December 21st was a busy days for Japanese gamers, for the PSP gamers there, two heavy weights look set to spice up the rather saturated sales of the system in the country now. While Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops already won tons of praises from the Western media for its breathtaking graphics and innovative gameplay, Namco is certainly confident of its 3rd Tales of series on the PSP to do as well, if not better. Given that Tales of Phantasia: Full Voice Edition, an almost faithful port of the original PlayStation game, shot straight to the top of the Japanese chart on its debut back in September.

Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology is an original entry based on characters from the previous games in the series. The impressive 3D graphics already drawn various praises and looks set to become one of PSP better looking games as well. Japanese gaming magazine gave it a 7.5/10 score and although the game was released only days ago, some Chinese websites already posted their own impression of the game, here’s a summary of their impression so far.

While the game looked impressive to them, there are certain areas that the game disappoint them, most notably, the graphics are probably too colourful for the PSP to render and as a result, you will notice the remains of certain objects even after they disappeared from the screen during fast paced actions.

Another downside is the characters seem motionless as their eyes and face display no changes at all no matter what the situation is. The reviewers compared the game to Sony own Brave Story: Aratanaru Tabijin, where the characters display different expressions on certain situations. In short, even the 2D characters of previous “Tales of” games look much better.

On the music, fans of the series will surely smile as the game seems to retain most of the music from the previous series. While Tales of Phantasia is being released with full voice, Namco ironically decides to not doing the same for Radiant Mythology. Apart from the game cut scenes, there’s almost no voice-overs during gameplay, some monsters don’t even have sound effects attached to them.

On the other hand, the reviewers are pretty happy with the fact that you can actually see the changes to your character’s appearance after changing their outfits. Beside that, a new additions to the series is that weapons can now be produced by combining items.

The fighting system should be familiar to those who played Tales of the Abyss, where players have the freedom to move during battles. However, the reviewers are unhappy that it’s less satisfying due to the fact that some of the moves don’t seem to “touch” the enemies at all. This was made worst by the lack of sound effects on certain moves.

As for the story itself, the game features plenty of missions, in fact, according to the reviewers, almost everything is mission-based. You will be asked to look for people, save somebody, gathers items, invited to kill some monsters, etc. And there seems to be plenty revisit to do in the game world, making the game feel boring.

Despite filling the entire articles with various dissatisfaction, the reviewers seem happy to recommend the game to everyone although fans of the series might feel disappointed in one way or another.

Posted in PSP on Saturday, December 23rd, 2006 at 1:11 am |
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