There’s nothing worse than someone who can’t tell a good story. (Well, actually there are a lot of things worse than someone who can’t tell a good story, but we like the glibness of that sweeping statement so we’re sticking with it.) Would you want to hear the story of a human-shaped creature born from a life tree who goes on fetch quests for people? “And this one time the owner of the inn needed three eggs. I totally got them for her and then the guy who runs the tool shop asked me to get him three opals and kill five boar-like creatures. And then…” Tales Of The World: Radiant Mythology goes on like this for fricking hours.

You start as the aforementioned offspring of the life tree. There’s something going around eating dimensions; the town you set up home in is being led by a dictatorship and most of the cast of Tales Of Symphonia are living there. Which would be fine if you’d played Tales Of Symphonia, but as it was a GameCube release and really rather average, we don’t think you will have.

“And then I went back to the dungeon, after spending around half a day collecting things for other people, and I had to rescue some prisoners. Did I mention the dungeons are really big and literally littered with monsters? But it was okay, I just tapped X at them until they went away.” Yawn, a massive jaw-breaking, eye-watering yawn.

You spend so much time in the dungeons because you have to complete a certain number of the rubbish fetch quests before you’re allowed to advance the story. Unfortunately, these see you going back to the same dungeons, only you have to get further through them. They are lengthy winding corridors filled with monsters. Sure, you can avoid them if you’re good enough at dummying them to get past. You can always fight, but the real-time mechanic just descends into button hammering.

As you get further through the tale you can change your job class and use magic, if you like. But this just makes the numerous battles longer as you wait for the magic attack to actually happen.

The thing that’s pissing us off the most, though, is that we had to play it for a day and a half just to get to a new dungeon so that all the screenshots wouldn’t look the same. And that’s a day and a half too long.

Tim Empey