I tried to play the PS2 remake of this several times when I was younger, and I could just never stick with it. It was paced too slowly, writing was too boring, and the combat was just awful. I bought the PS1 original ages ago around the time I moved here meaning to give it a shot, but never really felt up to it until now. Well now I've finally sat down and played through the first PS1 Tales game, and it's given me a lot of valuable insights as to why I disliked the PS2 version so much (even if this also wasn't exactly my favorite thing ever). It took me around 33-ish hours to beat the Japanese version of the game playing on original hardware.
The story follows a young man named Stahn, who is discovered as a stowaway on a dragon airship and quickly forced to work upon the crew realizing that he's just some idiot and not a spy. However, once the ship is attacked my monsters, he discovers a mysterious talking sword, and as they fall to the ground in their escape pod, his grand adventure to save the world begins~. The game's writing is okay, but decidedly flawed. On its better aspects, the game has a fun sort of vibe almost like a 90's fantasy road trip anime. There's not a lot of meaningful dialogue, but the comedy bits are well written and the dialogue itself is well written. On the more negative sides, the game's pacing is still quite slow (especially in the back half), the false conclusions really hamstring the story, and the narrative overall is badly wanting in terms of focus. They end up coming down a bit too involved in societal issues to have satisfying closure with the more generalized "the world isn't worth destroying just because there are bad people in it" ending they settle on, and a lot of the more interesting characters and aspects of the plot slowly get weeded away until it's just against some random Big Evil Guy (TM). There's a lot of potential, granted, and it's a frankly frustrating amount of potential with just how good a lot of the societal critique that's present actually is. However, we only have the game we have, and what we have is a very mixed bag. It doesn't really stick the landing for its own story, but it's not hard to see how Tales games after this had far better stories with how close to being great this game so often comes.
The gameplay will be very familiar to anyone who's played an older pre-3D Tales game. It's the old Linear Battle System the series is famous for, with an ARPG that sees you fighting against random encounters on a 2D plane as you go along your RPG adventure. The fundamentals are fairly strong, but like with the story, the devil is in the details. Dungeons have some neat puzzles, but some puzzles are incredibly tough and dungeons are also quite long with only one save point at the very end. While combat often feels very fun and quick, the game's balance is sadly quite rough. Enemies and even bosses struggle to ever be much of a challenge, and the only time combat really gets tough is when you're fighting annoying packs of enemies with lots of powerful AOE spells. Adding to that is that, while your ability as Stahn to really be aggressive and dictate the flow of battle is strong, that is your best and only real way to fight, as your AI partners are far too unintelligent to be much use a lot of the time. Even adjusting their AI behavior, I struggled at all points to actually get them to be as aggressive as I wanted them to be, particularly towards the enemies I actually wanted them to fight against.
This is all not that much of a problem though due to the more favorable parts of the game's balancing. The game's EXP rewards are quite generous and the encounter rate is quite high, so I honestly felt over-leveled nearly the whole game as a result without even grinding deliberately. Your natural MP healing after battle is also VERY generous, so just using your healer's heal spells to heal will make it so you really never need to worry about healing with items and running out as a result. They're systems that, while frustrating, are still thankfully fun, but their design blind spots are not difficult to spot, and it struggles to be truly satisfying with just how easy things basically always are.
The aesthetics of the game are very nice. The music is very good, and the character designs are delightful as well. Especially in battle, the characters' and enemies' animations are really well done and pretty, and the special moves and spells have beautifully done pixel art. The voice acting is also good, but it's weirdly sparsely used. Most of the game's voice acting isn't in battle when characters do battle cries to announce moves, but in skits that happen on the world map. However, these aren't like later Tales games where there's a button prompt telling you to hit Select or something to see the skit. Instead, you need to just stand still on the world map for like 8 or 9 seconds before the scene triggers. There are over 200 of these things, but the game doesn't tell you they're there at all, and even realizing they're there is very hard to do by accident. Unless you come across that page in the manual that mentions them (which I did confirm is indeed there), you'd likely never notice they're there at all, which is a real shame for something they clearly put so much time into.
Verdict: Recommended. This game is far from excellent, but it's still a pretty good game. The pace of the adventure usually makes up for the less than perfect writing, and the action generally remains fun even if it is largely satisfaction from being powerful rather than overcoming genuine, well-designed challenges. While the following game in the series improves on these mechanics a lot, it's still well worth playing the original Tales of Destiny if you're a fan of the series and want to see its roots. It certainly doesn't meet the high bars set by its successors, but it was very fun seeing the seeds of where all that later excellence came from~.
The story follows a young man named Stahn, who is discovered as a stowaway on a dragon airship and quickly forced to work upon the crew realizing that he's just some idiot and not a spy. However, once the ship is attacked my monsters, he discovers a mysterious talking sword, and as they fall to the ground in their escape pod, his grand adventure to save the world begins~. The game's writing is okay, but decidedly flawed. On its better aspects, the game has a fun sort of vibe almost like a 90's fantasy road trip anime. There's not a lot of meaningful dialogue, but the comedy bits are well written and the dialogue itself is well written. On the more negative sides, the game's pacing is still quite slow (especially in the back half), the false conclusions really hamstring the story, and the narrative overall is badly wanting in terms of focus. They end up coming down a bit too involved in societal issues to have satisfying closure with the more generalized "the world isn't worth destroying just because there are bad people in it" ending they settle on, and a lot of the more interesting characters and aspects of the plot slowly get weeded away until it's just against some random Big Evil Guy (TM). There's a lot of potential, granted, and it's a frankly frustrating amount of potential with just how good a lot of the societal critique that's present actually is. However, we only have the game we have, and what we have is a very mixed bag. It doesn't really stick the landing for its own story, but it's not hard to see how Tales games after this had far better stories with how close to being great this game so often comes.
The gameplay will be very familiar to anyone who's played an older pre-3D Tales game. It's the old Linear Battle System the series is famous for, with an ARPG that sees you fighting against random encounters on a 2D plane as you go along your RPG adventure. The fundamentals are fairly strong, but like with the story, the devil is in the details. Dungeons have some neat puzzles, but some puzzles are incredibly tough and dungeons are also quite long with only one save point at the very end. While combat often feels very fun and quick, the game's balance is sadly quite rough. Enemies and even bosses struggle to ever be much of a challenge, and the only time combat really gets tough is when you're fighting annoying packs of enemies with lots of powerful AOE spells. Adding to that is that, while your ability as Stahn to really be aggressive and dictate the flow of battle is strong, that is your best and only real way to fight, as your AI partners are far too unintelligent to be much use a lot of the time. Even adjusting their AI behavior, I struggled at all points to actually get them to be as aggressive as I wanted them to be, particularly towards the enemies I actually wanted them to fight against.
This is all not that much of a problem though due to the more favorable parts of the game's balancing. The game's EXP rewards are quite generous and the encounter rate is quite high, so I honestly felt over-leveled nearly the whole game as a result without even grinding deliberately. Your natural MP healing after battle is also VERY generous, so just using your healer's heal spells to heal will make it so you really never need to worry about healing with items and running out as a result. They're systems that, while frustrating, are still thankfully fun, but their design blind spots are not difficult to spot, and it struggles to be truly satisfying with just how easy things basically always are.
The aesthetics of the game are very nice. The music is very good, and the character designs are delightful as well. Especially in battle, the characters' and enemies' animations are really well done and pretty, and the special moves and spells have beautifully done pixel art. The voice acting is also good, but it's weirdly sparsely used. Most of the game's voice acting isn't in battle when characters do battle cries to announce moves, but in skits that happen on the world map. However, these aren't like later Tales games where there's a button prompt telling you to hit Select or something to see the skit. Instead, you need to just stand still on the world map for like 8 or 9 seconds before the scene triggers. There are over 200 of these things, but the game doesn't tell you they're there at all, and even realizing they're there is very hard to do by accident. Unless you come across that page in the manual that mentions them (which I did confirm is indeed there), you'd likely never notice they're there at all, which is a real shame for something they clearly put so much time into.
Verdict: Recommended. This game is far from excellent, but it's still a pretty good game. The pace of the adventure usually makes up for the less than perfect writing, and the action generally remains fun even if it is largely satisfaction from being powerful rather than overcoming genuine, well-designed challenges. While the following game in the series improves on these mechanics a lot, it's still well worth playing the original Tales of Destiny if you're a fan of the series and want to see its roots. It certainly doesn't meet the high bars set by its successors, but it was very fun seeing the seeds of where all that later excellence came from~.