I'm a big fan of the Tales series even if the games are frequently uneven. I'm almost always happy to play a game in the series just for the combat, but my favorite titles are those that also feature interesting character and/or plot elements. Interesting mechanics certainly help, of course. The first Tales game I ever played (and finished, early in 2006) was Tales of Symphonia for the GameCube. Not coincidentally, Symphonia is by far the most popular entry in the series. It's a great game, but I think a lot of its sales success has to do with being in the right place at the right time. It was the first fully 3D Tales title and an RPG release on a console desperate for a good RPG. Symphonia was one of three or four good RPGs on the console. Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door and Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance are also excellent--and I've heard good things about Skies of Arcadia as well (ported from the Dreamcast) but I have not personally played it even though I own it.
Tales of Symphonia introduced me to what the Tales series was about: action combat, grinding, cheesy (but charming) anime dialogue, and lots of dungeon crawling. Tales of the Abyss did not vary from this formula significantly but for whatever reason I found I enjoyed it much less. I frequently hear praise for this game but I found myself rather disliking it despite myself. The combat system was solid as always (although I didn't care for the random Fields of Fonons that altered character's skills) but it was difficult for me to find a single character I liked. The protagonist, Luke, was profoundly unlikable, and the amount of wordy technobabble in the dialogue was excessive even by Tales standards. The overly cutesy mascot Mieu was really just the icing on the cake. I almost wonder if I went into the game with the wrong mindset after hearing the reactions of other Tales fans to that game.
Sometime in between playing Symphonia and Abyss, I played a fair chunk of Tales of Phantasia for Super Famicom. A (somewhat flawed) fan translation had existed for the game for a number of years. Like all the series' early titles, Phantasia is completely 2D, with combat taking place in a sidescrolling fashion. The core gameplay is very similar to what the later 3D titles were doing, especially as far as skills and magic were concerned--except of course for the fact that combat frequently paused in order for more complex spell animations to play. I never did finish the SFC version of the game, but several years later (two years ago) I did decide to try the PS1 remake. It was never released in the US, but some industrious folks on the internet took it upon themselves to translate it. To my untrained eye, it was a far superior translation to the version I'd played quite some time before. I ended up enjoying it a lot and so moved on to Tales of Destiny right away.
Destiny was of course a total disappointment. It wasn't completely unplayable, but it was a step back technologically. It was less advanced because it was actually released before that particular version of Phantasia. It had more in common with the original SFC version than anything else. Basic attacks could not be strung together into combos, the cooking system was very simplistic and largely superfluous, and the characters were mostly pretty awful. The sound quality and music in general were also pretty bad--and don't get me started on the dungeons in the game's latter half. It is indisputably the worst Tales game I've played, but I can say the combat system was solid at the very least. It's certainly not a game I would ever play again, although I would be open to the idea of an enhanced remake!
Of course, when I originally started playing Tales of Destiny, I lost interest almost immediately. I attempted to enlist the help of my co-op partner to complete it, but technical difficulties barred the way. Much later, we discovered Mednafen and its far more stable PlayStation netplay--but by that point I'd already powered through the remainder of Destiny in an effort to clean out my backlog. That was way back in July. I'd originally briefly entertained the idea of starting Tales of Eternia after finishing Destiny, but I was determined to finish other games at that point--and I was also very soured on the Tales series. I wondered at the time if Symphonia (and Phantasia) were exceptions to a decidedly mediocre catalog of games.
Once my co-op partner and I finally did discover a more stable method for netplay, Tales of Eternia seemed like a no-brainer. I had finished Destiny and did not at all relish the thought of revisiting it. Fortuantely, Tales of Eternia improved on Destiny in just about every conceivable way. The characters were more interesting, the combat was more satisfying, and it had no talking swords. It was not without its fair share of annoyances (Tales technobabble, occasionally annoying dungeon design) but overall it was a game I really enjoyed. It also helped considerably that Reid and Farah were both pretty fun and varied characters to control in combat. Of course, the pointlessness of Max and Chat as party members really did decrease the variety of party compositions considerably--but the characters they shove at you by default made up pretty much the perfect party anyway.
We completed Eternia in January. Although it wasn't the best Tales game I'd played, it was enough to restore my faith in the series. I felt sure that there were other games in the series worth playing. I started to feel that completionist urge to play and finish them all. Since then, I've finished two more games from the series and I'm working on a third as we speak--or write, I guess. More on those later, though, because they both have their fair share of interesting things to discuss.
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