Tales of the Tempest reviewed in Famitsu

[chingi1]

Hmm, so expect this to be on clearence soon?

[gyozilla]

Bleh, I didn't say anything about ToP GBA having to measure up to the PS one anyway 

The problem with ToP GBA, I think was that they tried to do a very literal code port from the PSX version, at least for the battle system. And the result is that it didn't run well.

Literal to the point where they didn't even know how to cram all the PS key commands on the GBA. Clumsy toggle menus for the smaller screen, crappy music quality, all those key combos for battle were clumsy even if you could change them. None of these is 'cause the GBA couldn't HANDLE better.

i agree, ToP GBA retained a lot of the stuff that made it a great game in the first place.

The thing is, ToP GBA's supposed claim and PURPOSE was to reproduce the warm fuzzy feeling people get from ToP. But the game only reminds me just how aged the engine is instead. And then they slow your battles 4TW!

Personally, ToP GBA is like the first slack job which seems to have opened the floodgates for subpar portables. It symbolizes the creation of Tales Studio and the change from Classic Tales to newer ones. Classic Tales were admirable for the most part 'cause they had the feeling of EFFORT. With how we're talking about all these Tales releases this gen getting tiring and ridiculous, it's all about QUOTA.

Even more off topic, but as much as I like getting my separate 2D and 3D Tales fixes, I think joining the teams together once in a while / permanently will improve their values again (not to mention less back-to-back "tag-team" style releases). At this current pace, the series might just burn itself out.

For Tempest, yeah. With all the others like that, you could tell ahead of time, just by reading the info and looking at the screens.

Honestly, it didn't look that hot to me back then either    I let it go then 'cause it didn't look done or something (like how the ToL battle backdrops actually look SO much better in the final, though the item icons were still pretty bleh), but now it's sorta clear the final product isn't so different.

[Cless]

Literal to the point where they didn't even know how to cram all the PS key commands on the GBA. Clumsy toggle menus for the smaller screen, crappy music quality, all those key combos for battle were clumsy even if you could change them. None of these is 'cause the GBA couldn't HANDLE better.

I think you missed the point of my post. I was talking purely from a performance standpoint.

Either way, I disagree on the music.

Battle controls could be made serviceable if you eliminate the shortcut function.

A=attack
B=tech
R=defend
L="Stay" party command
select=target selection
start=menu/pause
(did I miss something?)

[Cyllya]

Talesing posted the credits if anyone's interested. The two directors were Chikako Kiyota and Daisuke Yamasita. They're Tales Studio, but I don't believe I've ever heard of them, so I guess they're newbs. Eiji Kikuchi and Kiyoshi Nagai, whom we know from nice games, only "supervised." Gah, use a whip when you surpervise these guys!

Dimps did the grunt work (e.g. graphics and programming), story, and planning. I guess the blame falls on them for most complaints, but TS isn't independant of it.

Mixing companies doesn't seem to work well for Tales. They did that with ND3 too. Since it's half TS and half not though, I'm wondering... does it have the old man in the room full of cats?!?!?!

Personally, ToP GBA is like the first slack job which seems to have opened the floodgates for subpar portables. It symbolizes the creation of Tales Studio and the change from Classic Tales to newer ones. Classic Tales were admirable for the most part 'cause they had the feeling of EFFORT.

Yeah, back in the day, even the subpar Tales games were pretty nice. I mean, ToP-PSX reused too much crap programming from ToD and random graphics from ToP-SFC, but it recycled properly unlike ToP-GBA or ND3's take on recycling. ND1 wasn't by the normal team and probably should have had real-time battles and was artificially lengthened like ToL and ND2 combined, but you could feel the love in it too, right? (Okay, maybe you need to be a huge ToP plot fanboy for that one.)

Even more off topic, but as much as I like getting my separate 2D and 3D Tales fixes, I think joining the teams together once in a while / permanently will improve their values again (not to mention less back-to-back "tag-team" style releases). At this current pace, the series might just burn itself out.

Meh. I think the two halves can stay seperate, and even let Alfa Systems toss out the periodic crossover, and it'd be just fine. It's when they decide that's not enough and either split into more groups or throw non-TS people in there that things start getting bad, but even then, so long as they don't collaborate with TS or AS (like TOT and ND3), their meh games don't seem to detract from the good ones. Only having the main two halves of TS plus Alfa Systems this gen would have gotten us ToD2j, ToS, ToR, ToA, ND2, and presumably ToD-PSX. (No SamoRine. And fans of friendship-themed dungeon crawlers may attribute that emoticon to ToL.) All those games are good, except that ToA's like an oldschool Tales slack job, but you know that was because they wanted out by the tenth aniversery, not because of ToP-GBA, ND3, ToT, or ToL were made (I don't think a lack of ToL would have fixed it either).

Battle controls could be made serviceable if you eliminate the shortcut function.

A=attack
B=tech
R=defend
L="Stay" party command
select=target selection
start=menu/pause
(did I miss something?)

Seems to me that they could have fit the shortcuts in the same button as the stay command without it being annoying at all. Like L+Down = stay or unstay and L+(another direction) for THREE shortcuts would have been fine, right? But they had to be all weird. Defending should only take one button.

[gyozilla]

I think you missed the point of my post. I was talking purely from a performance standpoint.

Nah, I understood you. I just went on describing the literal translations presentation-wise. Though I guess it was a bit of a quote hijack :p  Don't worry, it didn't look like my opinions were representative of yours 

But yea, you can't set a single key to Defend. It's always Down + whatever you set Target to (your target key dictates your guard).

down + target key = defend
target key + up = facing direction
target key + down = stay
target key + left/right = target select

One button's wasted on shortcuts and Start is unconfigable. It's stuck on semi-auto toggle, which means you can't shove Menu/pause to it    It's just clumsily designed....  ND2 (and thus 3) at least gave Guard its own button, no Stay and Direction crap, Semi-auto toggle only in the config menu.

Dimps did the grunt work (e.g. graphics and programming), story, and planning. I guess the blame falls on them for most complaints, but TS claims work on it too.

I can certainly see Inomata and Okumura handing in designs to TS than directly to Dimps. Too bad though.... Dimps is so-so, decent at action oriented games like the Budokais, the Saint Seiyas are pretty faithful, but Seven Samurai 20XX still haunts me in my sleep. Wiki says they were founded by former SNK staff so the action/fighter feel makes sense.

Yeah, back in the day, even the subpar Tales games were pretty nice. I mean, ToP-PSX reused too much crap programming from ToD and random graphics from ToP-SFC, but it recycled properly unlike ToP-GBA or ND3's take on recycling.

Yea, it had more heart; it wasn't complete blatant rehash. And more importantly, not rehash done badly.

Meh. I think the two halves can stay seperate, and even let Alfa Systems toss out the periodic crossover, and it'd be just fine... et al

My biggest problem with them apart is that they don't share or learn much from each others' mistakes/progress. You can argue that being independent keeps each team fresh or lets them do their own thing... but even ignoring the possibility that tag-team style might burn Tales fans out, it's almost like each team's progress overlap or maybe even cancel each other out.

I actually don't think throwing people in from the outside (non Tales Studio) is bad for a Tales game in theory. In practice, they're not managing right. Sharing the dev with some other people makes them stupid somehow, which means less effort than they usually put out, which in turn is also less than their pre-Tales Studio days.

And the new/long-time casual fans don't know about the teams. A friend of mine who's played all the English Tales since ToD didn't know it either (Just sorta noticed the 2D/3D pattern. Though in strictly English releases, it's just 2D moving to 3D), asking why it feels like each new game always had some stupid minor gripes that were working against it, when they were already fixed or nonexistent in the previous one. It's frustrating when it feels counter-intuitive like that. "We have this new engine twist, but we're gonna have this stupid flaw which the other team already solved last game because they didn't tell us."

[kiryogi]

My problem with Dimps is their track record. Besides the DBZ games, they were also known for all the recent Sonic Advances/Rush and :shudder: Blinx. Actually, I thought dimps were some folks that left Sonic Team?

[Kikujiro]

Not only that. They also developped the two Saint Seiya games (two horrors).

[Kiko]

My problem with Dimps is their track record. Besides the DBZ games, they were also known for all the recent Sonic Advances/Rush and :shudder: Blinx. Actually, I thought dimps were some folks that left Sonic Team?

But the Sonic Advance's (Save for 1 and Battle) were pretty decent fun fast romps. Sonic Rush was actually extremely praised by classic Sonic Fans as well for the most part. That's not quite a bad track record till you factor in the DBZ games

[Cyllya]

My biggest problem with them apart is that they don't share or learn much from each others' mistakes/progress. [...] "We have this new engine twist, but we're gonna have this stupid flaw which the other team already solved last game because they didn't tell us."

Hmm, what flaws/gripes are you refering too? I'm trying to think of everything that bugged me about ToS, ToR, and ToA, but none of them seem to be things that were fixed in the previous game except maybe
1. ToS, unlike ToD2, did not seem to know how to make a proper mage. (You can tell they tried with Kratos, Zelos, and Colette, but their magic sucks, so they might as well have been fighters, and Genis and Raine are like ToP-SFC backup characters, e.g. lame mage.) But ToR's mages were kind of like ToS's too, except Mao to an extent. And I still think people complaining about how overpowered magic is in ToD2 is why magic sucks so hard in ToS, so it learned something....
2. ToA's map is both ugly and annoying to use, while ToR's map is good in both appearance and functionality. But I think this is more a result of reusing ToS's not-made-for-PS2 engine + larger map + more detailed enemies + poor enemy management.... But I guess if the teams were together, they would've used ToR's engine for the map? (Or for everything, for all I know.)

[chingi1]

Tee hee, let's not even mention tol mages.

[Cless]

http://www.superpotato.com/detail/155000299000/

hohoho

I guess they overshipped!

[chingi1]

Hohoho? What're ya? Santa Claus?
Well, we can do better than that. If you could get it for $10 bucks, you wouldn't feel cheated. The game may be crud, but at least it was priced right.

[Kikujiro]

Ouch. Being priced at the same price as a two-years old game like PoT Crystal Drive says it all about sales.

(Note to myself: don't forget to check Play-Asia tomorrow and the following tuesdays )

[Magicpaint]

Good to see it bombed.

[Kiko]

Good to see it bombed.

..what?

[Cless]

I interpreted that as "Good to see that it bombed, so the idea that sub-par installments won't make namco laugh all the way to the bank". Which is an interpretation I agree with.

On the other hand, it's a double-edged sword. This will probably make namco less likely to support the DS in the future, even though it seems their attempts with it have been half-hearted at best.

We'll just have to see what the heck happens to the upcoming PSP games, I guess. The Phantasia port didn't even come close to Eternia's in sales, if I remember correctly. But that could be largely due to it being its fourth incarnation...