Tales of Destiny: Director's Cut - Tokyo Game Show Impression

Platform: Developer: Tales Studio Release Date: TBA 2007 (Japan)

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by Paul Koehler

Ports or remakes have been all too common at TGS this year, making up for at least half of the impressions I've done. Namco Bandai Games has taken it a step further and decided to release a Director's Cut of a remake! The Tales series is a juggernaut of its own, behind only the Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy series in terms of popularity, but this kind of a remake...what were they thinking? Still, Tales of Destiny: Director's Cut for the PlayStation 2 does provide a few new wrinkles to the game that will be of interest if it ever happens to make its way to North America. "Namco Bandai Games has taken it a step further and decided to release a Director's Cut of a remake!" The original remake was released in Japan in November 2006, and it was a redesign of Tales of Destiny on the PS2. For RPGamers who have played the original game, they will remember that the battles were relatively slow; something more limited by the hardware of the first PlayStation console than the game itself. With the PS2 those problems were pretty much fixed, and battles are fast. Nay, battles are very fast. This made the game much more playable, which in of itself was a good reason to remake the game. That and a few graphical tweaks, modifications to the battle system, and a 3D world map rounded out the title. So how does a Director's Cut figure into this? At the beginning of the game (and in the Demo), RPGamers have the option of choosing Leon (or Lion in the Japanese version) Magnus as the main character. It's uncertain as to how far into the game you can go with him as the character, for reasons I'm not going to say in this impression. Still, having a second viewpoint to a fairly well known story is an interesting twist. Is it interesting enough to warrant picking it up? Well, hard to say. The original remake hasn't been released in North America, although it could be the case that both that and the Director's Cut will make their way over. Still, there's no guarantee of that. If they do and you were a huge fan of the original Tales of Destiny, then I'd take a look. On the other hand, if you were one of the brave souls that imported the first remake, a second remake is just a waste of money, even if it means playing the new perspective. Final verdict: no more remakes, please!