LogFAQs > #922838376

Ever since I was in college I have been, very slowly, playing Tales of Eternia. I had to restart from the beginning once--the first file had only just picked up Keele, so no biggie there--and only picked it back up for a few hours once every few months. I'm now in the final dungeon about to fight Shizel/Nereid, and still need to do the coliseum for the Cless battle. So uhh... from my most favorite to least favorite:

Phantasia (SNES)
Symphonia (GCN and PS3)
Berseria (PS4)
Xillia (PS3)
Vesperia (PS4)
The Abyss (PS2)
Xillia 2 (PS3)
Graces f (PS3)
Eternia (PSP)
Phantasia (GBA)
Legendia (PS2)
- getting run over while on my bike because of idiot drivers whose plates and info I never seem to get
Symphonia II

Eternia, to me, is an exercise in tedium. It makes you do more than you have to,because yay needless mini-games. The titles are useless, and mostly just there without any sense of accomplishment. The latter third of the game's bosses take on the favored strategy of having copious amounts of health in the hopes that you get a power outage at random while you're getting close to victory. The monsters are poorly balanced in their ability to block or bounce back from a downed position, making it needlessly difficult to get a good combo in; whereas you can be in the middle of getting a combo in when the monster just turns from its staggered position to smack you around, you can be downed for numerous seconds and be unable to get up until the built-in, hidden timer ends, and so on. Possibly my favorite thing about Eternia is the music.

Some of you will notice that I've rated Vesperia lower than a few titles. The reasons are thus: The story is only an underwhelming level of so-so--complete with a true villain that dies too early and an obligatory, wandering bishonen who becomes your final adversary because reasons--and the side objectives in boss fights are a nice idea made obnoxious with a third of those fights. The combat is fine otherwise, but I prefer the fighting in Graces f, Xillia I and II, and Berseria; especially the latter. With the exception of the opening theme, the majority of the soundtrack made me feel like I was playing a slightly poorer man's Symphonia, by which I mean it was fine, but nothing stuck out besides the overall feel or sound of it.
---

http://i207.photobucket.com/albums/bb179/EntityXIII/entityfn7.jpg