So I've been playing Tales of Phantasia for about the last year on and off.

Yesterday I finally beat it.

Now the reason I played it was because of Tales of Symphonia, on the Game cube, was probably one of the best RPG's I've ever played. In fact I liked it so much that I played it again after we beat it (supports 2 players). After that experience I thought that the "tales of" franchise might be something of a safe bet.

Good lord was I wrong. Overall Tales of Phantasia was a decent game, but when compared to Tales of Symphonia it was a festering pile of shit. The English localisation of it is probably mostly to blame, I don't know what room full of monkeys they paid to do this, but they reused almost 60% of the location names from Symphonia. It made me feel like somebody took the Symphonia game, mixed it with 50% larks vomit, and then resold it as new.

And storyline/translation issues aside, the battle engine was a joke. I understand this is a port of a game released on the SNES and PS1, but for the love of god couldn't you guys fix it so the battle doesn't enter super slow motion every time it ends. There's no excuse for that in the current generation of hardware.

Uncompelling story line, confusing gameplay, and a battle engine so dated I felt like I was on drugs. Way to go guys. Brilliant work here.