Weekly Update #42: Tales of Phantasia Complete!

October 12-18, 2025

I never thought I’d see the day, but Tales of Phantasia has finally been completed. It only took six months 😅 I’m just grateful to still have a friend as an adult that gave so much of his time to play through such a long game with me. My full review is in the game review section below but TLDR; I thought it was a great old-school RPG that’s missing some modern QOL features. I also had another big week for acquisitions. Let’s start with that first as usual.

Game Acquisitions

I ended up getting the full seven-pack of Fanatical’s Build Your Own Story Rich Bundle which I rarely do. I was initially going to ignore the bundle altogether, but then I saw Just a To the Moon Series Beach Episode in it which was in my wishlist. I’m also a sucker for a good story in games as I’ve mentioned before and there were enough well-reviewed games here to spring for the highest tier. I also bought Chained Echoes which I had been waiting to hit $10 since release and it finally hit that price point last week. I used my Steam wallet credit on it though which is why the money spent doesn’t reflect that purchase. The rest of the games were freebies. Amazon is giving away a lot of spooky games this month for Halloween so you’ll see a few more in my acquisitions over the next couple of posts.

# of Games: 13

Total Money Spent: $20.07

Price/Game: $1.54

Game Recaps

You can ignore the Monster Camp entry. I was just getting the game set up and reading through collectible stuff. Anyway, Tales of Phantasia has been completed in yet another marathon six-hour session and got a decent amount of Expedition 33 in too. This is despite taking a few days off afterward to edit the videos, write this blog post, and catch up on some sleep. In Tales of Phantasia, we defeated Origin to obtain the last piece of the tria, found Dhaos’ castle, fought through way too many floors, and defeated the big guy himself for the final time. In Expedition 33, I completed Act I which unfortunately meant the end of dear Gustave and the introduction of Verso. I also unlocked the ability to swim which really opened up the world map more. After exploring the various islands to see what I can find, I continued to the main quest in the Forgotten Battlefield. After fighting through there, I picked up the last party member. Now I'm just exploring the new area before heading to the next main story quest. Check out my playthroughs! Like last week, there are way too many parts to embed here, and they’re being spaced out to just an hour a day on my channel so not everything is public yet. I’ll drop one episode of each game here and link to the playlists where you can find the rest as they become available. The Tales of Phantasia finale is scheduled to go up November 5th. 

Game Reviews

Tales of Phantasia

Tales of Phantasia is the first game in a long running series of JRPGs published by Bandai Namco. It follows a group of young heroes whose world is threatened by a powerful being known as Dhaos. After losing their first battle against him, the main character Cless is sent back to the past before Dhaos was considered all-powerful to recruit the aforementioned heroes and learn the magic needed to stop him once and for all.

In contrast to most RPGs of the time (the original game came out on the SNES in 1995, although I played the PS1 remake released in 1998), the combat is played out in real-time instead of being turn-based. I’m normally more of a turn-based fan so I was initially hesitant about the combat system, but I quickly found that my fears were unfounded. The combat feels very good in this game, especially with a co-op partner to help out instead of relying exclusively on the AI. Every character has a basic slash and thrust attack, as well as being able to assign four spells or abilities known in this series as artes. These can range wildly from a simple upward sword thrust to summoning a fire spirit to a devastating meteor storm. For the AI party members, you can deselect artes you don’t want them to use as well as alter their behavior to be more aggressive, defensive, or focus on support or healing. You can also pause the battle to select specific artes you want them to perform or use items. It was all very intimidating at first, but you really get in the groove with it after a while. After defeating the first boss at the end of the first dungeon in the jail cells, I felt more confident in my ability to make it through the game.

Besides the real-time combat, the rest of the game has all the standard RPG tropes that were long established before even this came out. You wander from town to town fighting monsters along the way, buy items and equipment from various shops, talk to NPCs to get quests, then fight through a dungeon to get something needed to advance the story and repeat. This might sound like I’m knocking on the game, but this flow is one of the things I like most about RPGs. The story is serviceable, and the villain is pretty one note until the very end. The characters are a highlight though, and the skits you can watch with them after every story beat were always enjoyable.

My biggest problems with this game probably just come down to age. There were many modern conveniences that are missing which is understandable since it’s a game from the 90s. There is no quest log, so good luck trying to remember everything every NPC told you unless you want to write it down. There is a world map that marks your location and the major towns which is nice, but there is no indication of where you’re supposed to go on it. There is no minimap and it’s very easy to get lost in the many dungeons in the game. A lot of the puzzles or paths forward were very unclear and I found myself multiple times having to look up what I was supposed to do or where I was supposed to go next. The graphics are mostly 2D spritework with a 3D overworld and some spell effects. The overworld looked pretty bland which makes sense given the hardware it had to work with, but everything else looked pretty good. The game also started feeling like it was dragging towards the end, but that’s pretty typical for games of this length that don’t stray from the formula too much.

In the grand scheme of things, these are nitpicks in an overall great JRPG of the era. It was made even more fun with the addition of a co-op partner. I imagine the game would’ve been somewhat less enjoyable without voicing all the characters together and having to micromanage the party members in combat. If you’re interested in JRPGs and are not intimidated by the age or real-time combat, I would say this game still holds up today and is an easy recommendation. Just try to play the PS1 version with the fan translation patch as it is superior to the SNES and GBA versions.

Time to beat (Main+Sides) - 58h:24m
Rating – 8/10

TV/Movie Recaps

Here is everything I watched last week:

·       Futurama Season 10 Episodes 7-10 (all caught up, show ongoing)

·       The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury

·       The Chronicles of Riddick

·       Splinter Cell: Deathwatch Season 1 Episodes 1-4 (still watching, show ongoing)

I didn’t get to any anime like I originally planned to. I’ve been so busy editing and stuff that it took me way longer than I expected to catch up to the latest season of Futurama. I also didn’t realize that the Splinter Cell show was coming out in full last week so I just started that too. Please make a new game in this franchise Ubisoft, it’s been 12 years! Anyway, Futurama had another enjoyable season. It still feels weird since I thought the story wrapped up quite nicely a few seasons ago, but money talks so it keeps going. Chronicles of Riddick was much more hardcore sci-fi than Pitch Black. The first movie felt pretty grounded despite being on an alien planet and Riddick being able to see in the dark. Even Dark Fury seemed pretty normal despite taking place on an alien spaceship. This movie went all out with full planetary invasions and a space religion centered around death to descend into the Underverse. It felt much more ridiculous this time around. Still an enjoyable movie, just a weird one.

Conclusion/Upcoming

My first game completion since July. It’s nice to get another review out there. Doubly so since it was actually a good game. I’ll miss the Tales of Phantasia characters, but I’m sure there are some good characters in every Tales of game. The next Tales game we’re planning on playing together is Tales of Eternia, known as Tales of Destiny II in the West. It’s going to be a while before we get to it though. My co-op partner was feeling a little burnt out by the end of it so we’re going to take turns picking some smaller games to play next. I hope you all enjoyed following along as I rambled about a 30-year-old RPG for the past six months. I really enjoyed my time with it.

My plan for this week is to finish up Splinter Cell: Deathwatch then start the second season of Gen V. If last week was any indication, I won’t get to any other shows besides that. The next movie on my list is to finish up the Riddick movies with the aptly named Riddick. There are rumors that Vin Diesel wants to make a new movie in the series but for now, that’s the last one. On the gaming side, I’m continuing my Expedition 33 playthrough. This is easily my GOTY so far, I’ve enjoyed practically everything about it. Assuming my co-op partner is feeling up to it, the next game on our list is going to be Monster Prom 2: Monster Camp. Quite a departure from what we just played 😂 I got the second and third games in the series from giveaways but never picked up 1 or 4. I don’t think they’re all that connected though and play more like party games. It should be a fun time. That’s all for now, thanks for reading!

Backlog total: 3,654 (+9)