Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology is the first time a Tales game has made its way to the PSP. The good news is, as far as PSP titles are concerned, it’s on of the better RPGs out there and boasts little load time, and beautiful graphics. The bad news is that this game will really only be appreciated by Tales’ fans.
Starting off, it’s obvious this isn’t your typical Tales game, because you create your own character. For a PSP RPG, Namco-Bandai did a good job at offering some options for creation, allowing for a variety of equipment and other typical character fanfare. With that, though, some warning bells should go off. Unlike most of the Tales titles, this one doesn’t give you the memorable main character you can grow to know (and love, for some of you fanatics).
The story of Radiant Mythology is rather simple: some cat guy named Mormo lets you know that you’re a Descender, and thus are in charge of defeating The Devourer, which is attempting to destroy your world of Terresia. Basic JRPG story, right?
Being based on Tales of the Abyss, the combat is one of the game’s strong points, allowing for much more movement and actions than the normal "select attack > attack > wait" routine. You’re free to move around between attacks, and this helps make fighting much more bearable than many other JRPG titles.
The combat isn’t the real problem in this game, though. Rather, the problem is how the game progresses. Basically, Radiant Mythology plays like a single-player MMO. You get your quest, you go kill X something and gather X items, you return the quest, you repeat. Every now and then you’re given a companion from previous Tales titles (which is really the highlight of the game, as each of them maintains their own personality), but it’s cookie-cutter stuff as far as quests go, and a large portion of the time even below that.
As a game, Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology is very obviously aimed towards the Tales fanboys (and fangirls). Most of the time in development seems to have been spent in writing up funny skits involving past characters, and far less time seems to have been involved in developing the actual game itself. For a Tales fan, this game will prove to be an absolute blast, and a must-own-especially if you’ve kept all of the characters separate, and remember enough about all the plots to catch the little jabs during the skits.
For the non-Tales affiliated, Radiant Mythology is a decent game, and probably one of the better options when it comes to an RPG on the PSP. Perhaps that speaks more about the lack of quality RPG titles on the handheld, though.
