This and Star Ocean share a lot alike, their menus and character interactions, and the fact that their Famicom sizes were the largest for the platform ever. Tales of Phantasia is quite debatable on whether or not it is the most famous Tales game. For one, I've seen quite a bit about other games, especially Symphonia, so Phantasia may not be all that popular. On the other hand, this game was the most remade out of all of them, with a GBA port and an iOS port, both of which aren't very well received at all. The original one on Super Famicom is honestly where it's at if you want the best experience.
I was quite pleased with what this game offered, but not completely excited. Lots of menus, lots of combat opportunities, although the random encounter rate is rather annoying for this game. A few unique battles and navigation moments, the time travel aspect, and quite a few nasty sidequests which thankfully are sidequests, oh yes, one of them just HAD to be an arena. The game's main combat system is pretty difficult to get the hang of as it is semi-active time. Making things worse is you only have two characters who are fighters in the sense, and one of them is an archer. And then there's the squishy wizards that make up the rest of the party. Actually, the problem here is that Cless is the only really controllable character, and it's pretty easy to just make him do the stuff in an effort to win battles quickly and forget about your other characters who are there to help sometimes. The battle menu serves as a slight pause to the action, and I abused the hell out of it here and when I played Tales of Destiny. Many battles end up pretty tough, and you don't want to get Cless KOed as he's the one you control throughout. TP is used for both magic and Cless's abilities, and this game thankfully regenerates them after battles, which I think is excellent considering how often abilities are used.
So plotwise, the character interactions take most of the precedence. This game does the destroyed hometown gimmick a lot better than most. Well for comparison, Breath of Fire 1 has Ryu's hometown ravaged, but no one there really dies due to Sara's magic. In Tales of Phantasia, both Cless and Chester when returning from their hunting trip come back to see everyone pretty much dead, including Cless's parents, Chester's little sister, and if I remember this one couple who were gonna get married. It's one of the grimmest things to see here. Not only that, but we see Mint later on and naturally her mother's dead too. The circumstances for this were dire, especially due to Uncle Olson selling Cless out, and how much of a jerk Malice turns out to be.
Most interesting character? Dhaos naturally. The sorceror king is the villain travelling through time to find a world tree and simply wanted a seed from the world tree on this planet. Once he finds out that this tree is apparently dying, who's to blame? Yeah, the humans, with their usage of technology and what not, that's what Dhaos thinks, so he wants to destroy the humans here. Of course, it's only after the final confrontation with Dhaos that the heroes know of his motives, and then a seed gets thrown to his planet, although Dhaos himself obviously would not be present. But he's definitely the kind of villain who was well-intentioned and actually quite agreeable in a sense. Unfortunately, it's one of those cases, in that he's nothing but a villain the party is after until after you beat him where his motives become clear, and that sort of ruins things by quite a bit. Many of the other characters really have only few interesting moments, Mint with the unicorn, Arche in general, but Dhaos's interesting moments only showing up at the end sort of eclipses everyone else entirely in some way.
Really and truly though, it's a hard game to give a decent grade to. There's so much there to find in many aspects, but in the end it's not entirely the most pleasing out of the RPGs I've played.
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