Tales of Phantasia Audio Comparison: SFC vs. PS

[Sharpshooter]

About 50 minutes or so ago, I was mucking about in the usual way when I'm thinking about stuff, and I was going through my collection of ripped game music when I noticed something interesting. I've got copies of the soundtrack for Tales of Phantasia in both the original Super Famicom SPC, and I happened to jump from a song in one version to another in the opposite, and noticed a rather striking dissimilarity between the two versions.

For those of you who might not know, Tales of Phantasia was originally a Super Famicom title, back in the day when the system was hitting its peak, though it never got a stateside or european release: when the Playstation got released, however, Namco decided to port it from the SFC to that instead. Eventually, though, a copy of the Rom made its way onto the internet, DeJap developed a translation for it, and the rest of it's underground gaming history.

What I find interesting, and rather dissipointing, is, as I said before, this sense of dissimilarity that I can't help but feel when I'm flipping back and forth between the two evrsions. There's no doubt, of course, that Tales of Phantasia has a excellent soundtrack, and indeed, it has put me through many an hour of work through Winamp - but it's as though, when Namco made the console shift, so much of the vibrence and substance that filled the soundtrack and made it what it is got stripped out, leaving behind a shadow of its former self.

Take Perverse Religion, for example: when you listen to it from the SPC, it's as though you're actually listening to a good ol' fashioned pipe organ or the ideal audio version of one. It's rich and deep, with that slight gritty-rusty metallic feeling, and it's like you could almost smell the the brass and copper and the other metals that are used for the pipes.

But load it up from the Playstation soundtrack, and it sounds so...tinny. The score is the same, the instrument assignments are generally the same - but it's just not the same thing. It's like the life has been sucked out of the music, and while it's still nice, it's just not as perverse or religious.

Who is Good or Evil also sort of demonstrates this. SPC-wise, it's chock full of the sense of "The shit has hit the fan, and I am gonna' get fucked up seven ways to sunday!". It's nice and bold and powerful, combining the organ andhoir pieces in perfect harmony. Load up the Playstation version, though, and it feels more like "Meh, I'll just get kicked in the balls and be done with it. Especially dissipointing is the way in which the organ seems so nerfed - yes, it feels a bit cleaner as compared to the SPC counterpart, but it also feels flat. Other parts, too, seem to suffer in quality: the choir sounds faint and dismal, and woodwinds and that sort seem to fall short.

Even as simple a song as Emergency suffered from the shift. Going off the SPC, it's actually dark, dreary, and haunting: the strings (or whatever they are - identity's actually a bit tough to nail on them) have this excellent sort of warble to them and the ghostly shreak you hear about ten seconds in actually seems almost ethereal, making it even more powerful considering the circumstances under which it gets played, not to mention also the excellent combination of piano and bell strikes at 5-ish second intervals. PS-wise, though, it's the same story: lifeless (and not the good way), dull, and hollow. The excellent string warbling gets replaced with a very low-key sort of bass thing, the piano and bell strikes are underplayed, and the ghostly shriek now seems to be just a quick jumping between two different xylophone notes.

The Playstation version does deliver a number of tracks that are on-par (or even possibly superior) to the SPC counterpart - that I won't deny. Yet, it seems as though, when compared to the SPC predecessors, many of the Playstation tracks fail to deliver that same sort of impact felt from the SPC version. We know that the Playstation is capable of delivering top-notch music, as Final Fantasy VII, Parasite Eve, and Wild Arms (to name but a few of the most-noted titles) have demonstrated, but in this instance, it often seemed to fail to match the strides made by the first edition.

Perhaps I'm spoiled by my love for the old system, but it just seems to me that the SFC had the better of the soundtracks,

Has anybody noticed this with any other titles, or maybe had this same thought with ToP as well?