Anime: Tales of Phantasia The Animation

I looked forward to watching this OVA after finishing Tales of Phantasia. As fantastic as a game it is, the 16 (32 bit in my case) bit era sprites didn't deliver the story events as great as it could have been even with the back up of the amazing voice acting present in the PSP version. Of course, I knew that a short 4 episode OVA could not cover it all from the beginning, so I'm not that dissapointed.

Animation

Unlike the other reviewers I found the animation amazing, on par with the marvelous opening animation in the game (PSX/PSP version). Great attention to detail in the backgrounds, and fluid movement of the characters made this a treat to watch. The designs of Fujishima are intact which is a plus for the fans.

Sound

The voice actors from the game reprise their roles in the anime, with the overall cast giving a strong performance. The OP and ED themes are both slow, melancholic songs that match the tone of the anime perfectly. Finally, the OVA uses some orchestrated versions of the music in the game which will surely please the fans.

Story

Unfortunately, trying to cover a 40 hour game in 4 episodes will have its consequences. The game skips around often, ignoring important pieces of the story, choosing to connect the most important points to tell the plot. If you played the game you will follow how the events develop easily despite the changes, however newcomers will often feel that everything is rushed and many matters are left unexplained. The OVA still manages to be enjoyable in spite of this though.

Character Development

Another area that suffered from the constrained time. Thanks to the great work of the voice actors and the some scenes of character interaction we can get a strong idea of how the character are. We don't have much background on them or know why they are the way they are, unfortunately. The anime manages to paint a general picture but that is as far as it goes.

Value

It is a fair fantasy anime on its own with interesting characters and setting. It feels that it was made for the fans of the game however, so newcomers might consider choosing from the many better stand alone fantasy anime available.

Enjoyment

Watching the story and characters I loved brought to life with high quality animation, sound and music was great. Unfortunately, the fact that many great parts of the plot and the character's back story were ignore knocks down a couple of points from my enjoyment. A full 26, or even 13, episode series would have been perfect but I still encourage fans of the game to check it out.

At first I was pretty excited about this anime.... I mean the snes rpg was always one of my favorites so I was soo happy they decided to make it into an anime. Then I heard it would be a 4 part ova and started to have doubts. All in all the anime didn't really accomplish much. It lacked many MANY things from the game and just didn't get the point across.

The basic outline of the anime is that there is an evil guy named Dhoas who is trying to anniliate humanity and a bunch of heroes have to kill him. They don't do much explanation on how any of the events came to happen so its pretty confusing if you didn't play the game.

Animation
The animation isn't THAT bad. I have to admit alot of the fighting was pretty mediocore BUT the only thing I liked were the spells and summons :P Since I was a pretty big fan of the game I wanted to see how some of the stuff would look like.... Unfortunately they didn't really show much of Cless's techs soo that got me a bit disappointed.

Sound
As I said before the story lacked in all areas. It didn't amount to much since it was soo short. You can't really get into it cause it ends soo fast. I'm sure if they made it into a 26 ep anime it could of done much better. They really needed to fill in alot of the parts to make the story more coherent. For instances they could of at least explained a bit about how the characters came to meet up and started on there journey. One good early example of them disregarding story is at the beginning between the first and second scene. Since I've already used the game soo much to compare in the timeline of the game the first scene took place near the beginning of the game and the second scene was pretty much the middle. So you can imagine how much plot was thrown away.

Story
You don't really get a feel for any of the characters. Even the main character doesn't really feel very developped. I mean come on cless was SOO bad ass in the game but he didn't seem THAT strong in the anime lol. They also dumbed down Dhaos a bit... I expected a longer and more dragged out last battle which didn't happen. Again I always hoped to see some more crazy stuff from the game. Well not looking at outer appearance of each character other more important elements of good characters weren't present. Personally the most important thing of a character is to be able to attach and feel for it. This wasn't possible given the length and depth put into the characters. In my mind they also left out alot of minor characters from the game that played quite a role. All in all they did a fairly bad job here too.

Character
The value was pretty low since I had already played the game soo I knew most of the story. That and they didn't really do much in the 4 eps they had to make it worth while watching.

Value and Enjoyment
I can't say I didn't enjoy the anime just but any enjoyment I had was only because I was a fan of the game. So this anime would only be worth while watching for ppl who have played and finished the snes game. Hell if anyone wants to watch this don't.... its MUCH more worth while playing the game it is definitely one of the best snes Rpg's.

Tales of Phantasia is an anime that attempts to summarize the events that took place in the Super Nintendo game of the same name. Over the course of four episodes, they try to get as much of the key elements of the story across as possible. Unfortunately, the effort ends up falling flat.

Story
The SNES game was, at its time, very interesting. It took the approach of bringing in a morally ambiguous villian, a welcome approach from the stereotypical "Dark Lord" bad guys. The storyline was interesting and it made an honest attempt to explore the other side of the issue.

However, the anime just never got around to doing that. Yes, they presented the idea that Dhaos wasn't all bad, and certainly they also showed that not all of the "good guys" were doing the right thing. However, just from watching the anime you'd never really understand why Dhaos is doing all the stuff that he's doing.

Which, essentially, is the main issue with Tales the anime. Instead of trying to spread things out a bit and make sure that they present all of the salient points, they chose to more or less go with a "highlight reel" approach. If you've played the game, you'll recognize a repetition of many of the important moments. However, if you haven't played the game, you'll inevitably start wondering why a lot of things simply never get explained or developed. Essentially, they captured the events that took place but lost track of the point of the events. In other words, the story just isn't very good in here.

Character
Again, they captured the general presentation of the characters but failed to do any explanation of why any of them are the way that they are. You get the snapshot but you don't get the depth. And besides the six important characters (the five heroes and the bad guy), NOBODY gets more than a couple of minutes of face time. Very little depth of characters, and even less breadth.

Animation
Come on, we know that a better job than THIS can be done. The level of detail is low, and none of the action scenes look all that great. A little less than mediocre.

Sound
No real complaints here. The themes are OK, nothing special, as are the voices.

Value
It was mildly entertaining, but I can think of better shows to plug back in for another viewing. Hoenstly, I'd much rather just go and give the game a whirl than sit through the show again.

Enjoyment
I suppose I can give it some points here. No, it wasn't all that well done, but it was still fun at times, and for anyone who's curious about the main points of the story but doesn't want to invest the significant amount of time that actually playing through an RPG entails (even the old ones still take quite a while), it's not the worst thing in the world.

Overall, I just can't recommend it, though. In pretty much all aspects, it simply felt like it was rushed. The story got crammed into too tight of a space, the animation wasn't well-done, and there were just too many elements which fell flat due to lack of overall development. There are certainly worse shows out there, but there are also MANY better ones as well. Don't make this any kind of a priority unless you're a hardcore "Tales" fanatic.