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Read my official Tales of Eternia review! I finished the game, reviewed it and submitted it to GameFAQs the other night, but read this one instead... it's revised and it's long (about 13KB). And so, the third's the charm... | |
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They are encoded in Windows Media Video 8. Enjoy them. Tales of Phantasia PSX opening anime Tales of Destiny US opening anime Tales of Eternia opening anime Valkyrie Profile opening anime (no music) | |
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Lazy 'ol me hasn't updated in over 4 months and it looks pretty lifeless around here. Ah well, forget about that... So, where did we leave off? Enix America released Valkyrie Profile in English a few months ago. Great game, still domestic RPG of the year no contest. On other notes, the translation is of high quality. The script is a great read, and the voice acting is fantastic (for the most part) for an english dubbed RPG. Overall, the opposite of Star Ocean 2's translation. Though there are Japanese version purists that don't like it. So, if you know Japanese, go with the Japanese version, if not, the english version is a fine alternative (and it has a couple of nice extra features, like being able to sort your item inventory and save halfway through the long intro!). Namco released Tales of Phantasia: Narikiri Dungeon for Gameboy Color in Japan on November 10th. I finally got my copy of the game a couple weeks ago. It's a nifty little game. And my current obsession of the moment... Tales of Eternia, third game in the Tales series and import RPG of the year was released at the end of November. Excellent game, much better than Tales of Destiny. I ordered the premium box version, and the thing is huge... best estimate of size would be it being as long as Dreamcast console box with about 2/3 the girth. My outdated impressions can be found here. tri-Ace themselves have been extremely quiet concerning Star Ocean Blue Sphere all of a sudden. The release on their page said it'd come out late 2000, but no one's heard anything and it didn't appear at Nintendo's Spaceworld even though it was officially announced so originally... Could they be retooling it for Gameboy Advance? One could only hope... Oh yeah! Today is also Tales of Phantasia SFC's 5th birthday. Bow and pay homage. ;) Site changes: None I quit my job so I have some free time again. Prepare for mega content update soon... including the unveiling of the Tales of Destiny and Tales of Eternia pages. ROM Hacking section is undergoing a complete redesign. It's being converted to a full site of its own and will be disbanded from here once it's finished and uploaded to a different server. VERGE page is being removed soon too, but it's not coming back in any shape or size. The page will inevitably become completely on topic. | |
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It's late. I'm tired. I have work tomarrow. It's past 12am. But they are here. Valkyrie Profile ENGLISH E3 screens have finally arrived. Go to VP's section to view them in the screen shot part. The text translation is looking very good, but the game stays serious as far as dialogue goes it shows... I'm not too impressed with the character name translations though... sigh... Arngrim...... | |
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Well, since yesterday was a day off from work, I had some time to work on this page. As you can see, I've made button links to the sections now. It shouldn't looks so bland anymore up there. I guess I should make it clear. I am unable to test this page update for bugs at the moment because I have the most horrible generic 56k modem in the world. Right now, it's going through some kind of fritz where it only seems to be moving around at about 2400bps. I hope my USR shows up today... New stuff:  Links page is finally converted to the new format, and I think there are a lot of new links added. Also, it's more image intensive as I've given link buttons to the links I could get some for.VERGE was updated with some somewhat sad news...For some reason god only knows, NO english Valkyrie Profile screen shots from E3 ever emerged. It's quite unfortunate, since it's the only thing I wanted to see from the whole thing. Well, so far, the poll's saying 70% like the idea of me adding the Tales sequels, 20% don't care and the other 10% are against it. Well, it's looking quite likely that I may end up doing it, but due to my work fiasco, it may take a long time for me to get them (creating a section does take a long time, ya know...). Anyways, off to finishing LUNAR... | |
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The GIA has released their impressions, and to their surprise, it's looking like an excellent localization! To quote them: Despite its Quarter 3 2000 release date, Valkyrie Profile was shown at Enix's booth in nearly fully localized form. The translation was filled with references to Norse mythology and well-used, specialized vocabulary--in the GIA's opinion, a plus. Enix stated that they viewed localizing this title as just bringing it to a new audience, "like a museum curator," preserving as much of the original nuance and emotional content as possible. The artwork and music are as gorgeous as they were in the Japanese release. The voice acting was also a notch above what we were expecting; Enix has apparently learned from the misfortune Star Ocean: The Second Story underwent. Voice actors and actresses have previously worked on project such as the Pok駑on animated TV show and Metal Gear Solid. With just a few short months until Valkyrie Profile hits U.S. shores, the title is coming along nicely. I've never played Metal Gear Solid and I've only seen the Pok駑on TV show once (and don't remember the voices). But people who've said they played MGS said the voice acting was some of the best they've ever heard. Hats off to Enix! | |
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Work is starting to get a bit more hectic. Todd got fired, Ethel quit, Randy quit, Tim and Rose are about to quit... what this all means is that I'm going to have more hours to make up for their shifts and will have even less time to do this page. But so far, it's been fairly worth it. I can catch up with game releases now, and I can also, FINALLY put together a new Athlon PC. The remaining pieces of this Compaq will die a happy death in a garbage compactor... New stuff: Updated and added some FAQs for SO2 and VP.Added a nice new POLL. Should I cover Tales of Phantasia's "unofficial" sequels, Tales of Destiny and Tales of Eternia? Your votes will determine that. There are several different answers for "Yes and No". Just select one closest to your opinion on it. The poll is hosted by Bravenet since the emulationworld polls don't seem to be working right... at least for me.If I can find a decent, and attractive font, the table of contents links will be changed into buttons. Links are also still being worked on. Slowly, but surely. I'm trying to get link images for every link on there. Sorry for such a cheap update after not updating for nearly two weeks, but my job's hours are expanding and I REALLY want to finish LUNAR: Silver Star Story before LUNAR 2: Eternal Blue comes out! | |
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I have a lot of content update material. I've decided to update it piece by piece. So: What's new: If there's anything I love to collect, it's Tales of Phantasia related merchandise. Well, I decided to invade Yahoo! JAPAN Auctions and looked up テイルズオブファンタジア (Tales of Phantasia) and was absolutely overwhelmed by the number of collectibles available! There was so much stuff, I couldn't help but rip off the scans for all the items! I've compiled all these and created a collectibles page! I wish eBay had all these goodies so I could buy them in a second. Unfortunately, if eBay gets any ToP collectibles, they're usually just shitajiki (pencil boards) that I can find on a decent anime store online :(. If you want to see the collectibles, go HERE! :) | |
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It's become evident that Enix will indeed be dubbing the US version of Valkyrie Profile into english. This tidbit has been taken from Enix's Valkyrie Profile page on it's website: Valkyrie Profile will feature 2 CDs with over 2 hours of professional voice acting as well as a broadcast quality animated prologue. "Will" is the keyword here. *Will* feature 2 hours of professional voice acting. Doesn't it already feature professional voice acting? Sounds like they're trying to say that it will feature 2 hours of professional english voice acting. If this is true, oh god say that Enix will be true to their word... | |
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You might have seen it coming, but Enix America Inc. plans to show off a preliminary English Valkyrie Profile at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). E3 begins on May 11th, which is roughly a few weeks away. English screenshots and possibly a movie should be available then. Just keep praying that they'll announce that it'll be subtitled. Do you really want to see another Star Ocean 2 as far as voice acting goes? How about even during full blown voice acted dialogue (like the unfortunate Grandia)? Ugh. Thanks to The Magic Box for the news. I should hopefully have a site content update coming soon... | |
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Not too surprising, but Valkyrie Profile was one of the games confirmed for English release. It was announced to be released this fall. It's defintely very well worth checking out, and easily destroys tri-Ace's previous offering, Star Ocean: The Second Story. If you liked SO2 and have your doubts about VP, fear not. Valkyrie Profile is the greatest game to bear the tri-Ace logo, hands down, no contest. Just PRAY that the voice acting will be subtitled (the original voice acting is VERY good) and also some English screen shots will come out soon. However, no info reguarding Star Ocean: Blue Sphere was announced (or even Dragon Quest VII, for that matter, so you KNOW this isn't final...). | |
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This is my last non holiday weekday of being home all day. Starting tomarrow, I'll be beginning my job. I'll be working 6 hour shifts from 11am - 5pm. In other words, there may be a shortage in updates due to my new job. New stuff: Added my Tales of Phantasia SFC/PSX differences FAQ. Still needs a little bit of work...Very small update to my FF6 Hard Type hack page over in ROM HackingFinally, the frame row for the ad/counter has has been put into a fixed height frame! You should have more view space in the main frame now if you run in 800x600+ resolution. Big thanks to Fox Astron for the help! ^^ | |
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Star Ocean: Blue Sphere was in the line-up of games to appear in Japan's Tokyo Game Show. Since it would appear that it wasn't exactly a "major" title, no one bothered to release any new info regarding it. E3 is just around the horizon. Not many games have been announced in the line-up yet, but hopefully we'll see an english Valkyrie Profile on display there... The VERGE 2 game development engine has been officially updated to VERGE 2k (aka V2.5). I guess this is the 16-bit color version, but I haven't messed with it much. Go get it. In addition, an apparently better unnofficial version has also come out. Get that at The Verge Archives One last thing. I decided to create a new, Unoffical verge-rpg.com temporary board and hosting it here. I did this because the server that the 'official' one is on is incredibly unreliable. Hopefully it'll get used more... anyway, Go here if you want to see it/post on it. Stuff: Replaced the Crawd and Rena illusrations in Star Ocean: Blue Sphere with much cleaner versions. Added my hacked Tales of Destiny DexDrive save to ROM Hacking. This one is a great save which enables Lilith Aileron as a playable character. | |
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This is GREAT. Xoom is now nevermore forevermore (hah)! Now I'm being hosted by one of the largest and most popular emulation sites on the internet, known only as Zophar's Domain. Many thanks to Taichou for the suggestion, and Zophar for the final OK. This server is great. It's fast (dual T3 I think), even has goodies like CGI! All it costed was to have a frame with a little ad in it. It's a small price to pay when you consider the benefits. =) Instead of just porting this page right away, I spent a lot of time enhancing it, making it appear much more attractive. Nearly every section on this page has gone through the semi-redesign... only a couple parts still need finishing, but I think it's done enough to release. Uhh, and if you're using Netscape, don't expect everything to work correctly or appear correctly. I have not debugged this page yet to be completely Netscape compliant. That damn browser is too picky on how things are formatted and if it ain't done the way Netscape likes it, things won't appear right. -_- Some of the bigger changes: Added a brand spanking new message board! Since this server has CGI access, I'm now able to have my own hosted. It's a WebBBS, it's very similar to WWWBoard, except the fact that it can use cookies to store your name, email address, website, etc so that once you enter them, you'll never have to enter them again. A VERY VERY big thanks to (wraith) for helping me set it up! Well, my old one was a dead as ever, hopefully this one won't.The shortlived RealAudio/Music player is gone and it's never coming back, unless I decide to go back to mods again. First off, the Geocities account where the old music files were hosted died nearly a month ago (thus explaining why the music hasn't worked), second, Geocities now has a ban on linked files, so I can't create another account to host them again. Third, the emulationworld server doesn't allow 'illegal' files (the music does fit that description!). If you were one of the silent three people who used it, sorry. Thanks to Jason Ostapyk for some specially encoded Star Ocean 2 RA files I was going to use, but now I can't do that. So now, the frame has been replaced with the ad which is fine with me.I'm not exactly good with creating frames. What I'd like to do is make the bottom row frame be exactly 60 pixels high, no matter what the browser window size is. I tried for about an hour or two the other day with the frame and just couldn't get it to look the way I wanted it. | |
This is just a quick but effective update, since I'm in the process of moving this page. Here they are, the first 5 screen shots ofStar Ocean: Blue Sphere (aka Star Ocean 3). They seem pretty impressive for a GBC game... | |
Awhile ago, Star Ocean Gameboy Color was announced that it wasn't going to be a port of the original game. In a report by Videogames.com, Star Ocean: Blue Sphere will in fact be a 100% true sequel to the second game, Star Ocean The Second Story, and takes place 2 years from where it took place. The report also says that the game will sport 3 character parties, and a half realtime battle system. There will be fewer shops in this game, so Item Creation will play an even higher role for success. With a link cable, you will be able to play against a friend. It is expected to ship during this summer in Japan. Given the release date isn't far off, screenshots will likely appear shortly. Huh. I wonder if -this- really IS Star Ocean 3? I mean, it's a true sequel and all, not a spinoff... Now I'm confused whether or not I should put this game's info in Star Ocean 3's section... | |
