Tales of Phantasia

Tales of Phantasia for the Game Boy Advance is a portable port of the game that launched the long-running Tales of series on the Super Famicom in 1995 and is still considered one of the most influential JRPG titles of the nineties. The GBA version, released in Japan, brings to the handheld the story of Cress and his companions, who travel through time to stop the demonic ruler Dhaos, and retains the series' signature Linear Motion Battle System, where the player directly controls a character in real time on a 2D battlefield and chains attacks into combos in a manner similar to fighting games.

The port to the Game Boy Advance required adjustments to the graphics and technical presentation compared to later console versions, but the game still retains its expansive world, elaborate supporting cast, cooking and crafting systems, and music, which ranks among the most distinctive elements of the whole series. The combat system, combining action controls with RPG stats and a combo-based attack system, was groundbreaking at the time of the original's release, and even on the GBA it offers a different experience from the classic turn-based JRPGs of the era, such as Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest.

Because the game was released only in Japan, European and American players got to know it mainly through a fan-made English translation, thanks to which the GBA version earned a reputation as one of the best-crafted ports of the early Tales of era and became a popular choice for players wanting to try the series' roots on the go. Today it is regarded as proof that even sprawling console JRPGs can be brought to a handheld without any major loss of quality, and for fans of the series it remains an interesting alternative to both the original Super Famicom version and the later PlayStation remake. For collectors it is also interesting in that it shows what the start of the Tales of series looked like before the later fully three-dimensional visual style became established.