Tales of Legendia (baaaaad)

note: I have played ToP, ToE, ToS, and ToA

Wow, after playing through (devouring) Tales of the Abyss, one of the finest examples of RPG Gaming, IMO, I decide to pick up the other PS2 Tales game.

Little did I know that it would be so halfassed. Voice acting, characters, story, and music... it's like a perfect blend of meh.

When it comes to me, story is the best, and most important aspect of any RPG. I can go through RPGs with "bad gameplay" and devour them just because the story is so good. Xenogears/Xenosaga for example. (even though I found the battle system in the first two episodes to be far more than the general Attack attack attack syndrome of most RPGs)

Anyway, the gameplay in this is meh. It's really the same thing as you come to expect from a Tales game, only the battle system is more a throwback to earlier games in the series, rather than later ones such as Symphonia and Abyss. It's still decent, I suppose.

The thing that kills the battle system for me is... random encounters. As you progress in the game, they get more and more frequent, or so it seems, and as enemies become more and more hard to kill, you'll be wasting more and more time on them. Seems typical, but what with Tales battle system you can notice late game battles do tend to take a longer time, and just having them thrown at you after every few steps... it makes you want to scream.

and then came Shirley.

I can only imagine what the developers were thinking when they decided to make the most generic woman in RPG history.

the story isn't gripping, which you could argue saying "WELL UR JUST A FAN OF CERTAIN STORY TYPES"

I can honestly say I'm not. I'm a fan of stories that aren't utter dog shit incarnate into terrible dialogue onto my screen. So with that, it kills it for me. Bad story and decent gameplay makes a bad RPG in my mind.

anyway, there's a lot I can say about this game... but I don't really want to go on further right now. I only just got up, need to take a shower. >_>

What do you guys think of said game?

I heard the game wasn't made by Namco Tales Studio so that's why most of the things in ToL was kinda lame. They tried to bring back the old 2d style battle system but with 3d characters, which was a bad idea. I thought it was neat to have a main character who wasn't a swordsman. Until Chloe came and I used her for the rest of the game. The music was pretty bad because Motoi Sakuraba (the usual tales music guy) didn't do the music this time (because it was from tales studio). But some of the music is alright, the rest gets annoying with the china go go dancing samurai fiddle thing theme.

Overall it would probably be 3/5.

its was good.... even though i never beat nerafis w/e it was called ...... i wouldn't go that far as a bad game there are lots worse