Tales of Phantasia: Narikiri Dungeon

Tales of Phantasia: Narikiri Dungeon
	Information
Game Systems	Game Boy Color
Developers	Telenet Japan ("Wolf Team")
Publishers	Bandai Namco Games
Producers	•Shigeru Yokoyama; •Shinichiro Okamoto
Directors	Kenichi Suzuki
Character Designers	Kousuke Fujishima
Composers	•Shinji Tamura; •Motoi Sakuraba; •Toshiki Aida
Japanese Releases	November 10, 2000
Ratings	Not Rated

This article is based on information from Japanese-only media.
The following content has not been released in the English language, so details are subject to change at any given time.

Tales of Phantasia: Narikiri Dungeon (テイルズオブファンタジアなりきりダンジョン, Teiruzu obu Fantajia Narikiri Danjon^?) is a dungeon role-playing game released on the Game Boy Color by Namco on November 10, 2000. Unlike the Tales games that preceded it, Narikiri Dungeon has a plot connection to a previous game in the series. Its story begins 104 years after the events of Tales of Phantasia. The game's characteristic genre translates to "Dungeon RPG" (ダンジョンRPG, Danjon RPG^?). It was eventually remade on the PlayStation Portable as Tales of Phantasia: Narikiri Dungeon X.

Characters

Original Characters

Dio	Mell	Kruelle	Dios Bandi	Meltia Bandi	Norn
	File:Mell (tvtropes).png	File:Kruelle (tvtropes).png

Dio - One of the Narikiri twins. He is carefree and optimistic.
Mell - One of the Narikiri twins. She is more level-headed and mature.
Kruelle - A weird creature that Dio and Mell saved from a monster. It is able to change its form and has high fighting power.
Dios Bandi - The past self of Dio.
Meltia Bandi - The past self of Mell.
Norn - The central antagonist of the game.

Returning Characters

Cress Albane	Mint Adenade	Chester Burklight	Claus F. Lester	Arche Klein	Suzu Fujibayashi	Dhaos

Cress Albane - A swordsman who seeks the answer as to what "true justice" really is.
Mint Adenade - A healer who believes her weakness is not being able to heal the hearts of others.
Chester Burklight - A childhood friend of Cress.
Claus F. Lester - A summoner from ancient Euclid.
Arche Klein - A half-elf who is extremely playful and likes to tease others.
Suzu Fujibayashi - A young ninja who helped Cress and the others defeat Dhaos.
Dhaos - A prince from the world of Derris-Kharlan who served as the primary antagonist of Tales of Phantasia.

Story

The Beginning

The story begins when what appears to be a shooting star lands in the mountains. The narrator describes the player, referred to in second-person, finding a pair of twin babies in the light and becoming their adoptive parent. By default, the boy is named Dio, and the girl is named Mell. The story skips ahead thirteen years to 4408 by the Aselia calendar. The narration notes that Dio is energetic, Mell is level-headed, and both of them are mysteriously powerful. Dio enters with a strange creature that followed him home from the mountains. He and Mell decide to keep it as a pet and name it "Kruelle" based on the sound it makes: "krr". Kruelle begins as a green bipedal creature who is roughly waist-high, but it is actually a shape-shifter whose forms change based on its power and mood.

Mell and Dio begin their day as normal when they are suddenly visited by a winged woman who introduces herself as Norn and says that the two of them have a doomed destiny. With little else in the way of explanation, she sends them to meet Arche Klein, the only surviving time warrior made famous by the events in Tales of Phantasia. Arche, whose age of 223 years is possible only because she is a half-elf, now lives in a pink, heart-adorned tower that Mell and Dio must climb. When they arrive at the top, Norn startles Arche by appearing and requests Arche's assistance in preparing a trial that will test the strength of Mell and Dio's hearts and bodies.

Wisdom from the Spirits

Narikiri House (ToP-ND) — Map of the Narikiri House.

After proving themselves in combat against Arche, Mell and Dio return to their house, where Norn enchants a painting of the sun to serve as a time portal to the year 4203. Mell and Dio are sent to Euclid to speak with Claus F. Lester so that he can inform them about the war with Dhaos that happened in Tales of Phantasia. He gives the popular version of the story, reminds them that history is biased, and then tells them what really happened: Dhaos waged war against users of magitechnology because they were foolishly depleting the world's mana supply. Mell and Dio also gain words of wisdom from the Spirits Sylph, Undine, Efreet, and Gnome after defeating them in combat.

Norn enchants their painting of a moon to allow them to travel to 4306 so that they can meet Cress Albane, Mint Adenade, and Chester Burklight. At Norn's request, Chester tells them why he now runs an orphanage, which is because such disadvantaged children may turn to an immoral lifestyle and wrongly attempt to justify their actions by blaming others. He says he does not want any more children to be like that and, getting emotional, accidentally mentions that he used to be such a child himself. He gives them directions to Maxwell since Cress is not around at the time. After another test of combat, Maxwell gives Mell and Dio a lecture in the concepts of time and space. He says that possibilities create parallel worlds, and going back in time to do something differently than it was supposed to happen will just cause a person to end up in a different parallel world. Thus, it is impossible to change history.

They finally meet Cress, who relates the shock he felt at learning the truth behind Dhaos's motives. He says he does not regret his actions in opposing Dhaos but regrets that he had only been able to see from his own point of view, not realizing until it was too late that, from Dhaos's people's perspective, he was the destroyer of their last hope. After this, they meet Mint, who rejects being called a great healer by Norn because she can heal people's bodies but not their hearts. She tells Mell and Dio that living for others, even just one person, brings happiness. They fight with Gremlin's Lair, who tells them good and evil are two halves of the same thing and cannot be separated, and Aska, who tells them to believe in their own potential. They can only continue their quest and meet Luna by helping others a few times. When they get home, a mysterious figure temporarily appears to tell them it is foolish to reject evil because being human means being evil; to stop being evil is to stop being human.

Norn converts a painting of a star into a portal to 4354 so that they can meet Suzu Fujibayashi and later asks Suzu to tell Mell and Dio what she gained by meeting Cress and the others. Suzu says that she was a child in both body and heart back then and learned that meeting and separating from various people was what it meant to become an adult. As Mell and Dio begin to leave, Suzu stops them to question Kruelle about its motive. She then realizes that Kruelle must have a reason for its actions and agrees to stop asking. Kruelle spends this conversation mewing in confusion. Mell and Dio are tested in combat by Volt and Shadow, the latter of whom tells them about the balance between light and darkness. The mysterious figure appears again to tell them light and dark cannot be separated and that stifling one's own evil will cause one to have a twisted heart. Mell and Dio go on to be tested by Origin and Pluto. The mysterious figure appears again to tell them that everything is meaningless.

A Tainted Past

Norn congratulates Mell and Dio on completing the spirits' trial and warps them to 4506, where Arche congratulates them as well. A few days later, Norn asks them if they understand why they exist. They refuse, and there is an earthquake as Norn opens a cave to the north. Going to the cave, Mell and Dio are accompanied by aggressive copies of themselves who claim to be their "true selves". Norn says there is no such thing as a true self and sends the first Mell and Dio to the land of the dead via a painting of a cloud. There, they are tested in combat by Flamberge, Fen Beast, Big Eye, Justona, Ishrantu, and finally, Dhaos, to learn the truth about their past. They were Meltia and Dios Bandi, citizens of a country on Derris-Kharlan called Palace Gudora, which was at war with another small country.

When they were 27, Meltia was a scientist in charge of creating a magitechnology-powered weapon. She brushed aside the moral implications of creating such a powerful weapon of mass destruction because she felt that the search for knowledge is more important than anything else. Meanwhile, Dios was a soldier. He reports to their adoptive father, General Bandi (バンディ将軍^?), that their country is losing and delivers a message from Dhaos, the leader of another country, warning them to stop the war because of all the innocent people dying. The general insists on ignoring the message, and when Dios reminds him of the great power Dhaos's country has, the general forces his obedience by reminding him that he would have died had the general not adopted him, saying he has a duty to give his life for his country.

As Dios predicted, the enemy country defeats Palace Gudora. After receiving his final order from the dying general, Dios runs to Meltia's lab. Meltia is wounded and dies shortly after he arrives. Dios goes to the computer and discovers that the magitech weapon is still functional. In compliance with the general's last order, he fires it at the enemy. The firing immediately kills 150,000 people and dooms the remainder of the planet by devastating the mana supply. Norn appears to Dios and says that she is the guardian of the dying Kharlan Tree. She decides to resurrect Dios and Meltia as babies and send them to another planet so that she can judge whether or not they are inherently evil. If it turns out they are evil, she will kill them for good. Elsewhere, Dhaos, who had previously been relieved that the war ended without his country using force, now realizes that the Kharlan Tree is dying. He decides to travel to another planet in search of a mana seed of another Kharlan Tree. Later, he finds Yggdrasill on Aselia but realizes that magitechnology is depleting that planet's mana is well. He is shocked to experience an inner voice telling him to kill the offenders and acknowledges it as his hidden voice of evil.

Revelation

ToP-ND GB (NTSC-J) game cover — The cover for the game.

Back in the present, Mell and Dio are able to continue through the cave, where they met their alternate selves. They witness scenes of the Phantasia heroes suffering with their problems while their alternate selves comment. Chester is reminiscing about his dead sister, Ami Burklight, and Meltia wonders whether he runs an orphanage for others' sake or for his own. Claus is worried about becoming too much like his own father, whom he hated for being too involved in research to spend time with family, and Milard Rune comforts him. Dios notes the similarities between love and hate but asks who those without parents are supposed to emulate. Arche, who has a long lifespan, misses all her human friends, especially Chester, and Dios says that separation is too painful, so one may as well never become attached to someone anyway.

Suzu is shown being forced to kill her parents, and Meltia says no one understands the darkness in Suzu's heart, perhaps not even Suzu herself. Cress is giving his support to Mint, who is recovering from illness, and Dios criticizes her because she is needed by many people and does not understand what it means to be unloved. Near the end of the cave, Mell and Dio fight Meltia and Dios, who remind them that this violates the principles of cause and effect and creates a paradox because they have killed their past selves. They become one with their dark sides again. Finally, Kruelle walks out in front of them and reveals that it has been Norn the whole time. As their final test, Mell and Dio must defeat Norn in battle. After they win, Norn says that the flow of time will correct them. They are once again reborn, and their adoptive parent, the player, finds them as babies again.

Gameplay

Due to the limits of the Game Boy, the game uses a battle system called Petit Linear Motion Battle System, or Petit LMBS, a turn-based variation on the Linear Motion Battle System used by the rest of the series. As in normal LMBS, the player controls only one character and does so via button combinations instead of a dialogue choice, while party members are computer-controlled.

Version History

Game Title	System	Catalog Number	Release Date	Region
Tales of Phantasia: Narikiri Dungeon テイルズオブファンタジアなりきりダンジョン	Game Boy Color	DMG-AN6J	November 10, 2000	Japan
Tales of Phantasia: Narikiri Dungeon X Taikenban テイルズオブファンタジアなりきりダンジョンＸ体験版 "Tales of Phantasia: Narikiri Dungeon X Demo"	PlayStation Portable (PlayStation Store)	NPJH-90130	July 2010	Japan (Demo)
Tales of Phantasia: Narikiri Dungeon X テイルズオブファンタジアなりきりダンジョンＸ	PlayStation Portable	ULAS-42242 ULJS-00293	August 5, 2010 August 5, 2010	Asia Japan

Trivia

In Japanese, "Narikiri" is the act by which something becomes something else entirely, no doubt a reference to Mell and Dio's costumes and how they allow the two characters to transform into the people they dress up as. "Dungeon" simply refers to the randomly generated dungeons in the game.

Tales of Phantasia: Narikiri Dungeon

Information
Game Systems	Game Boy Color
Developers	Telenet Japan ("Wolf Team")
Publishers	Bandai Namco Games
Producers	•Shigeru Yokoyama •Shinichiro Okamoto
Directors	Kenichi Suzuki
Character Designers	Kousuke Fujishima
Composers	•Shinji Tamura •Motoi Sakuraba •Toshiki Aida
Japanese Releases	November 10, 2000
Ratings	Not Rated