Tales of Eternia Remastered review for PS5, Xbox Series X, Switch, PC

When you think of long-lasting JRPG series, most people think Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest. A different series, by Namco Bandai, gives both of those a run for their money with their Tales of series. Twenty-one years ago, Namco Bandai kicked off their Tales Remastered project in 2005, which is an effort to bring some of the more classic games onto modern systems with some quality-of-life upgrades. Tales of Eternia is the next title to get the treatment.

Way back in November 2001, Tales of Eternia was released in the US as Tales of Destiny 2 on the PlayStation. It remained Tales of Eternia in Japan and then Tales of Destiny 2 came out in 2003 on the PlayStation 2 but was never released state-side.

Eternia has two worlds, Infernia and Celestia. Between them is a barrier that prevents the two worlds from colliding. The game begins with a young woman from Celestia crash landing on Infernia and meeting Ried and Farah. The young woman doesn’t speak the languages of Infernia and Ried and Farah are only able to get her name, Meredy. The three decide to go to the elder’s house to find out what to do and Meredy is immediately banished from the village for seemingly no reason.

Farah decides to go with Meredy and manages to drag Ried along for the ride. They start looking for their friend Keele, who is attending university thinking he might be able to translate for them. Upon leaving the village, Farah suggests going to a dojo just south of town. Turns out Farah was a member of the dojo at one point in time. Here is where you will get most of your advice on fighting.

Speaking of fighting, Tales of Eternia has random encounters. When an encounter happens, it goes to a 2D side scrolling fight. You control one character, while the others, up to three, are controlled by the AI. There are settings that allow you to change your party members’ behavior. Do you want them to go all out and spend all their TP (tech points), that can be set. Do you want them to be a little more conservative when it comes to special moves, you can do that too.

There are two attack buttons, the regular attack and the skill attack. You can attack using different directions on your thumb stick or D-pad. This changes the attack type. The same happens with your skill attack button. You can assign different skills to directions on the D-pad. So, for example, you can set a skill that fires a projectile as a left/right direction, or an attack that would launch you into the air with the up direction on the D-pad. You can change this anytime outside of battle. But be careful how often you use your skills, they cost TP.

The battle system is fun, if simple. With the amount of stuff happening on screen it can be hard to keep track of what is happening and very easy to lose track of how many hit points and or TP points you or any of your party members have. At the end of a fight, a few stats are shown, how long the battle was, how big of a chain attack you had, how much EXP you earned, etc. But something else you get is a little bit of your TP back.

There are plenty of enhancements and quality-of-life improvements in Tales of Eternia Remastered. All of the 3D environments are greatly improved, and while it doesn’t look like a AAA title, it does look more in line with a PlayStation 2 game, than a PlayStation 1. If you lose a regular fight, there is now a battle retry so instead of forcing yourself back to the last save point, you can retry the fight. Probably my favorite improvement is the destination icons. These icons will show you where you must go to do everything from continuing the story to starting side quests.

The voice acting is actually pretty good though the script can seem very goofy at times. When you break for camp, there are little cut scenes that are fully voiced out and, if watched, will expand the story through the characters’ personalities.  There is an auto run option that can be enabled in Tales of Eternia Remastered. This setting can be annoying as there are specific areas of the game that require precise movements and if the run setting is on makes it very difficult. There were times I turned it off in order to get the precise movements I wanted.

The music is very early 2000s RPG. The high energy tracks of battle fit but sounds a bit too busy and can feel a little messy, especially with all the sound effects happening during battle. By contrast, the music in the towns is peaceful and the overworld has a track that works well with exploring.

I played Tales of Eternia (or Destiny 2) on PlayStation and enjoyed my time with it and these quality-of-life upgrades on current consoles do a nice job bringing Eternia into modern gaming. While fighting is more simplistic than more modern JRPGs, don’t let that fool you into thinking Tales of Eternia Remastered is a simplistic game. If you are a Tales fan, give this one a go!

Note: Bandai Namco provided us with a Tales of Eternia Remastered code for review purposes.

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