Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology

by Derek Borges - 2008/03/10 9:33pm

When you begin this game and select the obvious option of 'New Game', you're prompted to pick your character's gender, hair style, hair colour and character class. A lot of the hairstyles are very simplistic and overly zany, making your character's eyes look slightly over proportioned and incredibly strange for a regular Tales veteran. The fact that you cannot choose your own set of peeps for the character is a slight annoyance to anybody expecting a full makeover option for their main protagonists.

After completing the basic steps, you're awoken by quite the annoying creature named Mormo, who will become your companion throughout the game that only mentions you as his partner, which can be irritating, if you can see the irony in it. There's really not even any point in naming your character, simply because no-one even calls your character by any name, unless of course, you feel like making your name partner. You may get a few honorable mentions as 'partner' but soon after, you're just referred to as a blank space.

The actual game looks great at the very beginning, but as you venture nearer to the Doplund Saga, everything suddenly becomes very bland, bleak and deserted. One of the main attractions of the game is being able to change your character's clothes, but once you reach Doplund, the prices of clothing shoot through the roof, and you're really bound not to care what else is for sale, because you'll want what's best, which will cost you nearly all of your hard-earned money, another frustrating implementation.

The narrative of Radiant Mythology really loses it's credibility once you find out what the 'World Eater' is and blow one of it's many nodes to kingdom come. It becomes very straightforward and excrutiatingly linear from that point onwards: Destroy the nodes and beat the hell out of the 'Mastermind'.

Fame points are awarded for completing missions, which allow you to access the adjacent storyline missions once you've gathered a decent amount of them. Fame points aren't used for anything at all apart from this feature, they really only serve as a limiter so that you can't shoot through the game without reaching certain points in the games level structure.

When Tales of the World's battle system is compared to it's counterpart Tales of the Abyss' battle system, it is ultimately a complete disaster. The combat is so much slower, and isn't nearly as engrossing, with countless hours spent sifting through menu after menu, battling hordes of randomised encounters.

Most of the Tales series have something to add to their combat system to enhance the experience, but this game really had nothing special. Though Overlimit and Unison attacks were implemented well, they're basically the same thing as each other, which is another disappointment.

Battles can be very long and ardous, and lead you to feel comfortable with only limiting yourself to one move, limiting your own skills and causing the player to become very prolonged with his or her self belief in one button combination. The game basically teaches you how to cheat the system, by taking advantage of the NPC's blindspots, running away and nailing them with a long range move or attacking them with a move that gets a large number of hits down before they can turn around, a disaster in two parts then.

Once you acquaint yourself with other Tales characters, you will find that they have a lot more unique settings, and that they're usually more fun to play as. An annoying thing about using the other characters however is that you can't equip/remove items from them at all, leaving you to watch and gleen at their respectable arsenal. Not long after you reach about level 30 and get your hands on some of the radiant equipment, it will become very infuriating that you can't play as a Tales character without your party getting themselves killed through bad level design and shoddy weapon and armour allocations.

Having to select a mission to complete so that you can move forward in the game was a pretty bothersome aspect of gameplay, as previously aforementioned. You can't even advance in the main story of the game if you don't gather an adequate number of fame points through some of the older or side missions.

What's more is that the dungeons are very repetitive, and it's a real nuisance to go on search missions and specific elimination missions, because you'll always feel like you've just been around that corner, with the addition that sometimes there is only one monster of that type in the entire fourth floor dungeon, and you'll have to wait an age for them to respawn and kill them.

Radiants soundtrack is also a very tedious affair to listen to bar some of the dungeon music that is encountered later in the game. The main battle theme is an excpetionally fruity experience but finds it hard to blend in well with the rest of the theme and style of play. The soundtrack starts to get really repetitive once you reach Doplund as well, it's like listening to the same music, over and over again until your ears bleed and you start to cry havoc, its that bad.

The replay value isn't very great either, adding another long rusty nail to the titles wooden coffin. You carry over everything from your previous playthrough, including stats, weapons, armor, titles, and money. There's no Grade Shop or anything to buy extra stuff with to enhance your second playthrough which is a shame, and so no incentive to replay.

Everything is just given to you, along with a title that lets you gain more experience after your first playthrough, making the second journey considerably easier, but isn't the game supposed to become harder after the first completion.

But on a more delightful note, the game will make Tales of Destiny fans glow with joy and pour their little hearts out, as a vast majority of the game's cast are the Tales of Destiny crew. Pretty much the only thing that will lift up the Doplund Saga for you.

There's also the addition of somewhat of a job system. The classes it features are Warrior, Priest, Mage, Thief, Swordsman, Fighter, Magic Swordsman, Ninja, and Bishop. It's really one of the most appealing things about the game, and all you'll ever use grade for. It's definitely interesting playing as some of the classes that are new to the series, due to the fact that some of these jobs were not put in with the free run battle system.

The game is acceptable for something to play every now and then when you're bored, or to learn a little bit more about your favourite Tales characters with new voiceovers. Other than that, it's pretty much in the same context of a boombox set on repeat with a remixed album that's been played down, not good.

Basically, if you're expecting it to stand up to games like Tales of the Abyss and Tales of Symphonia, which set the bar for the Tales series, you're going to be thoroughly disappointed.