After my tainted start in ToP for the GBA, I persevered and tried to give it a fair shot.
Every other SNES/SFC game translated for the GBA (at least all that I have played) have been superior to the original to some degree. Although purists may debate whether they like graphical updates, such as those in the Super Mario Advance series, the fact is that the GBA is much more powerful than the SNES/SFC, memory chips are dirt cheap compared to the roughly fifteen years ago that ToP was originally released, and the fact the game was already finished - the features were already there for crying out loud- make any downgrade completely inexcusable.
After I got past the atrocity of replacing the opening song with some uninspiring tune, I began to notice other things, like the fact that your character's image is no longer reflected in the water when he stands over it. This effect was used extensively in the original game, and added to the polish that really made it special.
And the fact that on the equipment screens the item names are all truncated. This happens because the Japanese language version could say the entire item name using nine or fewer spaces. (Nine seems to be the width allowed by the menu) Try to say the same thing in English and you use up those spaces pretty quickly. The artful and pretty much industry standard solution to this is to create a separate sprite pallet with narrower-width characters. If you've ever played Secret of Mana for the Super NES you may have noticed what I'm talking about - the text appeared very narrow on the menus to accomodate for the fact that English needs quite a few more letters than Japanese does to say the same thing. The fact that the translators of ToP neglected to do this is just one more example of a shoddy localization job.
The voice acting was a good effort, but I think the localization team should have taken a queue from the group who did the North American version of Tales of Destiny and left the Japanese voice intact for the most part. Most of the voices are banal and uninspiring compared to the original Japanese, which may have been silly, but was at least done with conviction. At one point one of the "cinema"-type sequences that was supposed to have voice actually just died in the middle of the clip. The subtitles said something like "Please do not harm the tree" and the sound came out as "Please do no..--bzzzert........". Come on, people, your testers saw this and thought it was ok?
Best Buy won't allow me to return the game for my money because it has been opened, so I have demanded my money back from Nintendo or Namco, whoever it is that is responsible. I probably won't get it, but I can try.
Usually the reviewers in EGM give warning about stuff like this when they review a game, but they sure dropped the ball on this one.
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