テイルズオブデステイニー２ (Tales of Destiny 2) REVIEW

Tales of Destiny 2 is the fourth game in the "Tales of" series which released on November 28th, 2002. The game was only released in Japan and sadly was never translated. For those who don't know, the Tales series is a series of anime inspired RPG games that play quite differently than your average RPG. When Namco first released Tales of Phantasia on the SNES they took a different approach on how an RPG can be played. In the Tales series, like many other RPG games you traverse a world map, visit towns explore dungeons, engage in battles against all sorts of creatures, get deeply involved in the story, and continuously upgrade your character or characters. What makes the Tales series so different than your average RPG is the way battles are carried out. Battles are real time, and are very fast paced. Rather than selecting which attacks you want to use then watch as your characters execute them you instead control every action of your character as if you were playing an strategic beat em up.


STORY:

Obviously if you haven't played the first Tales of Destiny, there may be spoilers contained in this section of the review. The story of Tales of Destiny 2 takes place eighteen years later after the four heroes from the previous game, Sthan, Rutee, Garr, and Phillia have put an end to Kronos' evil ambitions. Kyle, son of Sthan and Rutee embarks on an adventure to become a hero just like his father. The majority of Kyle's adventure is revolved around time traveling, and fixing what has been changed in the past to prevent absurd changed made to the present and to the future. Lucky for you if you happen to not like the somewhat cheesy plot you will still be interested in what's going on because every character has such a great personality in this game, you can easily become attached to them and feel the emotions that each character has.

GAMEPLAY:

SP is probably the most annoying thing implemented into a Tales game.

 The gameplay in Tales of Destiny 2 is fun, it's not my favorite in the series but it's still very enjoyable. Like the majority of Tales games, battles are fast and can get a little crazy at times. The game uses the random battle occurrences that is often used in RPG games and battles are played in real time. Controls are nice and simple, press O for normal attacks, press X or a combination of a direction and X for a special attack consuming both TP and SP, press triangle to open the menu and simply press and hold square to block.

TP is equivalent to MP if your familiar with any of the Final Fantasy games or similar games that use MP as well. While SP limits you on how often you can attack your opponent. When the bar is full you may attack your enemies all you want, but doing so will drain the SP gauge drastically as you mash on that O button, resulting in your attacks bouncing off the enemy. Both spell casters and fighters use SP however, spell casters use more SP due to their high damage output. There are so many different situations that can easily have your SP drained to nearly 25% that it can become more of  annoyance rather than a challenging aspect of the game. You can easily regain SP by simply standing still, you may also block while waiting for your SP to recharge.

MUSIC & SOUND:
 The music in Tales of Destiny 2 is something worth noting, it's done by none other than さくらばもとい aka Motoi Sakuraba, and does it's job at setting the mood throughout the story very well. By default I feel that it just wouldn't feel like a Tales game if the music wasn't composed by him, much like how a Final Fantasy game wouldn't feel like a Final Fantasy game if the music wasn't composed by Nobuo Uematsu. I'm not quite sure of how many common battle themes there are in this game as I began to lose track after a while of playing, but what I do know is that there is five or more common battle themes in this game. That's a whole lot considering most games only have one or two and can start to become repetitive about halfway through the game.

I can talk all day about the music in Tales of Destiny 2 but I'm not going to.

Even though I found the music to be astonishing I was slightly disappointed with the sound quality in this game. After just playing Tales of Rebirth and hearing such high quality audio coming from both the music and sound effects, it's hard not to notice that the audio in this game sounds very compressed in comparison. However I am only slightly disappointed in the way it sounds because it gives the game kind of a PS1 style aura to it, something it should have anyways since it's the sequel to a PS1 game (Just my personal opinion).

OVERVIEW:
Tales of Destiny 2 is a great game despite the problem I have with the SP system. Music is great with a bit of nostalgic tunes thrown in for the Tales of Destiny fans, story is interesting although a bit cliche, characters are unique, and the game is bright and colorful. Tales of Destiny 2 is a bit on the easy side, by default it's set to normal mode but I went ahead and played through on "2nd" and completed the game only seeing the game over screen about three times. The main story is a bit short compared to others in the series, lasting only around 35 hours. Luckily if that's not enough there are plenty of side quests awaiting your completion.

 Tales of Destiny 2 is affordable, and you definitely get more than what you pay for. The game is in Japanese only and is available on both the Playstation 2 and Playstation Portable.