I'd like to start out this review with a much-needed truth. Pre-Symphonia Tales of games are bad. They're just not that well designed. Phantasia was tolerable because it was their first game, but everything in between was bad. Somehow, I forgot that and picked up Tales of Destiny 2. Except it wasn't Tales of Destiny 2. In fact, there are 2 Tales of Destiny 2 games because localizing real titles is hard. Just ask Square.
In reality, the original title of the game is Tales of Eternia, but since Eternia is He-Man territory, there was some copyright issue so they made it seem like a sequel to Tales of Destiny which was released 3 years prior. Except it gets confusing now because they did eventually release a real sequel to Tales of Destiny afterwards on the Playstation 2. Confused much? So let me be clear, I'm reviewing Tales of Eternia for the Playstation which came out in 2000, and it is bad. I wish I had played Tales of Destiny 2 on the Playstation 2, which is probably better.
One of the main reasons pre-Symphonia Tales of games sucked so badly was because of the combat. It was frantic and uncontrollable. Attacking involves you automatically running forward, hitting the enemy, and then running back. However, this motion is largely ineffective and you'll just be holding down the direction pad some more and attacking or chaining abilities. I'm not sure why the automated running is necessary but you'll be fighting it the entire game.
While all that is going on, battles tend to get clustered pretty quickly. When all the spells and abilities are flying around, it gets really hard to tell what is going on. Or enemies will gang up on you, launching attack after attack which will stun-lock you into dying. Often times, a group of enemies can be handled with ease one time, and then will destroy you the next encounter, making battles spontaneous at times. But don't worry, you'll get a lot of practice with the stupid-high encounter rate.
Dodging enemy fire can be difficult since almost no enemy clearly telegraphs its attack well enough for you to react. I found myself getting into a pattern of using a few moves and then blocking, hoping to absorb some impending damage.
Since this is a bad game (I double-checked, it is), the AI has to be stupid. It's practically law that if your game sucks, the AI must suck. Basically the programmers couldn't program anything smarter than themselves, which in this game is near rock-bottom, which leads to mages running up to the front lines for no real reason, or healers that insist on standing next to or within the enemy's attack range. They'll get hit, stand up, and stay in the same spot, casting, only to get hit again. Watching this process repeat itself throughout the battle might cause you to develop a twitch.
The story has more holes in it than a screen door. After a while, it gets hard to care about. It's poorly written and poorly developed. The characters don't do much for me either. You learn about them, but they don't really change or grow, their presence just wears on your soul more and more.
There has to be something said about some of the dungeon designs, as they are terrible. There are the straight-forward ones which are customary in role-playing games, go through the area, find the treasure, kill the boss, simple. Tales of Eternia decided to take it one step forward and splice in some annoying.
One level has you solving a variation of the same problem/solution 10 times in a row, and another level is more like a game board that has you spinning a game piece to advance. Now, it would be fine if any of these things were implemented correctly, but they weren't. The 10 levels of problem solving gets tedious after 3 levels and the game board is so random, that the entire dungeon is based on luck. Turns will have you going backwards, and some points won't let you advance until you roll and arbitrary number range with each wrong role taking away more and more HP. Others will having you solving puzzles, most of which aren't self-explanatory as to what the goal is.
There are two voice options, English and the mute button and I can't recommend that mute button enough. The English dubbing is nails-on-chalkboard awful. With the exception of a few minor characters, every line is just pure stupidity. None of the actors seem to get into character, ever. The closest we get to effort is Meredy, who sounds like a lobotomized koala. So like I said, the mute button is your friend, don't stray far from it.
My favorite line in the entire game went something like: 'she's trying to destroy the world.... and that's bad.' The game was almost worth it for that spoken line. Almost.
The whole game might as well be on mute, the soundtrack ranges from mediocre to awful. The underwater music is literally a few noises put in a loop. What's worse is the first note is accented, so once the loop is done, you have a few seconds of quiet before it comes startling back. The pause is just long enough to lull you into a false sense of thinking 'maybe it'll just be peace and quiet' and then the loop starts up again. There was just no effort here. I think someone rooted through the stock music pile and threw random tracks against the wall and went with what stuck.
Graphics are colorful enough. Most things make sense when you look at them, like a 32bit version of an SNES game, which isn't inherently bad. But the one thing I have to complain about, and this is in the top 5 weirdest things I've ever complained about: almost every single map is designed to have you running at an angle.
Very rarely will you find yourself running straight up and down or left and right, it'll almost always be a diagonal. Now you wonder, why is that a complaint? Because the game doesn't support analog sticks. Can I explain further? Yes I will. You see, before analog sticks, people had to use the directional pad to move around, usually in 4 basic directions plus the 4 diagonal directions. Pressing your finger down on one directional button is fine. Pressing your finger down on two directional buttons is uncomfortable. Pressing your finger down on two directional buttons for 20 hours is downright PAINFUL.
It's also very hard to maneuver your character around, which is odd. There's a lot of things your character can get stuck on just by grazing it. I've honestly never had this much trouble just trying to run around in a game. Every pathway either seems very restrictive or has that one stray pixel that'll grab on to you.
The game will run you about 25-30 hours and about a week of therapy. Is it a terrible game? No. Is it worth playing? Only to those with a fetish for pain. If you're looking for a Tales of game to play, Symphonia, Vesperia, the Abyss and Graces are all out there. Track one of those down and enjoy yourself.
No comments:
Post a Comment