Tales of the Fetch Quest
Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology is neither radiant nor my-thological, but it is almost pure fanservice. Shame it's not an actual Tales game, though.
Published: August 1, 2007
The game attempts to add a little more depth to things by allowing you to cook and craft a handful of clothes and items, and to be perfectly honest it's a fairly deep system that requires you to learn how to coax key ingredients or materials from their baser sources and as you level up, you're allowed to cook or stitch or hammer together some decent gear. It won't completely replace the stores in the game (especially not if you want to cash in the points you get from doing quests for nifty clothes and weapons that help change your appearance a little more), but at least it gives you something to do in between all those guild requests.
One of the biggest areas where the game drops the ball, though, is in the multiplayer. More than a few RPGs have given co-op run-dungeon crawls a go, from Dungeon Maker to Blade Dancer, and it would have seriously eased some of the repetition if you could hack enemies up with a friend -- especially since the console versions of the Tales series have supported two-player. Instead, you can tweak the basic behaviors of your party, setting their range, aggressiveness and basic roles when you go into battle, and while it's a great little touch, it can't beat even a local Ad-Hoc crawl with a friend. Instead, you get to... um... trade stuff. Yay.
If nothing else, the AI in the game handles itself fairly well. Thanks to the manual tweaks you can make and with a little forethought into how you craft your party (which eventually will include characters from the previous Tales games), most battles are nice and quick, to the tune of just a few seconds if you've got everyone set up right, and since the game jumps from battles to exploration fairly quickly, load times aren't really an issue.
It's a technical achievement that carries over at least on a basic level to the rest of the game. The voice acting (when it's there) is typical stuff from the series (though not quite as good as Tales of the Abyss), but the music is the familiar blend of high-energy battle tunes and more laid-back in-town bits. None of it is exemplary, but it certainly does the trick and of course the battles themselves are rife with grunts and shouts and attacks.
Visually, things are fairly solid too. The PSP isn't exactly a texture powerhouse, apparently, so the game balances things out with painted backdrops and simple town details, but they work well enough. The art style for the characters mirrors their original games (there's even a little joke about it between characters), but while exploring dungeons and especially in fights, things are in 3D, move quickly and look like a pared-down version of what was seen on the PS2. Given that the games aren't exactly breathtaking most of the time, it means a nice, solid translation -- if pretty pedestrian in the actual presentation.
The bottom line is that Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology is just a boring fetch quest brightened up by a great localization and characters that will be familiar only to fans of the series, which is fine because this is little more than a fanservice tribute to all those folks to had to wait for the games to come Stateside, but for anyone who isn't already a convert, the in jokes will likely go over their heads, the endless back-and-forth of the gameplay will tire and the storyline will bore to tears.
Unless you're a hardcore Tales fan, there's no reason to pick this game up; there will be plenty of great RPGs hitting in the next few months, so save that cash and trade it in soon for something a little more worthwhile.
