Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024
* indicates a repeat
1. Arc Rise Fantasia (Wii)
2. Return of the Obra Dinn (PC)
3. Battlefield: Hardline (PS3)
4. Call of Duty: Black Ops (PS3)
5. Call of Duty: Black Ops II (PS3)
6. Dead Nation (PS3)
7. Kileak, The Blood 2: Reason in Madness (PS1)
8. Paro Wars (PS1)
9. in Stars and Time (Steam)
10. Tetris Battle Gaiden (SFC)
11. Super Tetris 3 (SFC)
12. Battlefield 4 (PS3)
13. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (PS3)
14. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (PS3)
15. Call of Duty: Black Ops III (PS4)
16. Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare (PS4)
17. Call of Duty: WWII (PS4)
18. Resistance 3 (PS3)
19. Tearaway: Unfolded (PS4)
20. Grow Home (PS4)
21. Grow Up (PS4)
22. Ratchet & Clank (2016) (PS4)
23. Dark Sector (Steam)
24. Nagano Winter Olympics '98 (N64)
25. Multi-Racing Championship (N64)
26. Super Smash Bros. (N64)
27. Puyo Puyo Sun 64 (N64)
28. Shin Nippon Pro Wrestling: Toukon Road - Brave Spirits (N64)
29. Jikkyou Pawafuru Puroyakyuu 6 (N64)
30. Let's Smash (N64)
31. Mario Tennis 64 (N64)
32. Ucchannanchan no Honō no Challenger: Denryū Iraira Bō (N64)
33. Jikkyou Pawafuru Puroyakyuu 4 (N64)
34. FIFA: Road to the World Cup 98 (N64)
35. Jikkyou Pawafuru Puroyakyuu 2000 (N64)
36. Jikkyou Pawafuru Puroyakyuu 5 (N64)
37. Time and Eternity (PS3)
38. Pokemon Red (GB)
39. Dr. Mario 64 (N64)
40. Shining Force Neo (PS2)
41. Chou Kuukan Nighter: King of Pro Baseball (N64)
Still enjoying the N64-style baseball fever, I picked this game up super cheap to serve as an alternative perspective on this sort of game compared to my beloved PawaPuro Yakyuu games. I’ve found that Imagineer and Genki have respectively published and developed a lot of hidden gems in this console generation, so seeing their names on the box definitely made this that much more tantalizing of a 100 yen pick up for me. It took me 5 or so hours to win the pennant with a 5-game series playing as the Blue Wave on easy mode (I may like baseball games, but that doesn’t mean I’m any good at them :b ).
As is the case with most sports games, there’s no story to speak of here. You will get the credits if you win the NPB series, of course, but it’s not like you can create a character and follow his career mode or anything. It’s got the 12 teams that played in the NPB 1996 series in addition to a special game-exclusive team, and you can pick whichever you like and play against whomever you want in glorious 3D! Coming out in late ’96 itself, this is actually the first baseball game on the N64, and you can bet that they’re flexing that 3D muscle as much as they can. In the broad strokes of things, it’s baseball, and it conveniently controls extremely similarly to the Konami PawaPuro games I’m more familiar with (though this does predate those games on the N64). You pitch, you bat, you field: It’s baseball. Nothing groundbreaking in the fundamentals, of course, but how you play it is still just what you’d expect from a baseball game from this console generation.
The main issues I have with standard play are nuances of how batting and pitching are handled. While you have an option to see where your ball will go when you’re pitching, you can’t see where the ball will travel when you’re the one batting (unless you were playing with a human opponent, of course). Unlike the PawaPuro games which solve this with both a batting reticule, incoming ball reticule, and also a view of the catcher whose mitt you can follow to get an idea of where the ball is going to go, King of Pro Baseball doesn’t have any of that stuff, and the experience really suffers in comparison as a result. What it does have, thankfully, is a toggle for “Lock On” batting, where you both see a reticule for the incoming ball as well as have your bat lock on to it, so once you get that first aiming down, all you need to do is time your swing well for a good hit. I’d certainly prefer an in-between option like the PawaPuro games have, but this gives it a very approachable pick up and play quality that I really enjoyed.
Beyond the lock on stuff, there’s a remarkable amount of customization that really lets you play just how you want to. As someone who struggles with fielding in these games, it was really nice to be able to individually toggle player or CPU control for each individual member of the team. Fine batting with everyone but one particular player? Just let the CPU handle that guy’s at bats! Good with the challenge of pitching but too frustrated with weird controls to want to field? Just make it so every fielder but the pitcher is controlled by the CPU instead of you (like I did)! Heck, in the pennant mode, you can even watch the CPU’s simulated games or have them play your own games for you too if you don’t want to (like I did when the game crashed in the middle of the championship ^^; ). The sheer amount of handicap that you can give each player and character respectively made this a really fun time for someone fairly poor at baseball games like myself. It definitely made this my new go-to choice for if I should ever have a buddy over to play a baseball video game with.
Despite using real players and stats from the NPB, this game’s presentation is delightfully cartoony and silly. All of the players have these weird, cartoony caricature faces that make every play so weird. My personal favorite expression they’d pull is just how devastated the pitcher looks whenever a batter hits a home run X3. Everyone is short, weird, and wibbly, and there are even special animations for turning to ice or turning to stone if they let a brutal enough pitch fly by them. The music and announcer are pretty typical for a baseball game, but the visual design is what really makes this game shine. It’s pretty clearly taking at least some inspiration from Konami’s 16-bit era PawaPuro games for the SD look everyone has, but it’s different enough from Konami’s games to stand on it’s own. It adds a wonderful amount of personality and whimsy to the game’s presentation that just makes it that much more fun to giggle at and play with your friends.
Verdict: Recommended. If you’re just up for a good, approachable retro baseball game and don’t mind the lack of a career mode like the PawaPuro games have, then this is a pretty darn good choice! Lacking any literal arcade-focused silly sports game (such as NFL Blitz) on the N64, this fills that gap really nicely. While it may be a hard sell for hardened baseball fans who prefer a more refined, modern approach to the sport, if you’re a more casual fan like me who loves an pick up and play simplicity with a silly sense of humor, then this is a great, cheap game to spend a weekend with~
As is the case with most sports games, there’s no story to speak of here. You will get the credits if you win the NPB series, of course, but it’s not like you can create a character and follow his career mode or anything. It’s got the 12 teams that played in the NPB 1996 series in addition to a special game-exclusive team, and you can pick whichever you like and play against whomever you want in glorious 3D! Coming out in late ’96 itself, this is actually the first baseball game on the N64, and you can bet that they’re flexing that 3D muscle as much as they can. In the broad strokes of things, it’s baseball, and it conveniently controls extremely similarly to the Konami PawaPuro games I’m more familiar with (though this does predate those games on the N64). You pitch, you bat, you field: It’s baseball. Nothing groundbreaking in the fundamentals, of course, but how you play it is still just what you’d expect from a baseball game from this console generation.
The main issues I have with standard play are nuances of how batting and pitching are handled. While you have an option to see where your ball will go when you’re pitching, you can’t see where the ball will travel when you’re the one batting (unless you were playing with a human opponent, of course). Unlike the PawaPuro games which solve this with both a batting reticule, incoming ball reticule, and also a view of the catcher whose mitt you can follow to get an idea of where the ball is going to go, King of Pro Baseball doesn’t have any of that stuff, and the experience really suffers in comparison as a result. What it does have, thankfully, is a toggle for “Lock On” batting, where you both see a reticule for the incoming ball as well as have your bat lock on to it, so once you get that first aiming down, all you need to do is time your swing well for a good hit. I’d certainly prefer an in-between option like the PawaPuro games have, but this gives it a very approachable pick up and play quality that I really enjoyed.
Beyond the lock on stuff, there’s a remarkable amount of customization that really lets you play just how you want to. As someone who struggles with fielding in these games, it was really nice to be able to individually toggle player or CPU control for each individual member of the team. Fine batting with everyone but one particular player? Just let the CPU handle that guy’s at bats! Good with the challenge of pitching but too frustrated with weird controls to want to field? Just make it so every fielder but the pitcher is controlled by the CPU instead of you (like I did)! Heck, in the pennant mode, you can even watch the CPU’s simulated games or have them play your own games for you too if you don’t want to (like I did when the game crashed in the middle of the championship ^^; ). The sheer amount of handicap that you can give each player and character respectively made this a really fun time for someone fairly poor at baseball games like myself. It definitely made this my new go-to choice for if I should ever have a buddy over to play a baseball video game with.
Despite using real players and stats from the NPB, this game’s presentation is delightfully cartoony and silly. All of the players have these weird, cartoony caricature faces that make every play so weird. My personal favorite expression they’d pull is just how devastated the pitcher looks whenever a batter hits a home run X3. Everyone is short, weird, and wibbly, and there are even special animations for turning to ice or turning to stone if they let a brutal enough pitch fly by them. The music and announcer are pretty typical for a baseball game, but the visual design is what really makes this game shine. It’s pretty clearly taking at least some inspiration from Konami’s 16-bit era PawaPuro games for the SD look everyone has, but it’s different enough from Konami’s games to stand on it’s own. It adds a wonderful amount of personality and whimsy to the game’s presentation that just makes it that much more fun to giggle at and play with your friends.
Verdict: Recommended. If you’re just up for a good, approachable retro baseball game and don’t mind the lack of a career mode like the PawaPuro games have, then this is a pretty darn good choice! Lacking any literal arcade-focused silly sports game (such as NFL Blitz) on the N64, this fills that gap really nicely. While it may be a hard sell for hardened baseball fans who prefer a more refined, modern approach to the sport, if you’re a more casual fan like me who loves an pick up and play simplicity with a silly sense of humor, then this is a great, cheap game to spend a weekend with~
42. Tales of Destiny 2 (PS2)
The actual sequel to Tales of Destiny rather than the alternate title for Tales of Eternia in English, this game has been on my radar for a while. I’m a pretty big fan of the Tales series, and completing this actually marks the last of the older mainline Tales games I’d never beaten in some form or another (so now Arise is the only one I’ve not beaten before). It was only a matter of time before I got to this one, and since I finally played through the original Tales of Destiny last year, I could finally put this one on the docket too. It’s one I’ve heard remarkably little about in English even compared to the quite little I’ve heard of the other Japan-exclusive Tales games, so I really had no idea what to expect beyond the silly skull masked guy this game is so famous for x3. It ended up taking me around 41 or so hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on real hardware on normal mode (sans for the final boss who I had to fight on easy mode). (This review also gets a lot more into narrative spoilers than I usually do, so for those who care, you have been warned).
Tales of Destiny 2 is, as the name implies, a narrative sequel to Tales of Desitny. Taking place 18 years after Stahn and his friends defeated the ancient evil and saved the world, this game follows his son Kyle. Stahn set out 10 years ago on an adventure he’s still not back from, so Kyle still lives at home with his mother Rutii at the orphanage that her and Stahn began. However, once his adoptive older brother Roni comes home, Kyle can’t resist the call to adventure himself. Exploring the nearby ruins, they meet a mysterious young girl named Riala, and Kyle knows his quest at once. He already wanted to be a hero, and he’s convinced this new mysterious girl must be at the center of this quest he’s confident he’s destined to go on. Such begins their quest that will, of course, eventually lead to saving the whole world from calamity.
Tales of Destiny 1 is a fairly poorly written game, and I’ve made no secret of my feelings about that. Tales of Eternia is a quite significant improvement on it, however, and even though these three games don’t really share much in the way of writing staff, I was looking forward to what was shaping up to be a pretty darn well written story. This game even has a bunch of guys who wrote for the various early Grandia titles on its scenario staff, so that was that much more reason to hope! However, my hope was ultimately not exactly fulfilled. While still being a fair step up from Destiny 1, I came away from this experience pretty darn confident that Namco made the right choice in localizing Tales of Symphonia (a game I have no lack of problems with either) rather than this game.
The main thrust of the narrative here is about happiness, suffering, and salvation. Kyle and his allies are here to fight against a god that wants nothing more than to save all of mankind from suffering, and the meat of the story is about how suffering and overcoming it are fundamental parts of being alive and being human. Everyone has tragic events in their past that they’d like to correct, but having to overcome that tragedy and find new ways/people/passions to move forward with is all a part of being human. There can’t be happiness without suffering, no darkness without light, etc, etc. The way they push that main thread is *mostly* good, I’ll admit, but it’s all the things around that where the game fumbles things a lot harder.
Most of these issues come from two heavily related places. The first of these is that a big motif (if not theme in and of itself) is Kyle’s desire to grow up and be a hero just like his dad. The game spills a lot of ink about exactly what being a hero means and how one becomes/is one, but it ends up becoming a very cumbersome framing device for Kyle’s bildungsroman than anything else. A lot of the parallels between the main theme of finding your own happiness vs divine salvation are so imperfectly made that they end up feeling incredibly contrived or outright contradictory (like being a hero on a personal adventure vs being a hero in an ongoing war for survival), and these scenes confuse the plot at best and destroy suspension of disbelief at worst.
The other main cause of the issues is the conceit of the plot in the first place. The sheer fact that this is a sequel to Tales of Destiny 1 (a game with quite a weak narrative) alongside being a time travel story (which are often very hard to do well) means we have given ourselves quite the mountain to climb to make this a story worth caring about, and this is a not a challenge the game can ultimately deliver on. The inclusion and centrality of characters like Leon Magnus and settings like the War of Heaven and Earth (a character and event both very important in the original game) makes this feel like Tales of Destiny fan fiction rather than a separate story trying to survive on its own merits. Leon and all the time you spend messing around 1000 years in the past end up being really wasted and/or vapid parts of the narrative too, so it feels that much more like we were only ever here to waste our time frolicking in how great Tales of Destiny 1 was.
We don’t even have the courage to stick to our guns with this stuff either. Despite the fact that so much of this game’s main theme is about conscious choice to not take the easy way out, that taking the easy path of salvation does nothing but remove your humanity, the thing we learn upon killing the final boss is that the timeline is going to self-correct now. We destroyed the thing that messed up the timeline, so now everything will be forcibly put back to normal and, more importantly, we’ll all forget everything that happened because it’s now going to unhappen. Stahn even comes back to life since a time traveler killed him, so Kyle’s upbringing will now be totally different too, just in case you were worried that little bit of foundational emotional punch to the story, growing up without a father, would be something the game stuck to either.
All of the respective sorts of character growth (or what little there is outside of Kyle himself) will all disappear into the ether of the universe because the plot just says so, and the experience of getting here was simply worth it for the sake of it for everyone involved (is the almost literal text they tell you at this point). I called BS out loud when the game had the gall to pull a “We may forget, but the bonds between us will never disappear!” line in the middle of that reveal, because that is just such a hackneyed canned ending that does not suit this story at all. If we’re going to pull the convoluted tripe of “do you sacrifice the girl you love to save all of reality?”, can we at least stick to our guns and give the player/characters some actual moral dilemma to deal with? It’s so transparently just one final trope to indulge in just so we can have a tearful reunion between boy and girl right before the credits that I could do nothing but roll my eyes at it despite how well directed a scene that it admittedly is.
This is supposed to be a coming-of-age story for Kyle, but we just don’t thread the needle well enough to do it. He’s a happy go lucky kid who wants to be a hero, and they never really succeed like they need to at giving him meaningful personal challenges to overcome that lead to believable areas of growth. Even outside of the absurd memory wipe at the end that makes a coming-of-age story feel pointless in the first place, Kyle is already a really rough character. It feels like he’s just swapping between an enforced “happy go lucky kid”-mode and “deeply serious adult”-mode from scene to scene rather than actually growing as a person and changing his habits (like someone like Luke in Tales of the Abyss). This is also the kind of story where side characters serve to elevate the main character’s journey rather than having thematically complimentary arcs themselves, so we don’t even have other arcs to lean on instead when our main one is fairly weak (and it all makes Leon’s inclusion feel that much more pointless).
There are some good bones to this story, but it’s so inelegantly done that it wound up being very hard to care about. Things simply do not come together in the ways they need to, and we can’t even make the central love story something to care all that much about. Kyle is just about complicated enough a character for it, but, more importantly, Riala is much too shallow a person to hold up her half of the love story. This game tries a lot of things narratively, and it ends up failing at just about all of them. Nowhere near enough consideration was given to how the constituent pieces of this story would work together, and we end up with a garbled mess out of the other end. I find the central theme really interesting, and we do it a real disservice by prodding it so half-heartedly rather than fleshing it out like it deserves. If nothing else, this game definitely illuminated a lot for me on why the Tales of Destiny remake exists on PS2, because Tales of Destiny 2 is already halfway there XP
So, the story is a mediocre mess, but is the gameplay any good? Well, that’s another complicated question to answer cleanly. The previous Tales game to this, Tales of Eternia took some long and important strides in refining what 2D Tales combat would be, and this game makes a frankly similar amount of really bold choices in its design. The main difference is that we don’t really make nearly as many positive choices, and I think that we ultimately learn a lot more lessons on what not to do than vice versa through ToD2’s gameplay design.
It's still a 2D action RPG for combat, so that’ll be familiar to anyone who’s played an earlier Tales game. What’s different is exactly how combat works. Rather than just HP and MP like most other Tales games have, this game also adds SP to the mix, which is an action point system that Tales of Graces and the Tales of Destiny remake would borrow to make their respective CC systems. Every attack and spell you do costs SP, and you’ll have to spend time resting or blocking in order to replenish it back. Unlike some later games where a system like this replaces MP entirely, this is more like a trade off in exchange for far lower MP costs for most spells. While the implementation isn’t as solid as something like Tales of Graces would later do, it’s a lot easier to get to grips with than the Destiny remake’s system was. It allows you to go a lot crazier exploring for combos and the like without needing to constantly worry about how aggressively it depletes your precious stores of MP.
MP Is still a precious resource you (and especially your AI companions) can absolutely run dry on quickly if you’re not careful, however, so this is a game (much like its mechanical successor, Tales of Rebirth) where cooking becomes quite important because you just don’t have the inventory limits to heal with gummis forever. Even affording all of those gummis gets pretty tough too, as this is easily one of the most cash-poor Tales games they ever made. Older games in the series tend to be more stingy with the cash you get from enemies, but this is easily top of the pile for me. Grinding for 20+ minutes might net you enough gold for *one* new equipment piece at the current town you’re at, and each member of your party has around five equipment pieces they’ll need to stay completely geared up. The difficulty balancing is thankfully not such that you need to grind at every new town if you want to survive (this game is tough but not THAT tough), but it was still an annoyance at every new town nonetheless.
And this doesn’t even begin to get into systems like Enchantment or Refining. Enchantment is a precursor to the system these games would eventually stick to where your artes and spells simply get stronger/buffs as you use them more. Here, there are all sorts of modifiers you can equip to your spells and artes to make them do anything from cast faster to costing less SP to just doing more damage. Equipment has a very similar system where passive modifiers can increase the stats of any generic piece of armor or weapon you have, and the Refining system exists to transfer a passive from one piece of equipment to another (for a maximum of two) save for unique equipment which cannot be refined.
Both of these systems relate to larger element and attribute systems around which you level up that I honestly never understood properly. I barely ever used either system very much beyond the most obvious aspects, and I barely ever suffered for it (we’ll talk about the final boss later). They’re both pretty bold ideas, but they’re implemented very clumsily and don’t feel very intuitive at all. It was a small mercy that they ended up being fairly ignorable, as I’m glad they eventually got polished down into easier to engage with systems in later titles.
Those systems were pretty ignorable (or at least too difficult to understand to warrant engaging with unless I felt I had to), but that doesn’t change the fact that this game is pretty darn tough. There were quite a few areas and bosses where even a bit of a misplay would spell my demise very quickly if I weren’t careful. If an enemy gets between you and the left side of the screen, your maximum SP and MP will only auto-restore up to half their normal max until you rectify this, and the sheer amount of enemies who can instantly teleport behind you to attack your back line is brutal in the late game.
The final boss can not only do this, but they also have *such* a massive evasion stat that physical attacks are basically useless against them as well as really strong spells that will nearly instantly kill your entire party. I spent 40 minutes with my first attempt on normal mode only to get steamrolled at their fourth phase, and it was an incredible mercy that I was able to find online about the weirdly hard to unlock easy mode the game has for combat. The Tales of Destiny remake has far meaner difficulty balancing than this game does, but this is easily one of the meanest PS2 final boss encounters I’ve ever faced (and even the easy mode attempt I won on still took about 30 minutes).
There are a lot of neat or novel things this game is going for (such as being a remarkably linear game with a lot of areas you can never return to, something unlike basically any other entry in the series ever), but it’s just all a bit too messy to ever really come together. You can play it mostly like any other 2D Tales game, but you’ll get ambushed by a really vicious encounter or boss often enough that you can rarely let your guard down all that much, and the EXP curve is low enough that grinding for either money or levels is rarely a good option. If you’re a big fan of 2D fighting games or beat’em ups, perhaps you’ll enjoy the way the systems here work more than I did, but I personally find the older 2D games and Tales of Rebirth far more intuitive and fun action games than this was (even outside how brutal a difficulty cliff the final boss is).
The presentation, at least, is something I basically have only praise for. This is an early PS2 game in the vein of something like Shadow Hearts, where we basically just made a last-gen game on current-gen hardware, but where Shadow Hearts went for 3D, Tales of Destiny 2 goes for 2D and it looks incredible (outside of the 3D world map at least <w> ). This is like if the already beautiful Tales of Eternia got even higher definition sprites and a far stronger output resolution, and the results speak for themselves. The game’s soundtrack and animated cutscenes are as excellent as ever for the Tales series, too, and for all the mixed things I can say about this game, I certainly can’t say that it doesn’t look or sound as good as you’d expect for this dev studio.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. While I really wanted to like this game, it just kept getting harder and harder to overlook the issues it has as time went on. The awful ending combined with how brutal a slog the final boss fight is just went to confirm every negative feeling I’d had brewing about both the narrative and the mechanics. There are certainly far worse PS2 RPGs you can spend your time on in both of those areas, no question (I’d still rather play this than the Tales of Destiny remake, frankly), but that’s damning with faint praise. There are a lot of excellent old RPGs you can spend your time on, and a lot of them are even in English to boot, but this just isn’t one of ‘em. This is a game that ultimately fails to escape the legacy of poor quality set by its namesake Tales of Destiny, and it continues the trend of “Japan-exclusive Tales games tend to be lousy” that only Tales of Rebirth was ever able to defy.
Tales of Destiny 2 is, as the name implies, a narrative sequel to Tales of Desitny. Taking place 18 years after Stahn and his friends defeated the ancient evil and saved the world, this game follows his son Kyle. Stahn set out 10 years ago on an adventure he’s still not back from, so Kyle still lives at home with his mother Rutii at the orphanage that her and Stahn began. However, once his adoptive older brother Roni comes home, Kyle can’t resist the call to adventure himself. Exploring the nearby ruins, they meet a mysterious young girl named Riala, and Kyle knows his quest at once. He already wanted to be a hero, and he’s convinced this new mysterious girl must be at the center of this quest he’s confident he’s destined to go on. Such begins their quest that will, of course, eventually lead to saving the whole world from calamity.
Tales of Destiny 1 is a fairly poorly written game, and I’ve made no secret of my feelings about that. Tales of Eternia is a quite significant improvement on it, however, and even though these three games don’t really share much in the way of writing staff, I was looking forward to what was shaping up to be a pretty darn well written story. This game even has a bunch of guys who wrote for the various early Grandia titles on its scenario staff, so that was that much more reason to hope! However, my hope was ultimately not exactly fulfilled. While still being a fair step up from Destiny 1, I came away from this experience pretty darn confident that Namco made the right choice in localizing Tales of Symphonia (a game I have no lack of problems with either) rather than this game.
The main thrust of the narrative here is about happiness, suffering, and salvation. Kyle and his allies are here to fight against a god that wants nothing more than to save all of mankind from suffering, and the meat of the story is about how suffering and overcoming it are fundamental parts of being alive and being human. Everyone has tragic events in their past that they’d like to correct, but having to overcome that tragedy and find new ways/people/passions to move forward with is all a part of being human. There can’t be happiness without suffering, no darkness without light, etc, etc. The way they push that main thread is *mostly* good, I’ll admit, but it’s all the things around that where the game fumbles things a lot harder.
Most of these issues come from two heavily related places. The first of these is that a big motif (if not theme in and of itself) is Kyle’s desire to grow up and be a hero just like his dad. The game spills a lot of ink about exactly what being a hero means and how one becomes/is one, but it ends up becoming a very cumbersome framing device for Kyle’s bildungsroman than anything else. A lot of the parallels between the main theme of finding your own happiness vs divine salvation are so imperfectly made that they end up feeling incredibly contrived or outright contradictory (like being a hero on a personal adventure vs being a hero in an ongoing war for survival), and these scenes confuse the plot at best and destroy suspension of disbelief at worst.
The other main cause of the issues is the conceit of the plot in the first place. The sheer fact that this is a sequel to Tales of Destiny 1 (a game with quite a weak narrative) alongside being a time travel story (which are often very hard to do well) means we have given ourselves quite the mountain to climb to make this a story worth caring about, and this is a not a challenge the game can ultimately deliver on. The inclusion and centrality of characters like Leon Magnus and settings like the War of Heaven and Earth (a character and event both very important in the original game) makes this feel like Tales of Destiny fan fiction rather than a separate story trying to survive on its own merits. Leon and all the time you spend messing around 1000 years in the past end up being really wasted and/or vapid parts of the narrative too, so it feels that much more like we were only ever here to waste our time frolicking in how great Tales of Destiny 1 was.
We don’t even have the courage to stick to our guns with this stuff either. Despite the fact that so much of this game’s main theme is about conscious choice to not take the easy way out, that taking the easy path of salvation does nothing but remove your humanity, the thing we learn upon killing the final boss is that the timeline is going to self-correct now. We destroyed the thing that messed up the timeline, so now everything will be forcibly put back to normal and, more importantly, we’ll all forget everything that happened because it’s now going to unhappen. Stahn even comes back to life since a time traveler killed him, so Kyle’s upbringing will now be totally different too, just in case you were worried that little bit of foundational emotional punch to the story, growing up without a father, would be something the game stuck to either.
All of the respective sorts of character growth (or what little there is outside of Kyle himself) will all disappear into the ether of the universe because the plot just says so, and the experience of getting here was simply worth it for the sake of it for everyone involved (is the almost literal text they tell you at this point). I called BS out loud when the game had the gall to pull a “We may forget, but the bonds between us will never disappear!” line in the middle of that reveal, because that is just such a hackneyed canned ending that does not suit this story at all. If we’re going to pull the convoluted tripe of “do you sacrifice the girl you love to save all of reality?”, can we at least stick to our guns and give the player/characters some actual moral dilemma to deal with? It’s so transparently just one final trope to indulge in just so we can have a tearful reunion between boy and girl right before the credits that I could do nothing but roll my eyes at it despite how well directed a scene that it admittedly is.
This is supposed to be a coming-of-age story for Kyle, but we just don’t thread the needle well enough to do it. He’s a happy go lucky kid who wants to be a hero, and they never really succeed like they need to at giving him meaningful personal challenges to overcome that lead to believable areas of growth. Even outside of the absurd memory wipe at the end that makes a coming-of-age story feel pointless in the first place, Kyle is already a really rough character. It feels like he’s just swapping between an enforced “happy go lucky kid”-mode and “deeply serious adult”-mode from scene to scene rather than actually growing as a person and changing his habits (like someone like Luke in Tales of the Abyss). This is also the kind of story where side characters serve to elevate the main character’s journey rather than having thematically complimentary arcs themselves, so we don’t even have other arcs to lean on instead when our main one is fairly weak (and it all makes Leon’s inclusion feel that much more pointless).
There are some good bones to this story, but it’s so inelegantly done that it wound up being very hard to care about. Things simply do not come together in the ways they need to, and we can’t even make the central love story something to care all that much about. Kyle is just about complicated enough a character for it, but, more importantly, Riala is much too shallow a person to hold up her half of the love story. This game tries a lot of things narratively, and it ends up failing at just about all of them. Nowhere near enough consideration was given to how the constituent pieces of this story would work together, and we end up with a garbled mess out of the other end. I find the central theme really interesting, and we do it a real disservice by prodding it so half-heartedly rather than fleshing it out like it deserves. If nothing else, this game definitely illuminated a lot for me on why the Tales of Destiny remake exists on PS2, because Tales of Destiny 2 is already halfway there XP
So, the story is a mediocre mess, but is the gameplay any good? Well, that’s another complicated question to answer cleanly. The previous Tales game to this, Tales of Eternia took some long and important strides in refining what 2D Tales combat would be, and this game makes a frankly similar amount of really bold choices in its design. The main difference is that we don’t really make nearly as many positive choices, and I think that we ultimately learn a lot more lessons on what not to do than vice versa through ToD2’s gameplay design.
It's still a 2D action RPG for combat, so that’ll be familiar to anyone who’s played an earlier Tales game. What’s different is exactly how combat works. Rather than just HP and MP like most other Tales games have, this game also adds SP to the mix, which is an action point system that Tales of Graces and the Tales of Destiny remake would borrow to make their respective CC systems. Every attack and spell you do costs SP, and you’ll have to spend time resting or blocking in order to replenish it back. Unlike some later games where a system like this replaces MP entirely, this is more like a trade off in exchange for far lower MP costs for most spells. While the implementation isn’t as solid as something like Tales of Graces would later do, it’s a lot easier to get to grips with than the Destiny remake’s system was. It allows you to go a lot crazier exploring for combos and the like without needing to constantly worry about how aggressively it depletes your precious stores of MP.
MP Is still a precious resource you (and especially your AI companions) can absolutely run dry on quickly if you’re not careful, however, so this is a game (much like its mechanical successor, Tales of Rebirth) where cooking becomes quite important because you just don’t have the inventory limits to heal with gummis forever. Even affording all of those gummis gets pretty tough too, as this is easily one of the most cash-poor Tales games they ever made. Older games in the series tend to be more stingy with the cash you get from enemies, but this is easily top of the pile for me. Grinding for 20+ minutes might net you enough gold for *one* new equipment piece at the current town you’re at, and each member of your party has around five equipment pieces they’ll need to stay completely geared up. The difficulty balancing is thankfully not such that you need to grind at every new town if you want to survive (this game is tough but not THAT tough), but it was still an annoyance at every new town nonetheless.
And this doesn’t even begin to get into systems like Enchantment or Refining. Enchantment is a precursor to the system these games would eventually stick to where your artes and spells simply get stronger/buffs as you use them more. Here, there are all sorts of modifiers you can equip to your spells and artes to make them do anything from cast faster to costing less SP to just doing more damage. Equipment has a very similar system where passive modifiers can increase the stats of any generic piece of armor or weapon you have, and the Refining system exists to transfer a passive from one piece of equipment to another (for a maximum of two) save for unique equipment which cannot be refined.
Both of these systems relate to larger element and attribute systems around which you level up that I honestly never understood properly. I barely ever used either system very much beyond the most obvious aspects, and I barely ever suffered for it (we’ll talk about the final boss later). They’re both pretty bold ideas, but they’re implemented very clumsily and don’t feel very intuitive at all. It was a small mercy that they ended up being fairly ignorable, as I’m glad they eventually got polished down into easier to engage with systems in later titles.
Those systems were pretty ignorable (or at least too difficult to understand to warrant engaging with unless I felt I had to), but that doesn’t change the fact that this game is pretty darn tough. There were quite a few areas and bosses where even a bit of a misplay would spell my demise very quickly if I weren’t careful. If an enemy gets between you and the left side of the screen, your maximum SP and MP will only auto-restore up to half their normal max until you rectify this, and the sheer amount of enemies who can instantly teleport behind you to attack your back line is brutal in the late game.
The final boss can not only do this, but they also have *such* a massive evasion stat that physical attacks are basically useless against them as well as really strong spells that will nearly instantly kill your entire party. I spent 40 minutes with my first attempt on normal mode only to get steamrolled at their fourth phase, and it was an incredible mercy that I was able to find online about the weirdly hard to unlock easy mode the game has for combat. The Tales of Destiny remake has far meaner difficulty balancing than this game does, but this is easily one of the meanest PS2 final boss encounters I’ve ever faced (and even the easy mode attempt I won on still took about 30 minutes).
There are a lot of neat or novel things this game is going for (such as being a remarkably linear game with a lot of areas you can never return to, something unlike basically any other entry in the series ever), but it’s just all a bit too messy to ever really come together. You can play it mostly like any other 2D Tales game, but you’ll get ambushed by a really vicious encounter or boss often enough that you can rarely let your guard down all that much, and the EXP curve is low enough that grinding for either money or levels is rarely a good option. If you’re a big fan of 2D fighting games or beat’em ups, perhaps you’ll enjoy the way the systems here work more than I did, but I personally find the older 2D games and Tales of Rebirth far more intuitive and fun action games than this was (even outside how brutal a difficulty cliff the final boss is).
The presentation, at least, is something I basically have only praise for. This is an early PS2 game in the vein of something like Shadow Hearts, where we basically just made a last-gen game on current-gen hardware, but where Shadow Hearts went for 3D, Tales of Destiny 2 goes for 2D and it looks incredible (outside of the 3D world map at least <w> ). This is like if the already beautiful Tales of Eternia got even higher definition sprites and a far stronger output resolution, and the results speak for themselves. The game’s soundtrack and animated cutscenes are as excellent as ever for the Tales series, too, and for all the mixed things I can say about this game, I certainly can’t say that it doesn’t look or sound as good as you’d expect for this dev studio.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. While I really wanted to like this game, it just kept getting harder and harder to overlook the issues it has as time went on. The awful ending combined with how brutal a slog the final boss fight is just went to confirm every negative feeling I’d had brewing about both the narrative and the mechanics. There are certainly far worse PS2 RPGs you can spend your time on in both of those areas, no question (I’d still rather play this than the Tales of Destiny remake, frankly), but that’s damning with faint praise. There are a lot of excellent old RPGs you can spend your time on, and a lot of them are even in English to boot, but this just isn’t one of ‘em. This is a game that ultimately fails to escape the legacy of poor quality set by its namesake Tales of Destiny, and it continues the trend of “Japan-exclusive Tales games tend to be lousy” that only Tales of Rebirth was ever able to defy.
