Lo and behold, just as I get my vid rig working, my the fan in this room dies, leaving me to a hellish fate (well, I'm gonna borrow a fan for now), but anyhow... in order to cheer myself up from all of these setbacks, I decided to forsake the usual fanfare of G3, P3, and even P1, and go even more obscurely retro, to a PlayStation 1 game which is a port of a SNES game, and the former being only available in "fan-trans" format.

Tales of Phantasia
Sony PlayStation (PS1)
Fan Translation to English

Incidentally, it seems this translation's lead programmer was the same programmer behind the upcoming P2:Tsumi translation. Seems he likes hard jobs, or something.

Anyhow, my impression after about 38 minutes of gameplay: It's a pretty game but they're a few glitched in the beginning. I'm not sure if it might be an emulator issue, but from realing walkthroughs, at least some of it is intentional and present in the Japanese official release.

So, a few hints:
- you can only save on the map screen (at least, at first)
- to heal, go back to the main characther's house, walk to your own bed, press "action" and say "yes" when asked to rest. This "heal" also revives dead characters
- contrary to what the walkthrus say, the first battles are not a piece of cake, since you have not enough money to upgrade, no skills, and your main character can't attack airborne enemies, nor even block or dodge their attacks properly
- the thing with the statue doesn't seem to work properly (in the inn), but that's a minor easter egg and I'll retry it with a restart or another emulator. The inn-keeper doesn't talk to me at all, so far.
- you can get and give a gift, a little bear for your sister, or something, but I'll have to make more careful note of how next time.

That's all for now. I'm going to go that that fan and drow my sorrows in pretty pixels.

UPDATE:

It works better with epsxe 1.60 and psxfin 1.9 than with the newer psxfin 1.13. I'll go into more details when I get some vid cap of it, but the main jist is: try the older emulators for this game. Or a modden PS1, I guess. Or  Hawk system.