It was lackluster; not bad but lacking in depth.

The customization feature that is so hyped from the manual and the back of the box is very limited and you can’t even choose the eye color (I like choosing eye color, it just makes the face to me, you know?). You can choose between male and female characters but its rather limited on both ends and most special armor items that are intended for early use in the game from shops seem to have more female options and isn’t even all that great looking.

The music is just bad. Compared to console Tales games, the unique music you can listen to from special spoiler battles seem to have the worst songs the individual console games had to offer. The only real song I personally liked was this one particular spoiler battle and even the final boss’s battle theme is rather bad.

The plot suffers from your cliche flying cockroach teddy bear-esque character essentially acting out your parts. However, admittedly I am probably being a bit too harsh with this part since the game allows you to have choices for different actions but they are usually only two choices and it’s really just choosing if you want to be the cliche type of hero or a complete jerk to other people. Some choices require you to pick out your favorite Tales bunch.

The Recruitment system just fails. It does not seem like a bad concept, and really I think it’s a pretty good one, but the implementation just is terrible. As you progress through the game characters will like you more and if you interact with them in skits and give them favorable responses it will usually boost your relationship but even the well-made relationships will sometimes lead to rejection when asking a particular Tales character to join you.

The Tales characters utterly fail battle-wise compared to the generic henchmen you can get to join you (The feature was originally intended to swap your created characters to put them as a mercenary for hire in another PSP users Radiant mythology game but the US version sadly had this taken out). Some Tales characters such as Leon are terrible at hitting with some of his moves and just terribly implemented.

The combat is horrendous. The A.I. is stupid. No way around it, they are just plain idiots. You’ll find yourself trying to resurrect them in important boss battles and have to deal with the idiocy all throughout the game. Worse yet, the combat system is terribly implemented. No matter how high a level you are, your attacks are ALWAYS slower than your enemies speed. This drop in speed is very noticeable and rather game breaking for some. So, don’t expect to pull off really fast and fluent combos like previous Tales games. The plot itself is rather generic; you meet some Sephiroth/Dhaos wannabe.

The game itself is a dungeon crawler-type game and has no real puzzles aside from finding things. Moreover, it is rather short; the more experienced Tales players may find that they’ve beaten the game within a day. Radiant Mythology could have been much better, there just isn’t much substance to it and it suffers from a extremely terrible gameplay mechanics compared to its predecessors.

I honestly don’t know what to give this game as a final score. It was a good first try by the Tales team despite it’s shortcomings.