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With Tales of Symphonia for GameCube and the recently released Tales of Legendia for PlayStation 2, Namco's flagship role-playing game series has received some big exposure in the US lately. Now you can finally play the game that started it all, Tales of Phantasia, on the Game Boy Advance. Originally released on the Japanese Super Famicom (Super Nintendo in the US) around ten years ago, it's one of the last Super Famicom games ever made and was very advanced for a 16-bit game.
Being ten years old, it also has many standard role-playing clichés. Take the storyline and premise, for instance. You are Cress, a young swordsman who is forced into a world-spanning adventure after his hometown gets decimated by an evil empire. Gather clues and items in towns, then venture into maze-like dungeons, caves, and castles to beat the resident bad guy. Recruit a rag-tag band of anime-inspired adventurers and magic users as you ultimately save the entire world from an omniscient evil force. The storyline features many plot twists and turns, too. In the first three hours of the game, Cress' village gets destroyed. He also gets locked up and escapes from a dungeon, and even travels back in time!  Even though you enter random encounters with unseen enemies as you walk around, the battles that ensue are anything but typical. One of the main features of this series is action-packed battles, and it all started with Phantasia. You view the action in 2D side-scrolling fashion as you make the main character run left and right, plus jump and slash enemies all in real time. It's something like a fighting game. The rest of your active party is controlled by the CPU in battle. You can set their aggressiveness on the menu screen, and can open up a menu during the fight to tell them to use specific items and spells. The learning curve is a bit higher than in today's RPGs, and if you get boxed in during a battle, you are sure to die, so save often! Due to the game's age, battles are a bit more clunky and choppy than the more recent games. Players who are used to the greatly improved battles in the modern games in this series may be disappointed. This Game Boy Advance version features other Tales staples as well like the cooking system. Collect recipes from chefs and food items in shops and those dropped by monsters, then mix them up to make treats to heal your party after a tough fight. Perform special tasks and get stat-building name titles that you can equip to your character like a piece of armor or weapon. Graphics are above average, with nice touches like butterflies and insects fluttering about town and little critters swimming in the water. Music is mostly forgettable, and while the game features a staggering amount of voiceï¾—especially in battle, it's all muffled and garbled and you can only understand about half of it. Play control is decent, though there are some quibbles with menu navigation. It's cumbersome to find simple things like how much money you have. Plus, words that represent selected items are just a tiny shade of lighter white than the rest of the text making it hard to tell what you're selecting. Sometimes it can be a bit difficult to know where to go next, especially if you put it down and don't come back for awhile. If you can get past the personality quirks of a ten-year-old RPG, or if you loved the GBA ports of the older Final Fantasy games, then you'll probably enjoy going on an adventure with Tales of Phantasia.  
Violence in battles is the fantasy, cartoony kind. Even though you smack monsters directly with swords, arrows, and spells, enemies only go out in a puff of smoke. However, though the violence in the story isn't depicted graphically, it's a bit more intense than what you might expect. At the beginning of the game, Cress watches his parents and his best friend's little sister die on the spot. Later on when Cress gets locked in a dungeon, he pulls out a sword stuck in one of your future party member's dead relatives. It's definitely not for the younger Pokemon crowd. Also, the storyline features made up gods and goddesses, which may not sit right with families with stricter rules about religion. Good reading skill is a must as menu items and dialogue are all displayed with text. Tales of Phantasia is best suited for older kid adventurers.
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