Tales Of The Abyss
PS2
Release Date: October 10th, 2006
RPG/Action
Review by Sirus
In Tales of the Abyss, you take the role of Luke, the son of the duke of the house of Fon Fabre. Seven years ago, you were kidnapped and because of this you are living a sheltered life inside your manor. You hear things about a war that your parents are discussing that is about to start but none of the names make much sense to you. You just keep living your naïve life and go about your training with Master Van. In the middle of the training, an intruder attacks. The intruder attempts to attack Master Van but you get in the way and when her blade hits yours, a reaction occurs sending the both of you out into a far away field. From this point on, you want nothing else but to get home to the life that you know. You meet a few companions that come with you along the way in a journey of self maturation with many twists along the way.
Tales of the Abyss is a long drawn out political journey that focuses on developing one of the most interesting and sometimes likable set of characters to ever grace a tales game. The game starts you out slow with a little tutorial on the battle system in that early training battle against your master and in a few early battles, you are given more pointers. You are given time to ease into the game with a lot of easy battles until you kill your first boss. After the boss is killed, you are given the ability to finally control the battles in manual mode which contrasts to the default semi-auto mode you are given to control Luke or the character of your choice. Manual makes the battles feel freer although less experienced players may prefer semi-auto as it’s less restricting than in previous tales games.
A number of little nuances of the battle are slowly unlocked as well as you level up. Early on, you get the ability to free run while holding the L2 button making the game a little less restrictive and, at higher levels, you unlock powerful special skills you are able to unleash on your foes. To start with, you are able to see your enemies on screen before you attack them, giving you the option to avoid them if you so choose. Early on, you are unable to be ambushed by enemies but after a short scene, you are told to watch out for ambushes. After that time you can be ambushed. Ambushes are annoying but nothing that makes it impossible to win. You just start the battle with different characters from those you were using but this is OK because all your characters gain experience, even if they don’t fight in battles anyway.
Once you are in a battle, you can run around freely and attack whichever enemy you want. You have regular attacks mapped to X and Artes mapped to O with four directions for each, just like previous tales games. A few of your attacks are able to receive elemental properties from colored circles left after a certain element of attack has been used multiple times. The first few times it is used, you see a symbol for the element in the middle of a white circle but after more uses, the circle turns the color of the element. Each attack has a single Field of Fonons effect it can unleash in a specific element. In early battles, it’s hard to use the FoF attacks effectively but once you get the hang of it, you will be using them in most battles.
Aside from Fields of Fonons, you get the ability to use Mystic Artes at level 30 while you are in overlimit. At level 15 you get the skill that gives you an overlimit bar you fill as you attack but unleashing overlimit doesn’t do anything until you learn the skill that allows you to use Mystic Artes. After unleashing your overlimit, you are able to use your Mystic Arte, at least for Luke, by holding down X after using a powerful Fonic Art. Mystic Artes are very powerful and can help you defeat bosses and stronger enemies. The battles are always fun, if not sometimes easy, but players who want a challenge have the option to put the game in Hard difficulty making the game quite a bit more challenging. I found Normal difficulty to be easy enough that I only died on a few key bosses but I preferred that because it let me enjoy the story.
After nearly every key scene in the game, you have the ability to access skits that show you added character development. These are nice to understand the intentions of each of the characters more but it would have been better to have the ability to advance them manually. As they are now, they are not voiced and they advance automatically making them hard to sit through. The voice acting in the game is generally solid with a few voice actors playing multiple characters. The music in the game is typical Motoi Sakuraba and fits the game in almost all places. The Japanese vocal track in the intro is replaced with a well done instrumental that is good enough that the original intro is hardly missed. The graphics in the game are, for the most part, well done but a few scenes have low res textures that can get annoying to some. The world map can have some especially long load times but you don’t need to fight battles on the world map enough for it to become an issue.
In the end, Tales of the Abyss is a 50-80 hour long RPG with a beautiful engaging story with one of the best casts of characters in recent RPGS and a battle system that makes most of the games frequent battles fun and engaging. Fans of RPGS who enjoy anime styled characters and worlds will find something to enjoy and players who just want a good story will get their money’s worth with this lengthy game.
Gameplay: 10
Graphics: 8
Story: 9
Sound: 9
Lasting Value: 10
Difficulty: easy-moderate
Final Score: 9.2/10 (an average)
PS2
Release Date: October 10th, 2006
RPG/Action
Review by Sirus
In Tales of the Abyss, you take the role of Luke, the son of the duke of the house of Fon Fabre. Seven years ago, you were kidnapped and because of this you are living a sheltered life inside your manor. You hear things about a war that your parents are discussing that is about to start but none of the names make much sense to you. You just keep living your naïve life and go about your training with Master Van. In the middle of the training, an intruder attacks. The intruder attempts to attack Master Van but you get in the way and when her blade hits yours, a reaction occurs sending the both of you out into a far away field. From this point on, you want nothing else but to get home to the life that you know. You meet a few companions that come with you along the way in a journey of self maturation with many twists along the way.
Tales of the Abyss is a long drawn out political journey that focuses on developing one of the most interesting and sometimes likable set of characters to ever grace a tales game. The game starts you out slow with a little tutorial on the battle system in that early training battle against your master and in a few early battles, you are given more pointers. You are given time to ease into the game with a lot of easy battles until you kill your first boss. After the boss is killed, you are given the ability to finally control the battles in manual mode which contrasts to the default semi-auto mode you are given to control Luke or the character of your choice. Manual makes the battles feel freer although less experienced players may prefer semi-auto as it’s less restricting than in previous tales games.
A number of little nuances of the battle are slowly unlocked as well as you level up. Early on, you get the ability to free run while holding the L2 button making the game a little less restrictive and, at higher levels, you unlock powerful special skills you are able to unleash on your foes. To start with, you are able to see your enemies on screen before you attack them, giving you the option to avoid them if you so choose. Early on, you are unable to be ambushed by enemies but after a short scene, you are told to watch out for ambushes. After that time you can be ambushed. Ambushes are annoying but nothing that makes it impossible to win. You just start the battle with different characters from those you were using but this is OK because all your characters gain experience, even if they don’t fight in battles anyway.
Once you are in a battle, you can run around freely and attack whichever enemy you want. You have regular attacks mapped to X and Artes mapped to O with four directions for each, just like previous tales games. A few of your attacks are able to receive elemental properties from colored circles left after a certain element of attack has been used multiple times. The first few times it is used, you see a symbol for the element in the middle of a white circle but after more uses, the circle turns the color of the element. Each attack has a single Field of Fonons effect it can unleash in a specific element. In early battles, it’s hard to use the FoF attacks effectively but once you get the hang of it, you will be using them in most battles.
Aside from Fields of Fonons, you get the ability to use Mystic Artes at level 30 while you are in overlimit. At level 15 you get the skill that gives you an overlimit bar you fill as you attack but unleashing overlimit doesn’t do anything until you learn the skill that allows you to use Mystic Artes. After unleashing your overlimit, you are able to use your Mystic Arte, at least for Luke, by holding down X after using a powerful Fonic Art. Mystic Artes are very powerful and can help you defeat bosses and stronger enemies. The battles are always fun, if not sometimes easy, but players who want a challenge have the option to put the game in Hard difficulty making the game quite a bit more challenging. I found Normal difficulty to be easy enough that I only died on a few key bosses but I preferred that because it let me enjoy the story.
After nearly every key scene in the game, you have the ability to access skits that show you added character development. These are nice to understand the intentions of each of the characters more but it would have been better to have the ability to advance them manually. As they are now, they are not voiced and they advance automatically making them hard to sit through. The voice acting in the game is generally solid with a few voice actors playing multiple characters. The music in the game is typical Motoi Sakuraba and fits the game in almost all places. The Japanese vocal track in the intro is replaced with a well done instrumental that is good enough that the original intro is hardly missed. The graphics in the game are, for the most part, well done but a few scenes have low res textures that can get annoying to some. The world map can have some especially long load times but you don’t need to fight battles on the world map enough for it to become an issue.
In the end, Tales of the Abyss is a 50-80 hour long RPG with a beautiful engaging story with one of the best casts of characters in recent RPGS and a battle system that makes most of the games frequent battles fun and engaging. Fans of RPGS who enjoy anime styled characters and worlds will find something to enjoy and players who just want a good story will get their money’s worth with this lengthy game.
Gameplay: 10
Graphics: 8
Story: 9
Sound: 9
Lasting Value: 10
Difficulty: easy-moderate
Final Score: 9.2/10 (an average)