/vr/ - Retro Games

>>8110549
haven't played the phantasia games, but from the pick i would say star ocean. true active battle system, party choices impact story in a major way creating purpose for multiple playthroughs, wide range of skills to make helpful items for long dungeons, lots of hard side quests, sharp and consistent difficulty increase,

what do anons think of phantasia? worth playing?

>>8110549
I'm sure it was Cress..

>>8110549
Old Days: Star Ocean
For about 18 years: Tales of

t.fig fan of both series and played damn near them all stopping after Graces F, and Star Ocean 4. Star Ocean 3 was fun, but that was it for the series and Tri-Ace spent its money interest and talent elsewhere from that point. Tales of Rebirth and above were dynamite titles that put Tri-Ace to shame.

>>8110583
>what do anons think of phantasia? worth playing?
Oh, it's definitely worth playing. I stongly suggest you to play the PSX version, since it improved all the things the original game did right and added lots of extra content, a new character that can be crazy useful to farm special items and also got rid of the few pad parts of the original game, like for example Chester's lack of special attacs and made the Basilisk quest MUCH easier to finish.

>>8110549
Both are amazing games, and two of the best on the system. My absolute favorites and i can't recommend them enough.

>>8110678
>I stongly suggest you to play the PSX version

No, don't do this. Play the original SNES version, not a watered down easier and inferior version. The original experience is best.

>>8110549
>phantasia
janky as fuck and kind of mediocre, has a very by-the-books plot
>star ocean
gives you a cool premise (sci-fi! traveling between worlds! technology!) and then completely wastes it by having you spend 99% of the game on a medieval planet that leaves everything indistinguishable from a regular jrpg.
winner is tales of phantasia

>>8110903
Pay no attention to this person. This is the schizo that comes in every tales/star ocean thread and spouts the same garbage.

>>8110630
On GBA it was. The official romanized spelling was Cless Alvein until GBA's Cress Albane (same goes for Klarth becoming Claus)

>>8110903
You always say this shit, do you ever see anyone fucking agree with you? We Star Trek always have them going down to low-developed worlds, you're missing the fucking point.
>>8110940
Exactly, EVERY FUCKING THREAD

Neither, ToD > SO2 > either of the first games

>>8110987
The PSX games were when both teams were fleshing out dramatically and in different directions. We are not talking about those games and beyond.

Tale Phantasia...come back... has the prototype novel of this ever leaked, and if so, where?

>>8111023
>will tale phantasia ever be released
Do you know how fucking pissed Tri-Ace was at Namco? No fucking way, they won't talk/release it out of fucking spite and Bamco coming to sue them to death over them.

>>8111045
Explain?

>>8111746
Wolf Team, the original developers of the game that became Tales of Phantasia, had a guy that wrote a prototype novel that was to be the basis for the game called "Tale Phantasia" (the novel version of which possibly leaked on the net somewhere). Namco ignored them, fired them (if I recall correctly), severely altered the plot and details of the novel, and retitled the game to be "Tales of Phantasia". They also hired Kosuke Fujishima to redo all of Wolf's art for Tale. The Wolf Team members behind Tale all regrouped and formed Tri-Ace, who then made Star Ocean for SNES.

>>8112204
Here is the original, intended art (by WolfTeam's Yoshiaki Inagaki) for Tale Phantasia before it was replaced and revised by Fujishima for Tales of. Klarth was also in, though known as "The Green Summoner".

Note that Inagaki also designed the sprites and graphics that made it into the final SNES version of Tales of Phantasia. These sprites were redesigned and replaced by Kosuke Fujishima for subsequent versions of the game, such as on PS1.

>>8112220
>>8112204
Neat, thanks for sharing.

I never played Star Ocean but I really loved Tales of Phantasia fan translation as a kid on the SNES emulator.

I'm way older now, should I play Star Ocean?

>>8112431
Yeah

>>8110647
>Star Ocean 3 was fun
Nigga what?

>>8110759
Oh, don't get me wrong, the original version is also very good, but like all first versions it's very unpolished on some areas and the PSX version fixed all of it's earlier mistakes.
Avoid the GBA version like the plague, tough. Kangaroo wars, my black ass.

>>8110903
totally agree

>>8110549
Cless was pants-on-head retarded and an absolute worthless dumbfuck. Tales took a while to find its legs and get good.

>>8112479
It was fun enough to play through the whole thing, do the seraphic gate, and get to lvl 155 of the infinite tower to get to lenneth. Then I couldn't go further, too hard.
>>8113618
For some reason that was a thing in 90s Japan, which was a step of of crybaby over war dipshits from the 80s.

>>8112204
That explains a lot. I always wondered why Star Ocean and Phantasia had a very similar feel and both released late in the snes life.

>>8112220
>Bowman the bowshooter

Can I just say that I love the fact that one of the Super Famicom's few instances of in-depth, non-Satellaview voice acting involves Robert Belgrade getting his wake-up coffee in the first minute of Star Ocean?
>>8112204
>>8112220
This right here is why I don't play the rereleases, even if >>8113370 might technically be true; Namco's disrepect towards the writer/programmer means that the Super Famicom version will remain closest to the unreleased novel as it's going to get, since every change afterwards deviates from the original vision.
>>8114886
Fun fact: Final Fantasy VII was apparently going to be Square's answer to them and have an even bigger cartridge size (8MB over 6MB) before development shifted to PlayStation.

>>8116110
Star Ocean was in dire need of a bigger cart, too.
Even with the biggest one available and additional chips it felt horribly unfinished and the content stretched and padded out (fucking Mt. Mertox...).
One has to wonder how they even would've managed to cram in the additional overworld of the final planet if they already filled out everything available.

>>8116110
And it's probably the worst compressed audio you can think of and I honestly heard clearer voice samples from a freaking PC speaker. (seriously, how the fuck did they manage that in the Might&Magic Xeen games?)

TOP. Full vocal music, more tactical combat, better written story, nicer graphics.

Star ocean had one of the worst transitions to 3d in all of gaming

>>8116110
>still internally based on the original in-game sprites despite the graphical upgrade
This is why I don't get hacks that try replacing them with the stylized Amano versions, it was even confirmed that Amano drew his versions of the characters after the pixel artist's, at least in FFVI's case.

>>8116973
I mean, I think it's in great part due to the incoherence between the in-game sprites and the menu portraits; the portraits are taken from Amano's illustrations (with a few liberties, such as Terra's hair being tinted green, for instance), which in a few cases (Locke's especially) explicitly contradict the sprite designs. When the full illustrations from which the portraits are taken are compared to the in-game art, the discrepancies are then multiplied tenfold, leaving the smooth-brained in the position of needing to reconcile these contradictions.

>>8116973
Yeah, if someone is credited as "image illustrator," not "character designer," then guess what -- they didn't design the characters.

>>8116973
This was my biggest disappointment with T-Edition. It had the promise to be above that crap, but instead the current versions replace the default sprites with Amano edits. At least make it optionally swappable like all the other outfits if you're gonna be 'tistic enough to pull that stunt. It's like the evil Richter in Saturn Symphony of the Night, sprites just ain't right.

>>8117107
I actually did not know Yoshitaka Amano stopped being credited as Character Designer as of Final Fantasy V. Explains a lot, really.
>>8117481
The big problem with Richter's Saturn sprite is that it doesn't even match the design in the two instances you see him in that outfit in the PlayStation version (Maria's thought bubble and in the Colisseum). The Saturn sprites artists honestly do clash with the original game - they didn't even know how to draw the new horse that Maria rides in on anatomically correctly and hoped you wouldn't notice its alien legs. Anyway, T-Edition fails my "three strikes and you're out" rule no matter who swears by it: 1) Gilgamesh replaces Siegfried, 2) All that anachronistic and out-of-series music/references in FFVI's soundfont is going way overboard, and 3) what you said.
On Topic: How's First Departure/R compared to OG Star Ocean?

>>8117779
>On Topic: How's First Departure/R compared to OG Star Ocean?
It's largely an improvement. It's pretty much entirely consistent with Second Story now in both style and mechanics. It does away with the weird not-overworld corridors of the original. And while First Departure's character designs are animu trash, R fixes it with better character art.