Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology for PSP Reviews & Ratings by IGN

Like a lot of other RPGs, Namco Bandai's Tales series has been overlooked by fans busy playing games by Square, Squaresoft, Enix, and ... Square Enix. Yet that might change with Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology, a game that attempts to bring together the best elements from previous Tales on one solid PSP title. Featuring the return of the Flex Range Linear Motion Battle System, full 3D graphics and more detailed character customization, Tales might have finally come into its own.



Radiant Mythology is different from its predecessors right from the start. Unlike previous games in the series, your main character isn't predetermined. Instead, the character is totally self-designed, allowing you to choose your character's name, gender, hair color, skin tone and even their voice. You also establish their job class, which can be changed to any one of nine other jobs later on in the game. Once this task is complete, your newly made character awakens at the foot of the World Tree, a magical arbor that protects the world of Terresia from evil.



There, you're greeted by a rather bizarre-looking cat creature named Mormo. Mormo explains that you are a Descender, a hero born from the World Tree's power in order to defeat The Devourer, an evil organism from another world bent on consuming all of Terresia. With the help of Mormo, a mysterious girl named Kananno and a resistance force known as Ad Libitum (made up of previous Tales characters), your hero will travel the world in an attempt to find and destroy The Devourer before it's too late.



Radiant Mythology's core gameplay revolves around various adventure quests assigned to you by Ad Libitum; many of these tasks must be completed to advance the storyline. These quests entail traveling to different dungeons to battle dangerous monsters, acquiring specific items or saving a local villager from danger. Your hero can take a set number of allies from Ad Libitum along for the ride. Although many Tales characters like Stahn, Leon, Tear and Luke are a part of Ad Libitum, they will refuse to accompany you until you become famous, which can only be accomplished by successfully completing lots of quests and receiving Fame points.



Fame points are important because once you gain notoriety, powerful Tales characters will join your party and assignments will be much easier to complete. Until you become famous however, you'll have to settle on choosing fellow newbies of Ad Libitum, so it's important to create a well-balanced party that will be effective in battle. Once you choose your companions, it's off to whatever dungeon you've been assigned to explore.



Each of the dungeons in Terresia is teeming with enemies, which you can attempt to circumnavigate if you're in a hurry or fight by running up to them and touching them. Once this happens you're swiftly taken into battle mode -- and we mean swiftly. There's only minimal loading time in Radiant Mythology, which is a pretty impressive feat for a PSP game.



The return of the Flex Range Linear Motion Battle System (also featured in Tales of Abyss) and the addition of 3D graphics makes the fighting sequences pretty impressive. Instead of just standing around waiting for enemies to attack you, your party members can move freely about the battlefield, unleashing beautifully animated attacks and combinations in real time. These skills are known as Artes, which require a set amount of TP (skill or magic points) in order to perform. TP is quickly used up in battle, but can be restored by various healing gels. Characters can also block incoming attacks from enemies or even retreat to give themselves time to recover.



Another great option is the ability to change your strategy mid-fight by calling up a menu and adjusting the battle behavior of your party members. With all these great features there's plenty to keep you entertained as your characters duke it out with frogs, golems and snails.



That's not to say the battle system is flawless, however. For one thing your hero can only move in a straight line, so if your enemy has moved off to the side while you perform an attack, your Artes will completely miss them (wasting TP), and if your characters are cornered by multiple enemies, it's difficult for them to get away. You're also only allowed to carry up to 15 units of an item at a time, so it's easy to run out of healing gels, a real pain when in the middle of a huge boss fight. Still, the overall system is solid, and players should have no problems figuring out how to execute powerful attacks or adjust their battle strategy.



Although beating up monsters is a large part of what makes Radiant Mythology fun to play, that doesn't mean you want to engage the same enemy over and over again, which happens quite a bit in this game. In fact what hurts this title the most is the copious amounts of pointless fetch quests and endless dungeon crawling you have to wade through in order to get to the next important event in the story. Seventy percent or so of your assignments from Ad Libitum are comprised of gathering food or getting rid of pesky vermin.



Although some of the items you gather can help you upgrade your weapons and armor or let you create food that's more effective than healing gels, jogging around the same dungeon trying to obtain enough of the same thing gets boring fast. Worse, acquiring items often requires buying tools like a sickle or a pickaxe in order to harvest them, and you may find yourself returning to the nearest town again and again to buy more tools because couldn't gather enough of the right stuff to complete your quest. Of course if you're sneaky, you can avoid some of the hassle by using the game's ad-hoc mode to swindle fellow players out of whatever item you need, but you won't receive Fame points and thus won't be able to invite more skilled fighters like Leon or Stahn to join your party.



Luckily, some of the tedium of running errands is broken by amusing cutscenes involving different Tales characters. The scenes are usually triggered when you enter a town or building and occur through suspended animation that features passable voice acting. Tales fans should be happy because each individual Tales character retains the same personality traits they had from previous games. Although there are certainly a few laugh-out-loud moments during these sequences, players not familiar with the series may find all this interaction between characters nothing more than inane chatter or random story-telling. Still, there are pieces of information that are worth paying attention to -- especially when it comes to learning more about Terresia and how to defeat The Devourer.

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