Tales of Phantasia

Tales of Phantasia launched the Tales series on the SNES, which later became one of the longest-running and most prolific JRPG franchises with dozens of sequels on later platforms. The story follows young hero Cress Albane, who sets out with friends across time to stop the tyrannical ruler Dhaos, traveling between the past and the present, watching the consequences of his decisions across centuries, and figuring out how his choices in one era shape the world in another, all while playing alongside a party of companions with their own personal motivations and backgrounds.

The game became famous for its Linear Motion Battle System, which, instead of purely turn-based combat, offered more action-oriented, semi-fluid clashes along a horizontal axis, with the ability to combine attacks and spells in real time and chain them into longer combos. On the SNES this was a technically very demanding project that used an expanded data cartridge to fit a sprawling story, animated sequences, and even digitized spoken dialogue, which was a rarity on the console at the time and a clear demonstration of just how far the SNES could be pushed in the final years of its life. The music was composed by Motoi Sakuraba and Shinji Tamura and ranks among the most acclaimed in the genre, with melodies that returned in the series even many years later.

Tales of Phantasia was released only in Japan, yet thanks to later ports to other platforms and fan translations it reached a wide audience and is today considered one of the founding stones of the modern action JRPG. Its influence on the Tales series and on the whole genre is immense, and among collectors and JRPG fans it ranks among the most sought-after and most expensive titles of its generation. Today's players value it above all for its fluid action combat, which in 1995 pointed the way that part of the genre would only follow years later, and Tales of Phantasia thus remains an important milestone in the history of Japanese RPGs.

Why play: Anyone who appreciates fluid action combat in JRPGs shouldn't miss Tales of Phantasia — a title that in 1995 showed the direction part of the genre would only take years later.