Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 408: Tales of Series

Episode Date: October 11, 2021

When the plucky developer Wolf Team set out to make a Super Famicom RPG on a grand scale in the mid-90s, the resulting production nearly destroyed the group, but resulted in Tales of Phantasia. Now, nearly 26 years later, the Tales of series stands as one of the few b-tier RPG brands from the 90s that's still going strong with regular installments, while the Star Oceans and Wild Armses of the world have fallen by the wayside. On this episode of Retronauts, join Bob Mackey, Victor Hunter, and Destructoid's Eric Van Allen as the crew discusses just where the Tales of series has been over the past quarter-century. Retronauts is a completely fan-funded operation. To support the show, and get exclusive episodes every month, please visit the official Retronauts Patreon at patreon.com/retronauts.

Retronauts is part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. For more information, please go to greenlitpodcast.com. This week on Retronauts, we tell tales of out of school. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I'm your host for this one. Bob Mackey. And today's topic is the Tales of RPG series, 26 years going strong. And we passed the 25th anniversary in 2020. And to date, there have been 18 installments, plenty of spinoffs, a large series that I feel is mostly ignored by the mainstream press. But it's found a niche, obviously, because the newest entry in the series just came out in September. For this podcast, we're going to focus mostly on the first game, Tales of Fantasia, and the production of that game. But of course, there's a lot to talk about with this series, and I'm sure we will towards the end of the podcast. But first, I want to introduce our guest for this podcast. Let me introduce our first guest.

He is the sponsor of this episode. Please introduce yourself. Sorry, ladies, I only marry and kill like a tiger. It's Victor Hunter. And we'll talk about that reference. I'm very familiar with it. Victor is the sponsor and who is our newest guest on Retronauts

a first time guest. Hi, I don't really have strong feelings about tigers one way or the other but I'm Eric Van Allen by day of destructoid and by night of Normandy FM. Now you're both my tales experts but of course Victor

you are the one who paid big bucks for this episode. You had any of your choice of topics we narrowed it down to this one. Can you tell me why you chose Tales of for your sponsored episode? Yeah. Yeah, so, you know, like the Live Alive episode, I have a couple reasons for this one.

I think first is that I think Wolf Team's DNA exists in so many franchises now that, like, Tails really is kind of unrecognized as this thing that sort of split off into a million different studios, and people went off to create so many other series and influence so many other things that I think it's just really fascinating to kind of track that history and that that lineage. Second, I think that Tales Games kind of get lumped in with like other fiercely anime JRPs.

And I think a little unfairly, there's a prominent games journalist who once described Tales Games as like junk food. Um, and I, I, I think I disagree with that. They're, I, I, I think they're more like a regional comfort food. There's, there's nutritional value there as long as you've kind of tuned your palate to what is on offer. It's a nice, uh, nice baked ziti, I think. Just a big, big, big loaf of contents. That's warm and delicious, uh, and for full of carbs. And, um, and, uh, three is that, uh, mama's still on. on a budget baby and uh i've got my foot in the door now for a 25 year old series that you've never covered and uh sorry you've been had again oh darn it this is my well actually i'll talk more about my history with the series but for the last episode victor that you requested i did play 40 hours of live alive for this one i think i have finished the first tales of game at least

twice so i was fully equipped with the knowledge to jump into this episode without replaying it so i was ready i was ready for this one And Eric, please talk about your history with the series. I was pointed in your direction by Cat Bailey. I was looking for Tales of Experts. I went to the people I knew first. They said they didn't know anything about the series, but then Kat said, ask Eric and he will be your Talesmaster.

Can you please explain where you met the series and your history with it? Talesmasters, one way of putting it, you know, tails sicko, you know, whatever you want to call it. Yeah, my history with tales is a little bit more modern. and I think that's purely by like virtue of the systems that I've always had. But Tales of Symphonia was one

that I'd always heard about and talked about on message boards. And I think I'd picked it up when I was younger and thought it was cool and stuff. And I got into college. And college, obviously, you have a budget for gaming. And I found that I could get a lot of hours out of Tales games, specifically

Symphonia and Vesparia. I had a roommate who once like we had we we came to an impasse where he was like you can't play that game while I'm in the room because I swear to God if I hear demon fang demon fang demon fang again like I'm out like I'm leaving um so they they kind of became my comfort food I'm glad you said that Victor because like these these games I think they do so much stuff that's so interesting and so different and end up like weirdly laying the ground for a lot of the action heavy RPG stuff we see nowadays both within Bandai Namco and outside but they also just provide a certain level

of familiarity and comfort and like warmth and I think that comes from a lot of different places and so for me personally they've always been a series that I can go to and even if it's not going to be the best even if it's going to be more like Tales of Cisteria I can get something out of it at least and it'll feel very familiar and comforting and so you as someone who's like, you know, been away from home a fair bit and traveled a bit and stuff like that, they feel like kind of a coming home sort of series. Yeah, I think they, the tales games kind of walk the line between like the traditionalism of a dragon quest and the radical reinvention every entry of a final fantasy where it's like

you're, you're going to have a foundation of a tales game and then you're going to get things mixed up in between like battle system is always going to be have some new wrinkles so we'll have some new adjectives attached to the name yeah usually the flex motion linear cross dimension the wiki article on the battle system alone i forgot that there were that many names uh yeah they rule as for me i played the first one in that era in which uh it was the early 2000s and all of the big super famicom late era RPGs are first being fans translated so uh i considered it a great injustice that we never got these games so all the big ones are coming over like you know secret of secret of mana two is what we called it that came over fan translated uh this came over a lot of really big games

like the first earthbound game came over uh thanks to fans uh freeing it from nintendo's clutches but i was thinking like did i did i enjoy this game i remember finishing the rom of it and then i remember uh playing the playstation version downloading the iso of that and playing the fan translated version of that and then i remembered oh i had a tales of fantasia poster in my bedroom so I did really like this game I completely forgot and I followed the series because Tales of Destiny

was the first one I played it was the first one they released in America and it was only the year 1998 but I was like wow at old school RPG this makes me think of 1994

which was four years ago that's where I started and I think I followed it up until the first like Xbox 360 generation one and that's kind of where I fell off but I love destiny I love Fantasia

I love the Eternia and Symphonia I think is the peak of the series and I don't know if any game has really matched that in my eyes it could have just been when I played it I had the amount of free time to play it I was in college I'm not really doing a whole lot but that is where I the peak of the series for me is that game yeah I think that there's

there's a lot of there's constant discussion around you know whether Symphonia was was the peak or whether you know if objectively like Vesparia built enough on Symphonia

that it's a better game but you know it's those debates will go back and forth for eternity yeah and I'm sure we'll talk about the ups and downs

of the series towards the end of the podcast but I do want to start by talking about the origins of this series which I do like Fantasia but the origins might be more interesting than the game

there's just so much drama and so many unexpected turns because this all begins with a company called Telanet And we actually did an episode on them seven years ago. It's number 30. We're now in the 400. So I don't remember what we said on that episode.

But we did an entire episode about that developer. They were a very, very developer. It kind of reminds me of that game development story, that mobile game in which it was the old style of game development in which your studio made every kind of game. You can make a full motion video game. You can make an action game. You can make an RPG. It can all be happening in one studio because the technology level is so low.

All of these things are feasible by one company. And nothing has been codified yet, so they can experiment with whatever, you know? It's, yeah. But, yeah, in America, they're mostly known for the VALIS series of games, which we didn't actually get too many of. But they operated in America or released games in America from, sorry, not just in America, but the company Telanet as a whole existed from 1983 to 2007. And other games you may know, we'll talk about the internal developers within Tellen. in it, but things like Genesis games like El Viento and Ernest Evans,

the Cosmic Fantasy series for the turbographics, they mainly developed for non-Nintendo consoles. So if you had a Nintendo, you probably didn't play a lot of their games. At least people in the West didn't. And they weren't a single entity. They had developers within them.

Wolf Team is the one we were talking about the most, but they were internal developers with fun names like Lasersoft and Riot. These do feel like Western game developer names to me. And Wolf Team generally made the best games at Telenet. And even in their fumbles,

they were still very ambitious with some of their weird ideas. They were really going for something. They had a lot of fun ideas and a lot of, you know, elbow grease to make these things happen. Ernest Evans alone is a bizarre experiment in a pre-quop

world. Yeah, Ernest Evans looks like he's one of the fighting game characters from the game balls. He's just a bunch of a bunch of like parts moving around together like sausage like it's kind of fun it's kind of weird El Viento is like one of their

best action games for the Genesis that came over here so the history of this developer again internal developers within Telanet wolf team makes the best games at some point within the history of Telanet wolf team goes independence and Telanet has a stake in them this happens in 87

although in 1990 they go back to telling that maybe they just couldn't make it on their own and they were merged with Lasersop. So there's a lot of things, business things happening and not a lot of resources about this online because it is things that happened in a Japanese business in the late 80s and not necessarily a notable Japanese business. So I can only find a few sources on what's happening here. I don't know if you guys know anything more about this.

No, it's such a, it's such a spaghetti of like mergers and then going off on their own and then being reintegrated back into things and it's yeah it's a weird mess and so Telanet what they did that was a mistake is they really bought in on the Sega CD and things like the turbographic

which they were popular but not really popular enough so in 1993 they restructure everything is smashed together into one studio and this angers a lot of people within Wolf team because they like their group that they had

so it's funny just how many RPG series and developers come out of these few years within this company because former members of Riot go on to form Media.Vot vision and they create the Wildarm series. Masaki Uno leaves Wolf team to form Camelot. They obviously make the Shining Series. They make all the Mario Golf and Tennis Games now. And then we'll see one more RPG creating studio form in the wake of Tales of Fantasia's development. But out of this one developer came a lot of B-tier in terms of popularity RPG series just from this schism, this initial schism.

And then, you know, not to get too far ahead, but a lot of these teams split up and then end up working together on stuff later down the road again and you know, reintegrating all the things they learned back.

It's very bizarre. And it's fun to see just how similar a lot of these spinoffs from the company they made RPGs so similar to Tales of, just in terms of the tone, the look, the battle system, things like that. Absolutely. Even the head of Wolf team steps down.

His name is Masahiro Akishino. He starts his own studio, J-Force. And the most notable thing that they did was co-developed the game, Dragon Force, with Sega. I guess the company wasn't doing very well because he went missing in 1994 and never, he was never found. So I'm going to assume there was a suicide involved or something like that. So then members of his team go join Idea Factory, which was a new studio at the time. So J-Force is not one of the names that we are talking about these days,

but they did do one notable thing, at least. So morale, really low at Telanets. So they see there are a lot of Super Famicom fans that love RPGs. Let's do this. Let's make RPGs. People love Dragon Quest. They love Final Fantasy. All these things are happening on the Super Famicom.

So they make things like Dark Kingdom and New Year. And this game, my wife, translated as Scarlet King's Storkeleton. and Oath with Monsters. And also, it didn't help Tellanette that their American publisher renovation was sold to Sega after Telanet shifted their efforts to Nintendo platform. So they were already losing money by not being able to publish in America as easily. So there's a lot of drama happening here and a lot of failure to. Yeah, one of the, I think one of the first import games that I bought at a, like a video game expo or convention. or something was a Super Famicom copy of Noi Geer?

I think it's Neu-Neu-gear? I don't know. I don't know. Neogir? New gear. The rest of this episode is just going to be us pronouncing the title, I think. Yeah. But because I recognize the Wolf Team logo on it, and it has really great anime box art.

And then, you know, doing research, discovered that, yeah, renovation, which was the North American subsidiary that published Telanet Games was purchased by Sega of America in, what was it, 93, I think. Yeah, I think that's right. And so New Gear did have a, it had finished box art. It had a localized title as the Journey Home Quest for the Throne, which is just as generic as a fantasy RPG needs to be in the 90s. And it even had a full final review published in Game Fan.

So there's this finished Wolf Team game out there somewhere. Somebody has to have it. I'm calling on all of you preservationists out there that I know listen. All I know is that renovation ads taught me how to pronounce Guy Aras. Oh, yeah. Yeah. They really wanted to let fans know how to ask for Guy Aras and stores. Yeah, I wanted to point out both teams, again, they're so eclectic before this point

a lot of games like, you know, the Valles series. One thing they made that totally surprised me going over the history is this game called, I believe, Road Blaster. It is this, it's not Road Blasters, the Atari game. It's a Road Blaster. It's a full motion video game with some of the best first person 2D animation I've ever seen in a game in my life. If you were at the Full Motion Video Games panel, we did at Portland, I played a bit of it. It is so amazing. And this company even went in on Full Motion Video Games.

They were just trying everything when it was popular. They, they, um, there's, there's some conflicting information about how much they worked on some of those FMV games that I wasn't really able to pin down. But I, at the very least, they ported, um, Time Gal to the Sega CD. And I think also Cliffhanger, the, the loop on the third, uh, FMV game. So yeah, they, they did all kinds of stuff. But at this point, they say, let's, go where the money is and that is super nintendo or super famicom RPGs that's not the case in the west quite yet but uh this is where tales up begins so younger staffers within wolf team they want to make this ambitious RPG they don't have the faith in their parent company i don't know if they sought approval for this but they started shopping this pitch around to different

developers uh people that would likely you know sell their game like square and annex uh they said no but they did find a publisher in Namco. And Namco is the company that will eventually finance this game and publish it in coordination with Telanets. And again, I don't know if Wolf Team was still partially independent, but it does feel pretty balzy if they didn't, you know, ask Telanet permission first, if they just, you know, took their game around and tried to break out that way.

And Namco, I totally forgot about this, but Namco was still on the outs with Nintendo at this point. They, you know, developed games for the Famicom early on with some major hits. They made a lot of money, especially for games like Zeevius. They made, I think they named one of their buildings after Zeevius, based on the money that came in from the Famicom port. But they were mad about Nintendo's licensing agreements. So they went in on the turbographics and the Sega Genesis big time. And then for a long time, ignored Nintendo platforms.

So in America, I think there's like maybe four or five games that were published by Namco for the Super Famicom. And in Japan, there were a few more, but they weren't publishing or developing RPGs. But they also saw this market was, you know, hungry for an RPG. So I think Namco smartly decided we only will partially fund this, we'll publish it, and it'll be less of a risk if it doesn't make it. But it seems like not a huge risk because the market is there. And yeah, Namco, they had RPG style things like Tara of Juraga, but this is really where their RPG legacy begins.

Yeah, I'm surprised that at this point there hadn't been, you know, a full-fledged Druaga RPG or like a Valkyri RPG. Those were all still kind of contained to more of an arcade experience. Yeah, I thought there were more, I thought there was some other Namco RPG series before this, but really there isn't. This is it, yeah. And they went big on this one because this is a huge super Famicom game. And it seems like there was some strife during development of the game. I can't find primary sources on this. I just find people talking about it.

And like if you put the pieces together, if you make inference, as you can see, the story is probably true. But there's a lot of strife happening. We can possibly blame Namco's involvement or interference. I mean, there's nothing on the record. But during development of this game or perhaps towards the end, three key members of Wolf team go on to form tri-ace. And they develop Star Ocean for NX the following year. and these games have a lot in common. So it seems like that there's no coincidence that, you know,

while working on this major RPG, three key Wolf team people go and make their other version of this game that's for another developer and then go on to make it a series. Yeah, this is like one of those stories of development that you hear around. And it's like, you know, there's nothing ever on the record about it. But if you just look at when people left, what stuff popped up and what came out. afterwards you can kind of at least be like

things probably weren't rosy there I mean the big one is the name change from tale fantasia to tales of Fantasia which I mean it's probably better that it's not the tale series and it is the tale series I'm not a huge fan of the tales of moniker

but I don't know if tale symphonia would be much better destiny tale made up word for the next 10 games yeah we'll talk about that but like yeah it does seem like that's more evidence where a deviation from Wolf Team's original plan is what caused a lot of these people to leave. So, you know, I heard this anecdotally for the longest time for like 20 years.

Like, oh yeah, Namco pissed off Wolf Team. People left to form tri-Ais. But there's nothing that I could find that's on the record. I'm sure maybe in some magazine published in like 1997 in Japan, maybe there's one interview with a tri-ace guy where he alludes to something. But I have not found anything on the record. I'd love to find something. But if you put the pieces together, there's enough there for you to realize something happened. One other thing that's very obvious to me is that the promotional art for the game and the in-game sprites are completely different.

This is not unusual for the time. Like if you look at Yoshitaka Mano's Final Fantasy characters and then you see what they look like in the game, it's very different. But there's a reason for that. In this case, these anime-style characters could have been transferred easily into little sprites. but I feel like the character designer was brought on later as like a promotional gimmick and the people within Wolf team didn't want to change the look of their game because if you look at this first game compared to the later games

it is very I don't want to say drab but I will say like earthy and a little like browns and greens but the later games and the games to follow this one they're just bright bright colors yeah so the the original concept artist was Yoshiaki Inagaki who would go on to also do concept art for Star Ocean and stuff. But his concept designs in any of his projects never reach like the promotional art phase.

They never reach the key art. He's always purely like a concept artist that other artists build upon. And he designed those original, the main cast of Tales of Tale Fantasia. And those designs were adapted into the sprites. And like you say, when the final character artist came on board, it seems like they were probably too far into the development period to go back and redraw all of these sprite sheets and everything. But I found that I believe this is Inagaki's personal blog that he's been running from about 2001. And the last update was in 2018. But it's his own personal Japanese blog.

And it's called, I believe, nostalgic Fantasian, wherein he is still drawing the tale Fantasia characters, like playing out scenes from the game. And he talks about the design process and when Fujushima came in and designing the original logo that said Tale Fantasia, he breaks down like the original logo where the H in Fantasia was an hourglass and talks about how it was just too difficult for anyone to read. So there's like this, he's got this tiny, tiny little corner of where like Tail Fantasia

still very much feels like a real thing. But he's not throwing shade on his blog then, I guess. No, no, it doesn't look like it Because he did leave for tri-ace, correct? He's one of the three, yeah. He's not one of the main three that are the titular tri-aces That they named the company after

But he did sort of like how Well, I'm sure we'll talk about Sakoraba, the composer. He was more in a freelance role So he stuck around and still did the music for Tales of Fantasia But then also did the music for Star Ocean And a million other tri-ace games

and Namco games, just sort of as a freelancer. In the case of the art, though, yeah, it is so different. It's not just like, oh, Tara's hair color is different in Final Fantasy 6 compared to the art. It's like, no, this is like a different outfit. These are different people. Yeah. I feel like it was either, you know, they came in too late, this agreement with the manga artist who would redesign the characters. And they would later, in later versions of the game, they would redraw the sprites look more like his arts.

I don't know if it was just like Wolf Team being stubborn and saying, no, you can market it with this art, but these are our characters. But again, nothing is on the record. It's just another interesting piece of evidence to see. Like, there is some tug of war going on here. Yeah. Inagaki, there's one section where he talks about still working on the game after Fujushima has been brought on. And Inagaki is doing, because he was in an art designer role for most of the games development. he's making the status menu portraits of the characters in Fujushima's new designs.

So, yeah, there was some interesting crossover there. And more evidence to just a schism or drama is that the game story is based on an unpublished novel by one of the main programmers, Yoshihara Gotanda. We talked about it before. It's called Tale Fantasia. And a lot of things were changed about this, including the title. Obviously, it's Tales of Fantasia, which they were mad about. out, apparently, according to some sources.

And a lot of things of the story were changed because it was a very, very ambitious story involving time travel and three different perspectives throughout three different eras of time. The main character of Tales of Fantasia Kless, he is the last character you see in this original story. Hold on. Uh-oh. Hold on. Did I get my facts incorrect?

What are we calling him? Oh, oh, geez. You know what I don't like Cress No no no Are you a Cress guy I'm a Cress guy This is an argument within the tales of fandom

Isn't it Yeah It's well I I pull from I pull from the GBA localization Simply because there's another character Like there's Curesu And there's Cura Su

There's Cress and what was romanized as clarth and he was localized as Klaus which is an actual name and makes a little bit more sense So there's like Yeah I I usually go with Kress I rib all my

My Tales friends for for calling him I will call him Kress just for you Victor in this podcast Oh I appreciate it But in this original story Cress is the last character you see the perspective of In this battle against the is it Okay, another name thing. Is it Deos?

Like, Douse. Douse, okay, because to me, when I see the spelling, it's Chaos with a D. Yeah. So I'm like, oh, it's Deos. I mean, that's on his Tinder profile. Oh, geez. We're not going to be linking to that on this podcast. But, yeah, again, Cress is the last character you meet in this original story.

But in Tales of Fantasia the game, you play the entire game through the perspective of Cress. and the other people that were meant to be main characters in this original story are now side characters or just very, very limited in their role in this game. Yeah, very limited in the case of the character that was originally going to be the first main character of the first arc was a character called Winona Pickford and she was going to have this like this big tragic romance with Douse

and ultimately having to fight him at the end and she's been relegated to that one opening cutscene where the party fights douse at the beginning and she's the archer who's laying dead on the ground. Oh, yeah. She was originally going to be one of the three primary main characters. There's quite an extensive wiki article about this original story and I want to say it was probably taken from pre-release materials,

previews of the game or at least an announcement of the game because you can see the original art too in some of these old magazine scans yeah yeah she eventually did get in in 1999 they sort of went back in and wrote a light novel about

Winona Pickford and and her story with with Douse and some of the main cast's ancestors basically the party that is in the opening it was their storyline but because Gotanda had left at

that point who knows how true that was to the original light novel tale fantasia or not but and that and that was never like actually published or anything correct the his original story the original tale fantasia was not published no no they could make so much money off of that now i mean imagine now i you know triace and namco are sort of on okay terms it seems so like imagine a remake what a way to justify a remake of the first game in your series by making it tale fantasia i think that would be very they've remade it a bunch of times i think it's time for another one yeah it's been 15 years uh yeah you have in the notes here that uh so uh you know um tales of tales of studio now or no it's actually just bandai namco games right yeah

tales of studio is gone we'll talk more about that in a second but um in 2019 You have in the notes here. The president of Triace is Gautonda, the writer of the original story. And apparently there is a Star Ocean mobile game in which there is a crossover with Tales of Fantasia characters. So everybody is getting along now. Yeah, seems like it. Or they needed a cash grab because Triace has been purchased by a mobile game studio. And all they get to do now is make mobile games and a couple remasters of Star Ocean.

and resonance of fate. Yeah, I feel that you see now so many of these... They used to be larger, but now smaller game companies in Japan working together. Like, every game company you forgot about is now just doing like Smash Brothers content, like game arts and things like that. I do like to see that they're still around and can work together. They find something to pay the bills with. Tales of Fantasia, from what I could tell, it's a success within, within its means.

It launches this popular RPG series, and there were lots. of delays in development, so I'm not sure if you added these notes, Victor, but I did see that, I think another thing pointing to the drama is that this game was meant to come out a lot earlier. And in Japan, it comes out at the very end of 1995. The

PlayStation has been out for over a year in Japan. I think Dragon Quest 6 is definitely out by this point. Yeah, the Saturn is out now. Yeah. Chrono Trigger, like, it's competing with a lot of things. So and, yeah,

We don't know if it, like, was a smash hit for the company, but there was enough there for them to say, let's do more of this. And they got their foot in the RPG fan door, basically. But the history of the studio, so Telanet sells their stake in Wolf Team to Namco in 2003. So Wolf Team is just working with a Namco in the early 2000s. Wolf Team is renamed to Namco Till Studio Limited. And then that happens, that exists until 2012. and then the 80 staff members of this studio are integrated into Bandai Namco Games

and that is just their developer of these titles now is just Bandai Namco Games and I was there it was the worst press event I've ever been to as a member of the Games press and I went to this junket or something for Bandai Namco Games before that they were Namco Bandai

but the first thing they did was have a press conference letting everyone know we are now Bandai Namco Games Bandai comes first Yeah as opposed to Namco band-up. Yes. And I had to sit through a press conference where they were all very proud of themselves for

that business announcement. But yes, that, like, I do feel like personally, I do feel like the Tales games have lost a lot of their identity over the years, a lot of their personality. And I don't think it's any coincidence that this, the corporatization of the

development might have something to do with that. I don't know. It could just be me. But I like the idea of Wolf Team making these games or Tales of Studio, not just like, the monolith that makes one piece games and gundham games and everything else yeah yeah and it's it's not even like it's not even as nebulous a studio as like you know when when people talk about like team silent or something that was just whoever happened to be working there there were some really like consistent through lines through wolf team up through tail studio and you know there's

they they generally had a vision and and a lineage there and stuck to it but yeah yeah and i i think we'll probably talk more about this later when we get to like you know the history of the tale series and stuff but it was it was a case where like nowadays i think you're starting to see the tail stuff take more effects in in like modern games and definitely stuff like you know scarlet nexus which just came out this year i feel has a lot of tales DNA in it but yeah for a long time it kind of felt like tales was just kind of doing its thing and it was doing well enough and and it was like you know don't look too closely or something might break but it also did feel like you know it started to become serialized in a way um especially towards like that mid tier um not mid tier like mid era like ps3 era of tales games you start getting some some cut and paste dungeons and yeah yeah yeah yeah i know that i started to resent these games a little bit being in the games press full time for like five or six years

in that I would just thrown these RPGs like you look RPGs right and it's a lot to even like write a impressions of an RPG there's a lot to get through and I felt like these just keep coming I didn't know this was an annual series I just kind of tuned out with um is it Vespiria

did I make that name up Vesparia? Yeah that's the 360 that's the one that the last one I played and then when I got into the press I'm like these just come out every year don't they and I feel like some time off between games would have felt but I feel like this new one feels like a reset we'll talk more about that towards the end of the podcast though I know uh because they're you know that they're big they're they get a little bloaty the the final act is always way too

long so yeah like having 70 hour RPGs come out constantly is overwhelming and and you know no one should have to try to keep up with all that um which is why I actually really like Tales of the Tempest, which is one of the most hated in the series because it's like eight hours long. So why not? Which one is that again? That's the first DS game. It was co-developed by Dimps who did like the Sonic Rush games for some reason. But it's, you know, it's a weird, it's a weird one.

But also it's less than 10 hours. I kill for that in a JRP. We need more 10-hour RPGs in our life right now. Let's talk about the people who made this first game because they're a major part of both Tales Up and Future RPGs. So the director is A.G. Kikuchi. From what I read, he was one of the younger members of Wolf Team, and that could have caused some resentment about him being asked to direct,

possibly by Namco. But then I was reading elsewhere that he had to step in after people left. So I have conflicting sources on when he entered the project. and if he was there from the very beginning as director. Yeah, because you're right. The sources are unclear whether, because Joe Asanuma, who was one of the three of the tri-ace gang, may have been the original director. And then, yeah, might have been replaced, might have left.

And then they filled that gap with Kikuchi. But, yeah, it's. Yeah. We need more interviews asking these. would kill for an oral history on this game's development. And I think enough time has passed that they would, at least I would assume they would be more honest about these things that happen. Not that they're all working together, but maybe we'll see that one day. But yeah, Kikuchi had worked with Wolf Team for a long time up to the first ballast game.

Lots of different credits, mostly with graphics, because you could just do a lot of roles back then on games. You just learn on the job and can do many things. This is his first. Oh, go ahead, Victor. Sorry, I love, in the credits, I think Gotanda, who was the writer of Tale Fantasia, is listed as total programming. Total. Yeah, sure, why not? He's throwing other programmers under the bus.

Yeah. I fixed their mistakes. But yeah, this is his first director's credit. He stuck with Tales of Games through 2014, and he was a general director on Tales of Zillia 2, which makes me think he was in charge of the story. studio or just like a higher up because general director makes me think like um like someone who is just looking over many projects not the director of like a specific game and uh no real credit since then he could be retired he could be in management heaven who knows but he stuck with uh tales of for like almost 20 years and the first credit you see on the credits actually is uh masaki

norioto um i it because of this it tells me like a lot of the design actually came from his Brain and Kakuchi put into motion. That's just my own reading of these credits. He's one of the three members of Triace that would leave either during development or after development. And he has the same credit on Star Ocean the following year, which makes you think StarRosh must have had a crazy development. If this just comes out, I think Tales of Fantagia comes out December of 95, Star Ocean comes

out in like July of 96. So either they left in the middle of development of this game or they had a crazy schedule to get this out by July. Yeah. And they're the two, they are the two data-wise, they are the two biggest Super Nintendo cartridges. They're both six megabyte carts, and Star Ocean has another mapper chip on top of that for some decompression and stuff. So, like, these are huge games. They're packed with stuff.

And, yeah, Norimoto obviously liked to make games because when he went to Tri-Ace, he didn't just assume a management role. He was really hands-on with a ton of the games. major design work on things like the Star Ocean Series and Valkyri profile. His last credit is a game divine supervisor on the somewhat recent

Star Ocean mobile game which is that the one we talked about earlier, the 2016 one? Star Ocean anemesis. That's a word. I take it, a real word. And music by Motoy Sakaraba. So at this point in his history

he is an RPG OST superstar and he definitely gives these games their distinctive sound and he will also compose for the Star Ocean series as well as after Demon Souls he is the Dark Souls composer and weirdly enough he's also doing things for like Mario sports games

and other JRPG series so I guess he's like the people who left Wolf team to form Camelot he was still friends with them it seems like he must be so great to work with because he can he can work for rival teams

for so many people and he's still still gets tons of jobs so he must just be the most charming guy in the world. He's got to be in his late 50s I'm guessing and he's just making four hour soundtracks for RPGs still with some assistance of course

it was part of the reason I got into Tales was the recognition of Sakuraba's sound in the Symphonia soundtrack because I had also been playing Golden Sun or you know back in whatever 2001 or 2002 and that was one of the first

times where I recognized a very distinct signature of a composer. Yeah, and he actually had a group called Dejave, which has a studio album that's on YouTube. You can listen to it called Baroque in the Future. And most of it just sounds like RPG boss battles. So he found a better market for that kind of music, I think. I've listened to a bit of that album. Would Jeremy like that? Oh, I think so.

Yeah. I think we need to get Jeremy. I like Sakuraba music from what I've heard, but I feel like he would dig that album. He's not on the podcast, but I will speak for him, and I say he will, he should like it. Cool. I think if we just sat him down with Sakuraba boss battle themes, it's exactly what he likes. Totally. But I want him on the record talking about this.

So also on the OST for this game, we have Shinji Tamara, who assists Sakuraba with most of the Tales music, and also this guy named Ryota Furuya. and is only credited with Wolf Team Games and has no credit after this. So he would not go with them making music after this. No idea what happened to him after that. Character designs, not the ones you see in this game, at least in the first version, but Kosuke Fujima, he is basically, for most of these games now, the official Tales of Artist. He'd create future characters for many of these games,

and future installments would just adhere to the designs he made because he would probably just make them first. And at the time he was a get for Namco. He had just finished the manga series or under arrest. And at that point in history, the Oh My Goddess series was very popular. And that would not end until like 2014. And then he would go on to do character designs for Sakura Wars.

So he was getting into the video game character design business at this point. Yeah. Because he was doing soccer awards after this, that's when they got Mutsumi Inomada to do the character designs for Tales of Destiny and that's sort of how they got into the rhythm of kind of alternating

between Fujushima and Inomata for character designs. Yeah, I knew there was another artist but I didn't know that that was the reason why. Yeah, and she's wonderful. When I first got into the Tales games, again, like the connection of Sakaraba's music, a lot of it was, you know,

I was on the internet in the late 90s so I saw oh my goddess and you're under arrest wallpaper posted on like anime fan sites all over the place. I had seen Fujushima's designs everywhere. So making that connection was just another thing that really really pulled me in. This art is definitely like part of what got me into the series too. And it was always kind of a weird disconnect because I feel like at least for games like Symphonia, the in game art is a little bit. different from the character design art and I always had to be like you know again talking about

my roommate from college but I'd be like no it's really cool look at these cool anime characters you'd be like but look at those little cheeby characters on there and I'm like look it's okay they sometimes look like those characters but they also sometimes look like the other characters just squint a little bit like suspend your disbelief man there's some abstraction we're not there yet you know we're just now getting to the point where where we can make the end game art look like this art but it is I think it lent a lot to this game style that it didn't just look like another anime RPG. I always

think that Tales games have at least had a very distinct character style to them that makes them look a little cut above what you consider like a standard anime RPG design. Yeah, they're classy. I don't think they ever got as horny as some of the other

RPGs on the same level of popularity because when I... You want to talk about Velvet from Tales for Siri. It's great. I love Velvet. But she's designed by a woman. so it's okay how dare you i'm looking this up now velvet but that was a moment where i had to be like look i i promised there are story reasons for why her clothes are always in tatters you will regret your words and beads once you play this game well listen i said i said as horny uh so it's okay to have one character

that makes you horny but i was getting a lot of these uh these these these btrpgs um when i was working in the games press like the neptunia series and like weird stuff like fairy fencer f things i'd never heard of before. There are so many of these that you haven't heard about and they got increasingly horny over time. I feel like Tales of has still kept it kind of classy. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think like the new games designs

like emphasize that a little bit more too. Like I was actually doing some Googling just now to see if Fujushima is working on the arise character designs or not. I don't think so. Yeah. Yeah. But I do, they do still feel like characters that are from an anime that you would feel safe recommending to a friend

let's put it that way I mean like everyone loves Cowboy Bebop you got to tell them up front about Fay Valentine you know yeah that's why Netflix cleaned her up a little bit yeah I I really loved when Zillia came out

it was like the 15th anniversary game and that was the first time they had Inomata and Fujushima both doing character designs and they split the cast down the middle and took half each and and their their designs just look great together and that's a game that has two protagonists one by Fujushima one by Inomata and it's just it's so nice that's you know and they they they kept doing that for some of the games afterwards where they sort of split character design duties and and I think it worked great but

yeah it's and one of the things that people will say about Tales games in general is that the cast really elevates the game to another level and yeah like you say Eric so much of that is just amazing colorful designs and cool characters too like you get repeat

who's just a dog that smokes a pipe and has a sword like that owns that rules every once in a while there's a werewolf or something yeah yeah I remember in Symphonia it's been a long time as I played it but one of the characters is like a convict and he's he has handcuffs on so he can only kick. Yeah.

Yeah, he says he will never kill another man with his hands again. So he chains his own hands so he can only kick people to death now. It has a loophole. That's a cool idea. And then the one time he does use his hands is to break out, he breaks the party out of jail. And he just does like a hadoken with his hands. And it's like, yeah, whatever.

Oh boy. I can't wait for future history one of one today. I hear Prof. Timesworth is going to teach us about World War Six. Gather around, students. It is time to learn. Podford University, where history and future are the same class. Available on iTunes, Spotify, and everywhere you get podcasts. Hey, Lassie, what are you doing here? Timmy's in a well. sequel cast 2 in Friends is a podcast looking at movies in a franchise

one film at a time like Harry Potter, Hellraiser, and The Hobbit and sometimes the host talk about video games and TV as well and now it's part of the Greenlit podcast network Oh lassie we don't need to rescue Timmy likes the well well enough I guess Darth Vader is Luke's father Lassey I told you to play off the spoilers Thank you.

let's talk about the game itself and the release history of it so again this game came out in December of 95 in Japan so in the year 2000 it was one of the first massive RPGs to get a fan translation it was a great time to be alive if you were a teenager and had a cable internet connection and could just download all the ROMs you wanted to every day but yes this group with a name I won't say they translated the game and despite a questionable localization it was a pretty big deal to play this in English and it It was obviously a lot of work went into making this. But you reference it up front, Victor.

There's a famous fun localization choice in which I believe the line is Arch fucks like a tiger is the line that they went with. Yeah, it's the boys sort of chatting about which girl in the group they think is the cutest. And yeah. And there is, yeah. She fucks like a tiger. There is some like cheeky humor in these games, but it never goes that vulgar. and there is like if you go to the Legends of Localization page which is great there's an entire blog post about here is how every translation figured this out and here's why that's not what they're saying going back to this game like as someone who got in like later in the series and wanted to go back and see what some of the roots are this is kind of some of the trouble around playing the earlier tales games is you kind of have to either like work with what you've got or just not play them because yeah Yeah, the English language releases, as we'll go on to say, like, are not always perfect.

And a lot of the games just aren't available on modern platforms. Right. And they have been available since their original release. Like, I don't think Destiny ever was re-released. No PSN release for Destiny or Eternia, which are now, like, $200 discs if you want to get them. I'm sure they are. So, yeah, it was a big deal to play this. Like, it was so cool to play these fan-translated games because I was playing it in 2000.

it came out like four or five years earlier. So it was so neat like, these are almost new Super Nintendo games. I'm just playing them on my computer because there's no other way for me to play them. I don't have a job and I can't read Japanese. I can't actually buy this and read it myself. So America would not see an official English release for this game

until 2006 when surprisingly the 2003 in Japan Game Boy Advance port was localized. I believe I play this entire thing again on the GBA. And the only thing that it's notable for is that, when they were doing the localization they did like auto spell check so ragnarok is kangaroo but other than that it's just a you know pretty part for the course localization yeah it's uh i don't know i don't know how deep we want to get into like the difference between the ports oh yeah we could talk about it because with each port there's more quality of life stuff they go back

and they add features that you expect from these games like you know cooking and the little skits that you can do on the world map yeah totally i i think You know, the Super Nintendo version for as ambitious as it is, they quickly course-corrected a lot of design decisions as soon as even Destiny came out, which is why in 1998, only three years later, you have a PlayStation remake of Fantasia that fixes so many of the things. like the battle system is a little bit difficult to parse and it feels random at times and it isn't particularly intuitive but then they standardize it to feel more like you know the way later tales games feel like a fighting game or like a character action game they they get a little bit easier to to figure out but um yeah the gba version um it it does some stuff right it does uh a lot of people kind of slam it as the worst

version, but it's it's kind of the easiest to play English version. I mean, the worst you can say about it is it's a bit like the colors are a bit washed out for a game that's already kind of, you know, a bit drab so it doesn't make things look a lot better and that's just

the victim of the Game Boy Advance on the screen. But it was a surprising release, which is why I bought it in 2006 like two years after I bought my DS. I was still playing Game Boy Advance games on my DS. Yeah. It's funny to go from the sort of like almost sepia tone

Super Nintendo version that lacks color to the GBA version that is more vibrant but they turned the brightness up too high and then you get the PSP remakes which are in the wrong aspect ratio and there's no proper way to play a Fantasia game in the right way. That always bothered me about PSP games

where they just would smash the 4x3 original image into the PSP format and it always looked bad. That's why I hate it has a better translation but the Final Fancy Tactics remake, they did it. They ruined the game in my opinion it's hard to look at with those graphics squished down like that. But yeah, you're right.

So we have, comes out on Super Nintendo Famicom. That's one version. Then there's a PlayStation version. That's another one. Then there's Game Boy Advance. And then there are seemingly two PSP ports. One is in 2006. The main addition to this is that's fully voiced edition. Did not come

out in America. All the story scenes are voiced, obviously, with that subtitle. And then, from what I could tell, there is a second port called Tales of Fantasia X that was included with Tales of Fantasia Narikiri Dungeon X as like a game on the disc or a game that's just packed in. I'm not sure what the circumstances are there. So, okay. So Tales of Fantasia did sort of have a sequel called Tales of Fantasia Nauri Curie Dungeon on the

boy color and it plays with the canon a bit and whatever it's it's kind of a fun little little side story they remake that for the PSP um and then also include it's it's based off of the full voice edition and and one of the big things that full voice edition outside of the adding voices obviously is they redrew your party's character sprites in battle so that they're more of the dimensions of they're less cheeby they're a little more like the the PS2

2D games like like Destiny 2 and Rebirth and that but they also didn't redraw any of the other human characters like the enemies so you have these tall lanky party members and these squat cheeby enemies but

so Tales of Fantasia Cross Edition which was just the bundled it's literally from the main menu of Narikyri Dungeon X, you just click on Tales of Fantasia in the bottom corner, and it takes you to it. One of the things they did is they added another party member, who is part of the main story of Narikiri Dungeon X,

but because the game's all about time travel and stuff, she sort of pops in and out of your party as her story intertwines with the story of the original Fantasia. And she's a cool character. I hope they bring her back if there's ever a remake. Her name's Rondaline. Fujushima came back to design her. So, yeah, with, they added Suzu Fujiboyashi, the ninja character in the PS1 version. And then, yeah, years and years later, they added Rondaline to cross-edition.

So there's, I mean, the differences, there's so many differences. Yeah, it's wild. Both mechanical, storywise. Playable characters voice they're adding they're adding new things to every version and then there's a version that's no longer available mercifully no longer available

the iOS version which I only read about so it's this like 50 hour JRP they find a way to shoehorn it into the free to play model and by all accounts very unsuccessfully like you're you're buying like gels through micro transactions

and stuff like that have either of you played this I've heard of it I have seen of it and yeah when it got to like the buying items through micro transactions I was like oh it's a dark future for RPGs if this becomes a thing and thankfully it did not but yeah it was another one of those cases where I was like oh boy time to play this old tails game I never got around to and then it comes out and I'm like I think I'm good yeah it's it's miserable it's the most cynical thing in the world because they they crank up the difficulty you can't change the difficulty to lower it at all.

They take away a bunch of save points, and they make it so that if you die, you have to pay to get revived automatically. So, finally. Which I mean, which is like, harkening back to Namco's arcade roots is the most charitable read I'll give on that. But other than that, it's just a miserable experience. With touchscreen controls, you're going to die a million times. That couldn't have been good.

And, you know, they could have made it so, like, every act of the game is like, I don't know, $8 or something. But no, they made it much more, like, predatory. Yeah. They could have taken a cue from Final Fantasy for the after years, which patrons can learn all about in our previous episode. Or dimensions. Yeah, dimensions, too. So many, it's a great model. I'm not so sure about the games, though.

So let's talk about more about this game. it's a technical marvel if you look at it compared to what was surrounding it it was doing things that Super Famicom games weren't doing it's one of the biggest carts along with Star Ocean so 48 megabits that's six megs in our

terminology so there's a flashy intro with a full spoken line sort of like the last Metroid is in captivity except after that there's an entire song by an idol singer and it's very tinny but they're still doing it on a Super Famicom cartridge

I mean, look, this would set the tone for tales going forward of like, we're going to have a whole, like, intro song and all that. We're just going to do this. Like, they started off on that foot. What I love about the intro is it's sort of like the attract mode when you start up the super Famicom game. And even though they're using the in-game graphics, they still sort of shoot it as if it's an anime intro. So like characters walk across the screen and then their portrait pops up. And it's like, they're trying to make, like, the composition of an anime intro. It's very cute, yeah.

I mean, they blew all of their cartridge space on this voice, so they can't, you know, do huge sprites on the screen or anything like that for this scene. But yeah, you're right. It is a tradition in the series for a long time. And it's still true with some games. Like, we weren't getting these songs. We would just get, like, a bland instrumental track over the opening animation because you have to license that music separately.

And, of course, they're doing this. I'm not sure if they did this for the first game. But obviously, it's like, You can buy the single. You can, you know, download the MP3 or whatever, buy it online. So they were definitely thinking of different ways to market different elements of this game. What I love about the Fantasia theme song specifically is that there's sort of the there's the one that they introduced in the PS1 version, which is just very much a produced CD quality anime opening song. And going back to the Super Famicom one, it's using the.

SNES sound font and then these samples of the singer and it gives the song a completely different feel. It's the same lyrics and the same melody and everything but the Super Famicom one sounds like this like Euro Euro dance mix that's got

like this really weird percussion. Yeah I kind of like it. It's a weird sound to it with all the compression they're doing. Yeah so yeah we have an opening song that's the first time we've had a full sung song in a Super Famicom game on a car Um, multiple spoken lines in battle, uh, I mean, we have sound clips in, you know, things like Street Fighter, of course, by this point and other things, but there is so much voice by every

character. They say every attack they do and it becomes a problem with these games because that's all you hear. Um, it's sort of like, you know, playing a fighting game, you hear like berserker barrage nine million times. It just becomes part of your life. And, um, this is not new for video games in Japan, but they're hiring, you know, known voice actors to voice

these characters. The main characters voiced by the guy who voices trunks in Dragon Ball. Not all of these voice actors are notable, but they all have done like nine million things. So Japan was way ahead of the game in terms of hiring voice actors to do voice acting instead of saying, who at Sierra can speak into a microphone, get in this

closet, but you need you to voice an owl. Which, to Symphonia's credit, I think Bandai or Namco, sorry, really like, the cast for Symphonia is big names like those are those are big people you know cam clark uh terra strong and and like like you know notable voice actors who who even had a following in the early 2000s before loving

voice actors became a thing yeah uh we talked about symphonia they put a lot of money into the localization i was just looking at the voice actors and scott menville is the voice of the main character he was uh batman sorry he was robin rather in Teen Titans, which was a new series when that game came out, and now he's still Robin in Teen Titans Go. And his voice is so recognizable. He's Kevin in Mission Hill. He's done a million things.

But yeah, a lot of, at that point in history, they were putting a lot of attention into the American localization of the games in terms of voice acting. Yeah. I think what this stuff does, like having the song and having the voice actors and stuff like that ends up giving it this feel of like you're booting up, you know, the latest episode in whatever your favorite. series is right now and I think that's something that kind of carries through

tales games as they go on is that they're I love tales games I'm not going to say like their plots or anything earth shattering or you know on the scale of some other major RPGs they kind of have more of a road trip kind of feel more of like a journey is the point feel and so every time you boot it up you get that intro song you have like your characters hanging out and vibing and they have like voices and stuff that you can start to associate with them And so it's cool to see some of the seeds of that here in the original game in Fantasia and how that like later became, I think, a major piece of what the series would become. Yeah, there are plenty of tales games that whenever I go back to play them, I'll always sit through the opening. Yeah, that's very important opening is still like every time I boot up Nesparia on my switch, because I've been doing a replay on the switch recently.

And I boot it up and I hear that like drums start to open it. I'm just like, okay, I'm going to listen for a little bit. Yeah, I know Like when Destiny came out And the anime boom was happening in America In like 98 but it was still like If you saw new anime it was still miraculous So just like I can watch like a 45 second anime movie

Before I start my video game It was like it was a really interesting novelty at the time for sure I think the first two Like video game Soundtracks I ever bought I think was Final Fantasy 4 Celtic Moon And the best of tales which was just a collection of all the intro themes up to that point.

And I, man, I played that CD like crazy. There have to be quite a few of them by now, especially with some re-releases get different, different openings too? Symphonia has a different theme from the GameCube and the PS2 version, yeah. And then one of the mobile games, I think Asteria has sort of like a season structure. And each one has a new animated opening and a theme song. Cool. So in case you're So in case you're wondering why we didn't get this game,

It should be slightly obvious, but there's a lot of reasons why. Nothing on the record, of course. This is all just speculation. But Namco, not releasing Super Nintendo games in America at the time, not really. There's things like Pac-Man 2 in other games like that. They're not really going in on the Super Nintendo that much. So they don't have enough resources to localize a game this big. They're not localizing RPGs, and I don't think anyone else is available to do this.

And the size of the cart means if they sold this in America, I'm guessing it was probably like $150 in Japan when they were selling this game originally. Just based on the sheer size, it would probably be like $100 in America because I remember paying like $80 for big games in America around this time. Like the 32 megabyte games like Final Fantasy 3 and Krono Trigger, they would be like $70 or $80 just because of their size and they were a niche product. And if you go back to old game ads, you will see in Japan they were selling these RPG. for the Super Famicom for over $100 new. They were like boutique products and they were making a lot of money off of them because of that.

And yeah, if they would have localized this game, it probably would have come out in like, charitably, let's say, maybe April or May of 96. And that was not the best time for the Super Famicom or sorry, Super Nintendo. I mean, I think that's when Super Mario RPG came out. But that was really like one of the last big things to happen for that system. And yeah, and again, we wouldn't get this until, 2006 with the Game Boy Advanceport.

Let's talk about the story because there's a lot going on here and returning to this to talk about it, I realize like, oh, this is more interesting than I thought it was even though it's very different from the original plan. And of course you have a lot of your RPG tropes that are in here. There is

your hero. Their village is destroyed. We've seen that before. There are... This, I have a tough time not thinking some of it was self-aware because in that opening town you go you go talk to one of the there's a couple standing on the bridge and they're both talking about how in love they are and how happy they are to be alive and how they can't wait for their upcoming wedding yeah and then you go to the next NPC over and he's standing at the guard tower and he says boy I sure hope I never have to ring this bell yeah I think it was a trope at the time, and I think even me at the time as a young kid, I was like, boy, there are sure a lot of pendants in these games, aren't there?

Because there are also magic pendants. There's also this thing happened X amount of years ago, and now they're trying to undo the thing that happened. The Great Evil was sealed away. But there are some curveballs in this that I thought were pretty interesting. Like, we see the prologue of this game when it starts off. It's a battle against Douse. Douse is about to be destroyed. So he warps to the future.

because a lot of what Dau says in this game is run away. Like, it makes him kind of a ridiculous villain if you think about just how many times he's like, oh, I got to go to the future again. I got to go to the past. He's jumping all around time. He goes to the future before he can be defeated, but then people are waiting for him there because they know he's going to be there. And then he's sealed away by them, and then that is just a hint of all the time travel

fun to come. Although all the time travel in this is just one-way trip, so you're not playing like a fun chrono-trigger style, you know, time travel or like even Dragon Quest's seven time travel it's all very just like back to the future you're stuck here until the next plot event happens yeah and a lot of maps are just kind of you know palette swaps of the the past present and future version even the when you go to the past version of your starting town all the buildings are in the exact same place they're just wood now because that's how towns we haven't invented bricks yet i guess or something i don't know um but yeah there are a few more curveballs in this

in that you learn that okay your town is burned out because this guy is trying to unseal douse himself. And when you get to the point where he's about to unseal douse, you're sent back 100 years in the past because you're not strong enough to fight him. It's the only way to save you, send you back into the past. Then you go to the past. That's where you fight douse. You do defeat him.

But then the biggest curveball is, as you're all celebrating, the game seems to be coming to an end, someone from the future appears and says, oh, hey, we got to come to the future because Douse is here, and it's a problem. So then you go 50 years to the future. So there are a bunch of curveballs involving Douse in like how to defeat him. And you're just jumping around time throughout this game.

When you start the game, you're not really expecting there to be time travel. That's not the thing advertised up front. With Chrono Trigger, yes, like there's like a stopwatch in the logo, basically. You know what's going to be happening. That's why they needed to keep that hourglass in the logo. Yeah, yeah. You're right about that, actually. But yeah, this definitely starts a long tradition of Tales games having a false ending.

in the third act yeah you always like get to a point now where whenever I play a new tales it'll begin to a point

where I'm like oh is the story no the story's not ending come on now we're like the two thirds point now and there's gonna be some new big bad

that shows up or is there an alternate dimension is there a different planet yeah one of your party members secretly working for somebody else

yeah and like one of the cooler things is when you go to the past you're sent to the past because you're not strong enough to fight Douse and you go to the future

you go back to the present to fight him, rather. You arrive right after you leave. Like, you're on the scene, like, right after you leave. It's a cool... I love when time travel stories do that. And there are a few little cool gimmicks in the story like that, but it's not mechanical in any way.

You're not, like, choosing when to go back and forth. You're just stuck in a time period until the next event moves you to where you need to be. And, like, the end of the game does tell you more like, okay, it suddenly wants you to be sympathetic to Douse, but you can see a lot of this is backloaded, not front-loaded in which douse is kind of a mystery throughout the game but you can see like if this was going according to the original story you would have been learning more about douse throughout history but the end of the game was just like ah he was actually good and he came here to you know

heal his own planet and now he's going to be part of this giant tree etc etc so yeah if we'd had that that Winona pickford arc which was meant to make douse sympathetic then the rea scarlet arc was was act two and that was going to be the revenge her revenge story against douse for for destroying her village and then the crest timeline ties it all together with all the time travel and gives you a much more nuanced idea of douse and his goals yeah and the game he's just kind of a cackling anime villain until they want you to feel bad for him uh in the last like five minutes of the game so you could see how he's no em itself no no you could see you could see how they had a much bigger plan

for him in this game but yeah a lot of cool touches there but really the main attraction in this game is the the limb system the linear motion battle system and every one of these games will have one of these and they will tack on or eliminate new adjectives with every addition

they don't need to do that it's fine but they do this I mean games are doing this at the time and Japanese games still do this now where we just have fun names for systems and I think it helps with marketing but I do like limbs and other games had been doing this before this is not a new idea but tales of Fantasia is the first game to figure out like well here is really how it should work because if you go back to games like even Zelda 2 it's an RPG and that when you get into

an encounter you do a little action scene and then you leave the action scene to go back to the world map in this one it is just really dialed down into very fast-paced fights and boss fights as well and there's no plastic forming involved. There's no really traversal. You're just on a flat plane and you're just attacking enemies and that's it. I think my favorite is

flex range element enhanced linear motion battle system. That's a good one. What does the flex range imply? This was for Tales of Symphonia 2.

I don't know. I have no idea. Yeah, I really remember to that game. The names don't really indicate what changes have been made, although there's the three-line linear motion battle system, there's the crossover linear motion battle system, there's the flex range, that's Tales of the Abyss,

online motion battle system. That's the Tales of Eterni Online. Three on three. Fugionic change. Yeah, that's one my favorite. Yeah, that one and cross-double raid linear motion. motion battle system. There's also a dimension stride

linear motion battle system. Deliberation. That along with, yeah, you're right. It's very much a marketing thing so that they have like a flashy title to put on the ads. The other thing they do is the characteristic genre for each game. Fantasia's was pretty basic. It was just called legendary RPG.

But then they would build on. that for further games and it would be sort of like it would be sort of like a mission statement for the dev team but then it also became this marketing thing so every time a new tales game comes out they have another sort of like sub sub sub genre of RPG so you get like uh tales of symphonia was a resonating with you RPG uh it did instance was a connecting thoughts RPG. Oh, finally a strand game. Oh, that's my favorite genre.

It's sort of like how like Shen Mu was what, like free eyes or something like that. That was the name of the genre he was creating. Totally. You know, it's silly, but I kind of like it. It just shows a lot of unearned confidence. Totally. I love it. Yeah. It, like, I'm more familiar, like, I think

more about the later versions of this than I do with the Super Famicom version because immediately when they remade the game and when they made Destiny, they're like, well, here's how it should really work like this is definitely the rough draft destiny is really the 2d version of what they would do and then once it moved to 3d it's a whole new you know can of worms but um again it's it's kind of like a fast-paced brawler it'd be more like a fighting game in the future but you only control class you don't you can't jump to other characters i would not come into the games until

later and it's interesting in that most RPG parties aren't like this but cless is the melee character in the front and almost everyone you have in your party is a ranged character either magic or healing or projectile attacks or something else but class is always in the front and when he's not you're in trouble yeah and they're all bad at their jobs yes the the AI is very very

dumb and I don't remember at what point in the game you can do this but you can turn off skills like don't don't use this and then you can tell them like use this more use this less when you get to future games you can control things to a very precise amounts yeah it gets almost FF12 like at point

Yeah. The tactics thing becomes super important because I think with a game like this, you know, you're putting so much control into just a single character that you don't want to be necessarily micromanaging the rest of the party while you're doing it. And so yeah, it's nice once they give you the stuff that lets you kind of create those, you know, like you said, FF12 and, you know, Symphonia and stuff was doing this as well, like tactics and saying like, hey, when I'm below X percent use this and stuff and stuff like that. And I think it's the one thing that if this series did not do that, it would just fall apart immediately because otherwise it's like you're one really talented fighting game player trying to take on an enemy while like three other scrubs are just mashing buttons off to the side. And it's like Donald Duck won't heal me the video game. Yeah. Yeah, you're putting a lot of faith in this not very smart AI. And you can do some fine tuning in the beginning. and they would do a lot more improvements like in the original Super Famicom release your attacks are based on your proximity to the enemy

and in the future they would say well no you can assign a different special attack to one of four cardinal directions in a button and then later on I think you can even do like fighting game style maneuvers yeah you get an item that lets you do like command inputs like quarter circles and stuff like that

that really kind of mix it up and the other thing that also unfortunately Fantasia doesn't have but that they introduced later on is just straight up multiplayer. Just plug in another controller and let your friends play all the other party members. Is that in the first release or is that in later releases?

It's not in any version of Fantasia. I don't think that might be wrong. It might be in the PS1 version because I think they added it in destiny. Yeah. I think there might be, this is so like minutia but I think there's an item in the PlayStation 1 version of Fantasia that lets you do multiplayer, but I could be wrong.

Yeah, I think it's like The in-game thing is that like It detects certain electrical signals So you equip it to one of your characters as an accessory And then they can It's very psychomantus They had to make it work with the lore Yeah

So there are some things in this that are missing That are mainstays in future games Like there are not the little skits that we see Where this is also be like a star ocean thing as well In which on the world map There'll be a little prompt And you'll hit a button and it'll have like a back and forth between two characters

and then other things they keep adding things to future games but one of the more common mainstays in the series is cooking and there's like a food bag in this one

which is like a very simple version of that but in the future version of this game you can assign like different meals to every character and have them cook

after battle and once they get better and better at those cooking meals they can heal more or do certain other special effects like they really

develop these systems more but they're not in this original game. And any other highlights from this original game before we talk about the series as a whole? Because, again, there's a lot of RPG, like, calories in this. There's a lot of expected content. But, again, the battle system is what really sets it apart from other games. The cool story with different twists really helps it, you know, be more than just a generic

RPG. It's very pretty. There's some cool technical things like the opening song. Am I forgetting anything else about this game? I think the cast is great. The story is great The battle system Is trying a lot of things

And yeah There's some There's some sort of dead ends As far as design goes That would get explored A little bit better In destiny and on And even in Star Ocean and on

And in further tri-ace games You know Baiton kytos Has some symphony Or tales of elements So does Eternal Sonata Oh definitely yeah You know

Yeah with Star Ocean they go beyond cooking. Those games have, you know, inventing and playing music. And sometimes they go a bit too far, at least with, like, the third game. But they were really interested in these different systems that can coexist within a game. Yeah. So we can talk about the series as a whole, because you guys have more experience than me. My story is, you know, I started with Destiny, and then I got the fan translation of Fantasia.

Then I played Eternia, which came out here as Tales of Destiny 2, which is confusing because there is a Tales of Destiny 2 in Japan. And then I played Symphonia, and I was like, this is the best one yet. And then I moved on to the 361. Is that Disteria? That's Vesperia. Vesperia. Thank you. Thank you.

And that's when I was like, I don't know if I'm into this anymore. And I would play a few more after that. I think I played like Dawn of the New World, which was the Wee Tales of Symphonia kind of side story with a really bad main character and maybe a few more. And I think the last one I played that I wanted to play more of that I liked was Tales of Grace's F. But that was now 10 years ago. so I have not really touched the series in a while and I meant to play the demo of the new one before this podcast I didn't have time but I hear polarizing things about that one as well so I don't know if you guys can speak about like where the series has been and what your stance is on it now go for it Eric yeah so like I said I came in kind of modern so like Symphonia was the big one for me and then I actually really really like Vesparia mostly because I think it's cast is really really good especially your Yuri is one of the better JRP protagonists that I've seen because he's like, what if the JRP protagonist just didn't care about murdering the bad guy at night when no one else was watching and he was like, this dude's doing bad stuff. I'm just going to go kill him. I always liked him as kind of the anti-hero to Flynn in that game who's kind of the more traditional RPG protagonist type character. And then I didn't have a PS3. I've never. owned a PlayStation 3 in my life.

So I missed a lot of the middle run games there, ones that I've wanted to go back to. But, you know, they're not the easiest to play if you don't own a PlayStation 3, which is, you know, the how reticent the Tales studio is and Bandanamco is to like re-releasing these games and remaking these games as a whole different conversation. But I picked it back out with Zesteria

and did not like Zesteria very much. But Berzeria is what really reignited my love for these games and got me going back and playing more of them and and revisiting like even older ones. And I think Brzeria is absolutely phenomenal and honestly underrated in terms of Tales games. And and with a rise, I see how it's polarizing. But it definitely feels like a reaction to these games have been kind of in that like B tier range for a while. And I think, you know, maybe there's some ambition to try. and boosted up to the level that it has some notoriety on the scale of a final fantasy or something like that. It feels like the right year for that to happen. Honestly, there's like not a lot of big

RPGs this year. But it definitely means in the process that they're like kind of wrestling with what it means to be tails versus being a big AAA RPG and where those two things can meet up and where they can kind of run against each other. So it's in a weird spot. And I'm really interested to see like how a rise gets received and how it gets looked at because I think it could be like a symphonia-esque turning point for the series in in good ways and bad ways. I think because Arise has so much influence from like the other Namco RPGs of the last decade, like there's a lot of DNA in there and a lot of staff members from like God Eater. And like you say, Scarlet Nexus, Code Vane, like, outside of Tales, Bandai Namco has been experimenting, like, God-Eater, how do we make a Band-I-Namco Monster Hunter?

Code Vane was, how do we make Band-I-Namco Souls-like? Scarlet Nexus is, like, a very ambitious, cool, like, they throw a lot of, of Markets. marketing and production behind these games now. And I think they, with a rise, they have the, the desire to, like, market the crap out of it and get it out there. And I think it was in a recent interview. Someone said that, like, Vesparia, the deluxe edition or definitive edition of Vesparia was, was an experiment to see, you know, if.

if a Tales title would bring more people in. And I think it was something like 10% of Vesparia definitive edition sales were newcomers. Wow. And the rest was fans of the series already. So I think Arise is really trying to bring new people in. And yeah, exactly. We'll see if that makes it a symphonia or if it drives some hardcore people away. It's so challenging too because like I think,

for for what Tails has always had going for it has been sort of reaching into places that a lot of RPGs weren't traditionally going for us to like skip based stuff and having that like party dynamic growing over the course of time and also the

action based combat being more of an action game than like your traditional turn base I remember when I was playing Final Fantasy 7 remake and I was sitting there and I was I think I was doing some boss battle as Tifa and just doing this like really long combo where I doing all these different attacks and psyching up and stuff like that.

And I was like, this feels like a tails game. Totally. Literally, I feel like I'm playing a tales of video game right now. And it's weird to see how as other RPGs kind of, you know, catch onto these ideas.

And even as RPGs in general start to skew more action based because they can now, because they can do that kind of stuff, where does that leave tails in all of this? Because playing the demo for a rise, there are definitely moments where you will be like, this feels like Final Fantasy 7 remake. Yeah, yeah. You're totally right about that. I didn't even think about Tales of when I was playing Final Fantasy 7 remake.

I was thinking of Kingdom Hearts, but no, it's totally Tales of a combat. Kingdom Hearts is just a bad action game where you're on experience points. They're actually, in the Final Fantasy 7 remake, you can pause the combat to, you know, give commands and things like that. Yeah, absolutely. Eric, you, you haven't played Zilia 2. No, I've got like, I've got to. a list of shame as I like to refer

to it as which is these are the games especially on PlayStation 3 I missed a lot of games that I wish I could go back and play but it would require me buying a PlayStation 3 but Zilia 2 is on there I've started Abyss a few times over

but I've had trouble getting into Abyss which I've heard is not a unique reaction to that game Yeah yeah actually I tried playing that game twice there was a DS port of that right or 3Ds Yeah, the first time the PS2, the low times were just awful in that game. And they weren't much better in the 3DS version.

I don't know why they couldn't fix that. But I really, I played maybe like 20 hours of it on the 3DS. And people's, a lot of people recommended it heavily, but I just couldn't get into that one. One of the, I think one of the first things I ever looked up on YouTube was Tales of Symphonia combo exhibition videos. And that is a world that. I wish more people knew Tales had in it because

a good Tales game and a good tails combat system feels just as good as like a devil may cry or a bayonetta. Like when you really get into a battle system, which is why I bring up Zilia 2, because I think that had the most

flexible and interesting combat where it's sort of they really buff the character, which sort of de-incentivizes you from playing as the other cast members, which is kind of a bummer, because I think Zilia's cast is really fun to play as. Everybody in that game plays completely differently and feels like a different action game. But Zilia-2's main character, you switch between guns, hammer, and daggers, and he plays differently with each one,

and you set your attack shortcuts up differently. And you just, you're, you're, you're, you're like combos that feel and look as cool as any platinum game like there's such a rich deep battle system that is so different in every tales game that like you will find something cool if you're into action games berzeria is a musso game essentially yeah but with like more reined in and more structure to it that that feels more satisfying like there's more risk and reward in Briseria than a typical Muso. It does Muso better than Muso games. Yeah.

The mechanic they introduced that was like using Velvet's claw to like extend a combo, but there was some risk to it. And also the way you could route art combos through different shortcuts and stuff like that. And that game was really, really cool. Yeah. And even like playing a Rises demo. So I've, as both media and just like playing the demo, I've probably played like 10 hours of this game already.

um but in the previews i've had and in the demo that's out there you can play as like the different characters and they actually have gone out of their way to make some of those characters really interesting to play as and have their own unique mechanics so like renwell who's the mage and arise has this really cool thing where if an enemy is charging an arts up you know like one of their magic spells you can not only like stop that timer but steal the spell from them and bank it and then you know have it in your pocket to be able to use later and you can also charge an art up and then bank it yourself to like have multiple spells that you can pop out at different times and it makes the mage class which in other tales games has kind of always been like

I'm going to stand here casting my art and eventually we'll fire it um with some with some little mini games sometimes they'll they'll add a little mini game if you're controlling a mage like tap tap the a button a bunch of times to shorten up your your your spell casting time but yeah it's nice to see mages get proper consideration for what makes the gameplay interesting yeah it feels like they're at least making an attempt to have each character have a very defined identity and play very differently so that way you're not just you're not just encouraged to play as them but when they're doing like I was when I was playing the demo uh my AI controlled law character just started popping off in the middle of a fight and I was like how was he doing that and I went into his mechanics and was like

oh he's got this thing where if he goes long enough without getting hit he starts to power up more and more and it is kind of almost tifa final fantasy seven remake-esque where the longer your combos go you can like psych up more and more until you're just running over everyone yeah um so it's it's cool it's a cool concept that they're doing but i think it is going to run up against some stuff because tails has for a long time been a bit serialized it's been a bit like codified in what it is and what it should be. And it's that age-old question of like, do you break tradition to try and bring more people in

and elevate the series to a place where other people might be, you know, interested in playing it or do you keep playing the hits? And it's a really tricky road that I don't know if there is a good answer to it or not, but they're certainly trying to bring more people in with the art style that they're doing, like the graphics and stuff that they're doing are honestly really incredible in my opinion, but they're definitely different

from what you normally expect from tales and a lot of systems that just feel very like interesting twists of tales that might excite some folks and turn off other ones who are like, I want a tales game. I want what tales games are. Yeah, which is

why I hope that we can exist in a world where we can have new, ambitious tales games that are including all these influences. And then we have such a backlog of traditional tales games to pull from that most people have never played

that like those those can coexist you know we can we can have a Breath of the Wild one year and a Link's Awakening remake the next like these are possible where would both of you recommend people jump into the series if they want to play it I mean a lot of these games are not really available unless you find the original discs or whatever

surprise like Namco will randomly make some of them available on different platforms like miraculously Tales of Symphonia has been ported to Steam and that is I think the most popular game so maybe it shouldn't be a surprise but that is a almost 20 year old game that is now playable but most of these are stuck on the original

platforms I think only the most recent games have been ported to Steam and later platforms Yeah this I've heard weird things about the Steam port of Symphonia I've never played it myself because I actually like legitimately keep around my TV and GameCube and copy of Tales of Symphonia from college so I can always just play it that way

and I'm weirdly diehard in that way but I've heard odd things about Symphonia Steamport and it being just a little bit strange in some places. So your mileage may vary. I've always told people start with Vesparia on the switch because

not only is that like a good switch RPG to just pick away at but it was kind of the culmination of what I would call like that version of the Tales Combat that Sinfonia combat and stuff. It was kind of like where they really hit their stride with it. And I think that cast is very compelling. And I think the story gets going pretty fast. It doesn't have as much of a build. Tales games kind of always have a bit of a buildup that they need to do early on before they're

like, okay, here's, here's the story you're going to really care about. You know, here's the non-traditional fantasy stuff. But Vesparia is a good jumping on point. Burz area is also very good. If you find yourself wanting to play a game about an imprisoned woman who turns into a werewolf and wants to kill everyone like that's velvet's a really cool interesting protagonist um or honestly once a rise is out i i know a lot of people who have told me i've never played a tales game and i'm going to start with a rise and i think if you are just looking to play one of the games in the series playing the most modern one will probably be pretty good but if you want to see what the older ones are like definitely like vesparia yeah yeah i think

Vesperia is a really good choice. And what I'm looking forward to in a rise is that return to sort of deliberately designed geography. The 2010s is a big era where a lot of the traversal of world maps and stuff got really, really bland. And I think Vesperia, sort of the trilogy of Symphonia Abyss and Vesparia represents the 2000s, like, Tales of Studio, tales experience really, really well. And because Vesperia is absolutely the most accessible of those right now, it's on just about everything, I think. So, yeah, Vesparia is a great place.

Brasaria is also readily available. There's a steam version of that. And, and it is, like you say, it's a cool cast. They, you know, you get to play a cast of assholes. And, and then the two who are totally fish out of water and are the goody two shoes that are trying to deal with this group of jerks. And, and Berzeria is also, from what I've played of a rise, it feels like a good midway point between some of the newer combat mechanics and a little bit of the,

older stuff from from the the tales of studio era yeah yeah so those were our recommendations and i think that's the end of our podcast about tales of victor uh thank you so much for supporting the show and choosing this topic i was happy to jump back into it i forgot that i was a tales of fan until you reminded me and that i probably spent a thousand hours playing these games in my lifetime so far and now i want to play more of them so uh you did the good job at that so victor perfect what can you promote what do you want to promote on this podcast? Sure. You can follow me on Twitter at Victor E. Hunter. I'm also on Nadia Oxford's Final Fantasy 14 podcast, Charlie and Dropouts over on the Axe of the Blood God Patreon. Get it a week in advance if you're on the Patreon there. It comes out on

the free feed a week later. So that's been a lot of fun. Me and Mike Williams and not I have a great time talking FF14. And play Dragalia Lost. I'm the voice of the main character, Udn. Awesome. Eric, thank you for joining us first time, guys. We'd love to have you back. What do you want to plug?

Yeah, so by day, I am a reporter over a destructoid. You can find all of my news articles there, as well as a lot of reviews I'm doing right now, because it's the fall in video games, and there's just a billion of them coming out. out so got a lot of those lately and then by by evenings and night I co-host a retrospective podcast called Norm Dfm which as you can tell by its name started out as a mass effect retrospective podcast and then moved into Dragon Age jade empire the last of us and now we're

currently on Final Fantasy 10 so we're just kind of like a we play through the games and cut them up into little segments and talk about each one of them with a bunch of guests we've had a lot of different guests on over the years and stuff. So if you like any of those games and want to like re-listen to them and re-experience them, that's kind of what our goal is. And we critique a lot of that and talk about daddy issues and RPGs because Final Fantasy 10, the daddy issue RPG. It was about dads before every game was, I think.

Yeah. Yeah, the original dad problems game. But thanks to you, both of you for being on the show. Yeah, thank you for having me. So big thanks to Victor Hunter for sports. sponsoring the podcast being a top-tier patron in choosing this topic. It was so much fun to talk about. And thanks again to Eric Van Allen for being on the show.

We'll be sure to have him back. He was a great guest. But as for us, if you want to check out more of what we do and get all these episodes one week ahead of time and add free, please go to patreon.com slash retronauts. Sign up for three bucks. You'll get just that.

But if you want to hear more episodes, sign up at the $5 level. You'll get two bonus episodes every month. Those are full-length bonus episodes. We've been doing them since the beginning of 2020. So if you've never heard them, you have quite a few to catch up on. friend. And again, that is at the $5 level at patreon.com slash retronauts. And along with that,

you get a weekly column by Diamond Fight that comes with a podcast as well. So there's more bonuses on top of that. And we have more tiers on top of that if you want to sign up to get t-shirts or to sponsor an episode as well, just like Victor Hunter. So please check us out at patreon.com slash retronauts. As for me, I've been your host for this one. Bob Mackey, you can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo and my other podcast, by the way, is Talking Simpsons. It's all happening at the Talking Simpsons network at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. There's a bunch of podcasts under that umbrella. There's Talking Simpsons, the chronological exploration of the Simpsons.

There's a lot of a cartoon. We look at a different cartoon of a different series every week. And there's also mini-series happening behind the paywall at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. Like our newest series, all about Batman the animated series. It's a limited mini-series featuring our 10 favorite episodes of Batman, the animated series. It's only behind the $5 paywall at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. That's it for us this week. We'll see you next time for another episode of Retronauts. Take care.