60%PlayStation Portable

If you're a fan of Tales games, you might decide to give this one a shot. It's the first spinoff game that was released in the West, and actually the last also. Despite there being four spinoffs before and four (kind of 5) more released after, this is the only one we got. Maybe it's because of the quality... The game is unfortunately just not very good.

At the core, the combat gameplay is fine. It's the standard 3D Tales of combat, just super slowed down. Attacking is slow, defending is slow, even using items is slow. It's fine though even if it is slow. It's just nothing special. Instead of focusing on unique characters, Radiant Mythology lets you choose your class. You get warrior, thief, mage, priest, along with 5 or so extra classes that you can unlock. They all use artes found in the main Tales games that you'll know and recognize instantly. Along with yourself, you also choose your party, and they have the same jobs that you have access to.

Problems arise when you look at anything past the combat. Let's start with story. It sucks. It's just a story of a world destroying itself, so it destroys others to fix itself. All the cutscenes should be less than an hour. What should have been a focus is the stories of the mainline Tales cameos, but instead, they are just barely used in the plot, and their stories are just the ones that you already know if you've played their games, adding nothing. What's even weirder is having someone like Garr/Woodrow, who is royalty, say he is from there, when there is no other royalty anywhere else in the game. It doesn't even make sense. They really dropped the ball.

The gameplay loop is boring. You're supposed to focus on quests. You do quests to get fame, which you need to unlock the next plot quest. Quests come in two main flavors: kill x amount of y, or gather x resource. There are very few other quests. You'll constantly go to the same dungeons fighting the same enemies for different quests. And there aren't even that many areas or enemies. There are maybe 9 unique areas (plus the final dungeon), and each area has 3-4 floors on it. Each floor has 3 enemies on it. That's it. That's the whole game. It never deviates from 3 enemies on a floor.

And each time you complete a quest, your party disbands and you have to recruit a new party for the next quest. For the other party members, you can choose between a couple of Tales cameo characters, or randomly generated generics. Obviously, you'd want the cameo characters, right? Well, they can refuse to join your party. They like to refuse. And what's worse, they start at set levels. The generics will always be within your level, but if you're not taking the cameo characters because they refused you and you outlevel the cameo characters, they have successfully become dead weight. By the end of the game, I was using all generics. They don't refuse me, and they're stronger too.

I think in the early 2000s, this game would have had more charm. It's meant to be pick up and play and you just do a little bit each day and get to see characters from your favorite games in your hand. But now we can play mainline Tales games in our hand, so it's lost that appeal. This is a relic of the past. Again, the core gameplay isn't bad per se, but when you have thousands of options, this shouldn't even cross your mind.

50%PlayStation Portable

A sentence I thought when I was about 3 hours into Radiant Mythology really sums it up: "I bet the NPCs are having more fun than I am." While it does improve an infinitesimal amount, or maybe it was just the Stockholm syndrome setting in, it never felt that good. On its own strengths, it's got a meh story, extremely repetitive and few dungeons, a soundtrack that's all over the place (a small handful of tracks are very good, but a lot were clearly made just to be easily loopable).

The battle system is brought over pretty faithfully from Symphonia/Abyss. It feels fine, just a bit stiff, like Abyss gameplay with arthritis. But the LMBS alone - much as I love it - is really not strong enough to make up for the game's shortcomings, the maze-like samey dungeons except you can't even open the map completely to see where you are relative to everything else like in dungeon crawlers, the constant repetitive and mandatory fetch quests, and how there's honestly very little in the game. There are about 7 real dungeons that you'll run through constantly, three towns, and that's it. I upgraded my equipment a grand total of two times in the entire game by saving up and buying the strongest weapon and body armour - the shops never get new stuff. At least I got to wear the funny hat.

I've also always felt the cooking mechanism was superfluous in all Tales games except Phantasia, it's mostly only there just to get a few good skits out of since your actual healing is done with gels. The food strap mechanic in Destiny DC was far better. But HERE - you don't get to just cook, you also get to craft everything else. Refining materials, armour, tools, bla bla bla... I just sold all my materials cuz I couldnt be arsed to craft them, and I got by just fine.

Without a doubt the thing that rubbed me the wrong way the most in this game was the Fame system, which mandates that you grind the same fetch quests in the same dungeons over and over again before you garner enough notoriety to get a story quest. I hated this mechanic. I know this is a portable game and a lot of portable games have success with similar 'pick up and play' mechanics - I don't mind this in most of them, God Eater easily comes to mind, I *loved* the repetition in those games (even those weren't this egregious about it if you wanted to just speed through the story, though). But like I said before, the gameplay and LMBS in this game alone aren't strong enough to sustain or justify that, and with such few dungeons to explore, it gets old fast. If someone modded this game to remove the fame system, it would actually be better. It's terrible padding. Despite the game being short for an RPG, it still feels too long.

Okay, I get to kick this game while it's down one last time - the RNG elements really hurt it. You can invite other characters to join your party for each mission, and it's completely RNG whether or not they will accept. This feels like a stumbling block over what the main appeal of this game is - getting to form parties and do stuff with your fav characters from the Tales series.

But there are positives - the graphics are really good, comparable to the home console Tales games of the era. While the story is sparse and meh for the most part, the endgame storyline was all right, even if the villain is just a recycled combo of Dhaos and Mithos. Mormo is cute. The battle system wasn't overly compromised on. Also for all its fetch quests, at least the game isn't obtuse about giving you information about victory conditions, and returns you to town automatically once you complete one of them.

And the main positive, of course, the whole point of the game - the fanservice! You get to meet characters from all the Tales games up to 2006, watch them interact with each other. Their characterization is accurate to their selves from their home games, and the humour is still fun. So yeah - in a childish, fanfiction-y sort of way, getting to create your own character and going on adventures with all your fav Tales characters is pretty nice.

It's a low-budget game with tons of flaws, but I guess I have too much of a soft spot for it to call it bad - it isn't, but it isn't very good either. My best memories of it will always be that comfy summer of 2010, not of 2021. Guess I was just easily pleased as a kid. 5/10!

80%PlayStation Portable

Out of the Tales games I own this one is probably my least favourite not saying it's a bad game it's a pretty good game just not that great of a Tales game. It plays more like a dungeon crawler with an all star cast of Tales characters.

75%No Platform Specified

With colorful graphics, a decent soundtrack (many of the songs are simple but catchy), 300 missions and countless hours of gameplay, it's hard to say too many negative things about Radiant Mythology. Unfortunately the one complaint that exists is what hurts the game the most, which is the feeling that you're nothing more than a glorified page sent on a bunch of pointless missions while trying to figure out how to save the world. This is extremely frustrating because you're supposed to be a hero and not an errand boy. Still, with amusing cutscenes involving different Tales characters and a solid battle system, fans of the series will more than likely be satisfied. That is, if they're not too busy harvesting potatoes.