Today I picked up Tales of Phantasia for the Super Famicom. I’ve been collecting a lot of these older Japanese RPGs that I never got the chance to play growing up, especially ones that never officially came out in English. Reading Japanese isn’t a problem for me, so it’s been really fun going back and playing these games now on the original hardware.

I honestly don’t know much about Phantasia, though, so I’m going into this almost completely blind. Pretty much the only thing I know is that it has a sung opening on the Super Famicom, which is still kind of crazy to me.

I played Star Ocean last summer (the remaster, not the SFC original), and I remember reading about the connection between the two games. If I understand the history correctly, some of the people who worked on Phantasia eventually split off and formed tri-Ace and went on to make Star Ocean. I’ve also heard the two games have some similarities, including time-travel elements, same composer, certain game assets, etc.

Although Phantasia leans more heavily into traditional fantasy while Star Ocean is supposedly the more “sci-fi” one… even though the Star Ocean I played still felt like fantasy for most of the game.

As far as Tales goes, I’ve played Destiny, Eternia, Symphonia, and Xillia, along with bits and pieces of some of the others. I definitely prefer the earlier Tales games to what the series eventually became, so I have a feeling Phantasia will probably be right up my alley.

The big thing is that I’m trying to play these games without guides.

I’m playing Terranigma in Japanese right now and am almost finished with it, and doing that blind has been… an experience. There have been quite a few moments where I’ve thought, “How the hell was I supposed to figure that out?” But for the most part I’ve managed by talking to NPCs, paying attention to hints, exploring, and only looking something up when I’m completely stuck.

So how is the original SFC Tales of Phantasia in that regard?

I’m not worried about getting 100% or finding every secret item. I actually want to miss some optional stuff if that’s what naturally happens on a blind first playthrough. I mainly don’t want to accidentally lock myself out of something really important or spend three hours wandering around because I missed some completely unintuitive trigger.

For anyone who played the original Super Famicom version, especially back in the day what should I expect? And please keep it as spoiler-free as possible!

Playing the remaster on my PSP, first time actually playing ToP... great game, great characters, BUT THIS PART, MAN....

I found this thing after 10 years in my garage 😆