Tales of Phantasia is an unofficially translated Super Famicom game from Namco, released in 1995. It started a new series which since then became the third most successful video game series in Japan, right after Dragon quest and Final Fantasy. Namco has deliberately kept this game Japan-only, believing that Namco of America would not make enough money off of the game. However, the Super Famicom version of the game was unofficially translated into English, French (two translations), Spanish, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Brazilian Portuguese, and Finnish by an online translation group called DeJap Translations. The game was developed by Wolf Team, written and programmed by Yoshiharu Gotanda, and scored by Motoi Sakuraba and Shinji Tamura. It was the first SFC game being 48MBit large and to feature streamed audio voices, made possible by sound programmer Hiroya Hatsushiba. The fan translators did not bother to dub the voices. The game was later remade for Sony Playstation and ported to Gameboy Advance. The Playstation version has the highest quality soundtrack. A lot of gameplay changes were made for the Playstation and Gameboy Advance versions, compared to the Super Famicom version. The Gameboy Advance version of Tales of Phantasia is adapted from the Playstation version.
The game involves a young swordsman named Cless Alvein and his comrade, archer Chester Berkright, and an evil being known as Dhaos. It starts in the town of Totus, which later gets destoryed after Cless leaves the South Forest after boasting with Chester. Every last one of Totus's villagers were killed in the attack. Chester had to bury the bodies while Cless embarks on an adventure. Then Cless goes to Euclid, and gets throw in jail. Then Mint Adnade finds him and releases him from jail. Shortly thereafter, she joins Cless's party. Throughout the game, Cless travels back and forth in time. Then he meets Klarth M. Lester and Arche Klaine. Cless enters Alvanista Castle to save the prince, who was controlled by a servant of Dhaos, the antagonist of the game. Immediately thereafter, he gets thrown in the Alvanista dungeon, but the king informed the soldiers about the situation and demanded that Cless would be released from the Alvanista dungeon, and stated that Cless came to the castle to free the prince from the control of that servant of Dhaos.
Tales of Phantasia has spawned several sequels, including Tales of Destiny, Tales of Eternia (Tales of Destiny 2 in the United States), and Tales of Symphonia.
