Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023
* indicates a repeat
1~50
52. Adventures of Lolo 2 (NES)
53. Adventures of Lolo II (Famicom)
54. Adventures of Lolo 3 (NES)
55. Kickle Cubicle (NES)
56. Adventures of Lolo (GB)
57. Cocoron (Famicom)
58. The Darkness (PS3)
59. Haze (PS3)
60. Animaniacs (GB)
61. Lair (PS3)
62. Bionic Commando (PS3)
63. Donkey Kong Land (GB)
64. Darkwing Duck (NES)
65. Donkey Kong Land III (GBC)
66. Donkey Kong Land 2 (GB)
67. Metroid II (GB) *
68. Pokemon: Brilliant Diamond (Switch)
69. Eggerland (FDS)
70. Eggerland: Meikyuu no Fukkatsu (Famicom)
71. Eggerland: Souzou he no Tabidachi (FDS)
72. Marvelous: Mouhitotsu no Takarajima (SFC)
73. Legendary Starfy (GBA) *
74. Legendary Starfy 2 (GBA)
75. Tales of the Abyss (PS2) *
76. Tales of the Tempest (DS)
Despite being a Japan-exclusive game, this is a game I've owned since before I even moved to Japan. I bought it back when I was on a super Tales series kick in university, but I never ended up actually playing it until now because of a mix of both prior lack of confidence in my reading ability and more current disinterest in playing handheld stuff that I can't stream. However, after playing Tales of the Abyss, I was eventually struck with a sort of mood to play this, and I figured I should probably take advantage of that urge while I had it, because otherwise I'd never get to playing this lousy thing XD. A lot of reviews and stuff I read online were *very* negative on this game, but older reviews were more positive (though certainly not glowing), so I was very curious to see what I'd ultimately think of this game. It took me about 14 or so hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on original hardware.
Tales of the Tempest is the story of a boy named Caius. Living in a small village with his father, he spends most of his time with his best friend Rubia until the day that strange, shadowy monsters attack their village. Caius is hit with an incredible shock when his father suddenly transforms into a beast man to save everyone, but is hit with the harsh reality of the situation in a following exposition dump. Beast folk are viewed as subhuman heretics by the church, and Caius's father urges him and Rubia to flee the city before they're caught up in this too. So begins the ridiculously hurried immediate setup to our bite-sized Tales adventure on the DS.
In basically all of the English-language review stuff I read before playing this game (both old and new), people praised the mechanics of this game but trashed the story. While it's certainly far from the best RPG released in 2006, I honestly don't really understand all the hostility towards the story. There are some severe pacing issues (especially near the start), the design of some cutscenes is downright comical, and the lack of non-battle voice acting or the usual Tales series skits is also no help either, and a lot of this is down to technical limitations as well as inexperience with the DS's hardware. That said, I think this is still a quite well told and well constructed story that stands pretty comfortably with other middle-of-the-road Tales games of the early 2000's like Symphonia or Rebirth. The romance elements are sweet, and the larger themes around trying to "stay yourself" (i.e. caring and sincere) as you grow up despite the cynical, violent, selfish world around you are quite well done. It's a story about racism that manages to differentiate itself from Tales of Rebirth remarkably well despite their very similar plot elements too. The execution of the story may well feel like something you'd more expect from a PS1 or SNES-era RPG, but I think it is nowhere remotely near as bad as people claim, and it overall online opinion on it genuinely makes me question how much of the story a lot of English-speaking players actually honestly understood as they played it.
Where people often praised the mechanics of this game online, like with the narrative, I found myself with a fairly opposite opinion to popular sentiment there as well. This is a pretty early DS game, so they were smart in not trying to recreate something like Tales of the Abyss or Tales of Symphonia's 3D battle systems, and instead they opted to recreate Tales of Rebirth's "3 lanes of 2D combat" style instead. Credit where credit is due, they've honestly done a better job than I would've expected possible of creating a Tales battle system in a 3D environment. They've even got a day and night cycle that affects the status of both the overworld enemies AND towns (and NPCs), which is something very few console Tales games had even tried to do by this point. Presentationally as a whole, really, they've done a really remarkable job of creating an experience that at least *seems* on the surface to be a proper Tales game but on the DS. That said, I think a lot of that starts to fall away once you actually start getting into how the game plays.
Navigation on both the map and in battles feels very clunky. The game has touch screen controls too, which have frankly appalling inaccuracy (I'm so happy they were always optional), but the button controls feel very weird and inaccurate a lot of the time in ways that made combat very frustrating. Enemies range from dead-simple ones you can stun lock to death because enemy AI is very bad at attacking vertically between lanes to ones that are a hyper nightmare and pain in the butt to fight because of how often they'll plague you with status effects and quick movement. The balance of the game as a whole is quite rough, really, with enemies often feeling more difficult than they perhaps should be, and it's difficult to dismiss the rough controls as a symptom of that.
That said, the worst part of combat by far has to be your beyond useless AI companions. They are totally incapable of any intelligent thought, which isn't super uncommon for early (though not this early) Tales game AI, sure. However, what sets this game apart is just how bad your ability to mitigate that as the player character is. You can pick from a simple set of AI behaviors for your allies like a lot of early Tales games, and you can also have them use items too. Unlike in basically any other Tales game, though, it is actually completely impossible to direct them to use specific moves at any time. You're left at the total mercy of their awful judgment on when they'll actually bother to use a healing spell rather than spam ineffective offensive moves, and it makes the whole game (particularly bosses) so much more of a chore than they should be. Enemies generally being far too spongy so battles drag out forever, dungeons being sets of copy-paste corridors devoid of treasure that are very boring to navigate, and the overworld being FAR too large so going between places often takes 20~30 minutes or more are very significant design issues that shouldn't be ignored, but having to put up with just how wretchedly incompetent your AI buddies are was easily the worst part of playing this game for me, and it's definitely the aspect that makes it most difficult to recommend this.
The presentation of the game is just fine. I think it's certainly aged in a lot of ways, as cutscene direction in particular can look quite silly with just how simple the 3D models are, but it's a very valiant effort for the time that will have a good deal of charm for some who like retro 3D aesthetics. The music is quite solid, as is usually the case for Tales games, but the real complaint I have is for the text sizes. I played this on a New 3DS XL, and I'm frankly glad I did. The text for item descriptions is SO small that I cannot fathom how awful it must've been to play this on the old, original-size DS consoles back when this originally came out (and I frankly wish I had one lying around so I could test it for myself, really).
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Though this game can be kind of a pain to play, the handheld format actually helps mitigate that enough that I can't quite bring myself to call this a not recommended title. The ability to just pick up and put down an otherwise kinda ploddingly paced game helped a lot, and if you can put up with how fairly janky the combat is, then I think this is honestly a worthwhile game to explore for fans of the Tales series if they want to experience the story. It's far from the best RPG on the DS, let alone among handheld Tales games, but it's still a game that I think can safely stand shoulder to shoulder with other Tales games, and it's nowhere remotely near as bad as its reputation would have you believe.
