TGS 2006: Namco's Tales of Portabilia Preview

September 22nd, 2006, 21:50 Posted By: wraggster

Heres an Excerpt:

Namco's Tales of... series has really come into its own ever since the GameCube Tales of Symphonia conquered the platform and finally came into the hearts of American gamers. Namco has produced a flurry of entries in the series for just about every platform imaginable, including two ports of classic entries to the PSP (Tales of Eternia and the recent Tales of Phantasia: Full Voice) as well as a remake on GBA of Tales of Phantasia. Added to the Tales here at TGS are two brand new and completely stunning new portable entries, both of which bring the series to handhelds in full 3D.

Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology for the PlayStation Portable follows on a Tales line originally seen on GBA. The breakthrough for this PSP game over prior PSP Tales games is that it features a full 3D battle system, more like that of the new Tales of the Abyss than Tales of Legendia (which tried to stick to the classic 2D viewpoint of the series, just replacing sprites with polygons.) In battles, your party unfolds four deep in rather large arenas to combat a multitude of enemies at a time, utilizing a full free-roaming battle engine. In action, it's most impressive on PSP -- with you and your full party running around batting often dozens of enemies at a time and working together for attacks and defenses, the PSP's screen fills up with action at every angle. A robust character customization system and full system of character classes for your four figures lets you create the characters you want to play as. Loadtimes in and out of battles are tremendously fast and hidden by effects, and the cel-shading used for the backgrounds and characters is very well-done on the system. It's a festival of colors and effects, and while the overworld dungeon crawl has more fog than we'd like to see in a game so otherwise attractive (we should also probably add, no multiplayer sadly), it's a very good-looking and easy-to-play PSP game.

Full Article at IGN

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