One of the hardest challenges role-playing game developers faced in the decade after masterpieces like Ultima, Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy came out was trying to figure out new ways to keep the genre fresh. But sometimes innovation means thinking outside the box and taking inspiration from unexpected places. Or in the case of the Tales series, unexpected genres.

You may have heard of the Tales games, but if you haven’t, I wouldn’t be surprised. They are much more popular in Japan than they are in America. The reason for this? Maybe it was overshadowed by the Final Fantasy series. Or maybe its turn-based battle system was too radically different from those of other RPGs. Despite this, its popularity continues to this day and the series is ongoing. The first of these games was Tales of Phantasia, released exclusively in Japan for the Super Famicom (the original Japanese name for the Super NES). The game’s story centered around a teenage swordsman named Cress Albane, who lives in a small village with his friend, an archer named Chester Burklight.

One day, Cress and Chester’s home is invaded by an army commanded by a dark knight named Mars, who goes on to destroy the village and ends up killing Cress’s parents and Chester’s sister, along with many more of the village’s innocent inhabitants. As you later learn, the set of events that led to this tragedy was first kicked off years ago by a sorcerer king named Dhaos.

Back then, four heroes faced the sorcerer king in battle and were about to defeat him, but Dhaos escaped during the battle by time-travelling into the future. Although when Dhaos arrived in the future, he still ended up being sealed away by one of the four heroes’ descendants, using two magic pendants to do so.

After Cress and Chester meet a young priestess named Mint who helps them escape from the wrath of Mars, the trio ends up meeting a man named Trinicus, who was one of the four heroes who fought Dhaos in the past. They learn that their parents were friends with Trinicus, and they also learn that Mars stole both Cress and Mint’s family pendants in order to set Dhaos free.

Trinicus decides to send Cress and Mint back in time 100 years into the past, back before Dhaos was sealed away and when he was waging a war against the humans with his demon army. With the aid of a pink-haired teenage half-elf mage named Arche Klein and a 29-year-old spirit summoner named Claus F. Lester, the new band of heroes journey to the lair of Dhaos to do what the original four heroes were unable to do and defeat the sorcerer.

The story continues from there and a lot more things happen, but you get the idea of what kind of game this is. It’s basically a time travel story with a high fantasy setting. The game was made by a group of artists and programmers who called themselves “Wolf Team,” founded in 1986 and originating as a division of the software development company Telenet Japan, which was founded just three years earlier. The person who wrote the game’s story was Yoshiharu Gotanda, a would-be novelist whose unpublished work “Tale Phantasia” formed the basis of the game’s plot, which was also influenced by such things as Norse mythology and H.P. Lovecraft.

Manga artist Kōsuke Fujishima (who is most popular for his work on the manga Oh My Goodness!) designed the characters for the game, and would continue to do so for many other games in this series, gaining a big fan base for his artwork in the process.

One of the things about Tales of Phantasia that made it stand out from the RPGs of the day was the actual voice clips heard during battles, during certain story points and during the game’s opening theme song. All of which necessitated a higher megabyte capacity than usual for a Super Famicom cartridge. But the most innovative thing that contributed to the game’s popularity was the introduction of the Linear Motion Battle System (LMBS). Like most turn-based RPGs, an encounter with an enemy would lead you to a showdown on a battlefield, but in Tales of Phantasia, your 2D battlefield could scroll from left to right (depending on your proximity to your opponent). You can control your character in real time during these fights, but unlike other RPGs,your other party members were computer-controlled and assigned to either go on the defense or go on the offense. These hybrid action-heavy real-time/turn-based battles were inspired by fighting games like Capcom’s Street Fighter, which made the game feel like no RPG that came before.

Namco released Tales of Phantasia in Japan in the December of 1995 and it received a positive reception among RPG fans, despite some heavy commercial competition from Enix’s Dragon Quest VI. The game would later be re-released for the PlayStation in 1998 with new and updated features, and it finally made its North American debut when the 2003 Game Boy Advance remake was released in the U.S. three years after it came out in Japan. Although by that point, later and much better entries in the Tales series had come out and Phantasia was seen as technologically dated and rough around the edges (just like many older RPGs), despite the remake retaining much of the first game’s charm and appeal.

Before Tales of Phantasia got released, internal conflict with Namco about the game’s creative direction during development led to many of Wolf Team’s members departing the company and going off on their own. Which led to the formation of the independent RPG developer tri-Ace, which was co-founded by Phantasia creator Yoshiharu Gotanda (the exact same year Tales of Phantasia came out) and is still going strong today, with the studio’s most popular works being the Star Ocean series and Valkyrie Profile (tri-Ace has also assisted Square Enix in the development of Final Fantasy XIII-2 and Sega in the development of the PlayStation Vita game Phantasy Star Nova).

As for the Tales games, Namco continued teaming up with Wolf Team (which Namco renamed “Namco Tales Studios” in 2003 after gaining a majority stake in the company) to develop each new entry. The next two were the PlayStation games Tales of Destiny (1997) and Tales of Eternia (2000). The former was a commercial hit while the latter mostly received praise for its gameplay. Next came the critically acclaimed sequel Tales of Destiny 2 (2002) for the PlayStation 2 and the highly popular Tales of Symphonia (2003) for the GameCube. Symphonia is the most globally popular of all the Tales games, and it’s the game that first got many Americans into the series. There was also Tales of Rebirth (2004, PS2), Tales of Legendia (2005, PS2), Tales of the Abyss (2005, PS2), Tales of Innocence (2007, Nintendo DS), Tales of Vesperia (2008, Xbox 360), Tales of Hearts (2008, Nintendo DS), Tales of Graces (2009, Wii), Tales of Xillia (2011, PS3) Tales of Xillia 2, (2012, PS3), Tales of Zestiria (2015, PS3), Tales of Berseria (2016, PS4/PS3) and most recently Tales of Arise (2021, PC/PS5/PS4/Xbox Series X/Xbox One) which critics gave positive reviews and which some gamers called the best entry since Symphonia. It even won Best RPG at that year’s Game Awards and was nominated in the same category at the D.I.C.E. Awards.

All these games vary in quality and execution, especially in regard to the writing and the genre conventions, but the most consistently well-received things about them are their battle system, with the LMBS being a mainstay of the series, although with many entries it gets tweaked in different ways. One of the most popular innovations being in-battle free running, which was first introduced in Abyss. Others include the Unison Gauge, which was introduced in Symphonia and allows your entire party to attack an opponent simultaneously, and the Rush Gauge, which was exclusive to Rebirth and gives characters new abilities when filled. That feature was a replacement of Symphonia‘s Over Limit feature, which filled up more and more the higher the attacks from your opponents built up your Tension Points, granting that character new capabilities during battle. Plus Tales of Eternia introduced the ability to cook food, which also became a regular series feature and enhanced your status when consumed.

Just like with the mainline Final Fantasy games, each main entry in the Tales series takes place in a new setting with completely new characters, unless they are a direct sequel like Tales of Destiny 2. Although that may have been what led to the Final Fantasy comparisons and possibly why its fan base in the West is so much smaller. To be honest, I’m not surprised. The Tales games have never really been trendsetters for the genre. As a result, neither the best games in the series nor the worst games in the series really stand out from the crowd, with only a passionate fan base of RPG enthusiasts keeping the series alive. The last main entry came out four years ago, but they have been keeping fans preoccupied in recent years with plenty of remasters until the next main game. In fact as of now, Tales of Berseria Remastered is scheduled to come out in a couple of months, bringing the previous Sony exclusive to Microsoft and Nintendo platforms as well. Innovative and continuously evolving gameplay mechanics go a long way in keeping a game series fun.