Poll of the Day > I must rank the Tales games I have played.

(+) Yeah! (+)

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.
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Lmao, you have Xillia over Vesperia.

Vesperia
Berseria
Symphonia
Zestiria
Graces F
Xillia

ToS 2

Xillia felt so mediocre. At least it wasn't ToS 2 though. Haven't played any others.
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dragon504 posted...

Xillia felt so mediocre. At least it wasn't ToS 2 though. Haven't played any others.

Xillia was enjoyable, as stupid as the dual-world system ended up being. It wasn't until you get to the outer world that the game fell apart and was like "Oh, let's move across a pair of fields, and then go ahead and just wrap up here instead of making where we are the 2/3 mark." I still enjoyed Xillia, just like I still enjoyed Vesperia. I just prefer Xillia more.
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I've only played through Abyss and Symphonia (have Phantasia for GBA too), but good lord I hated Abyss. It was so bad I had to rethink whether or not Symphonia was even good, and that was like my favorite game growing up.
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Legendia looks cool, but I dunno. People say it has the best soundtrack bin the Tales games
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MechaKirby posted...

Legendia looks cool, but I dunno. People say it has the best soundtrack bin the Tales games

Legendia is the one that put me to sleep. It's the only one that did that. It's why I rank it as low as I do.
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I liked Vesperia and Graces a lot. Played the PS3 version of both, during the time when I was most interested in JRPGs. I found the combat really engaging in both games, especially Graces because the characters played so differently from each other. Vesperia probably had a better world and Graces a better combat system.

Xillia and Symphonia were okay, but I didn't finish them. Xillia in particular had really bad voice acting, I just couldn't stand Milla's English voice. After Xillia I don't really have time for JRPGs any more so I haven't played the new ones.

Destiny DC showed promise early on but I could never get my PS2 emulator working right so I didn't play much of that one. Maybe some day.

Well, at least people agree that Symphonia II is terrible.
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The_tall_midget posted...

Well, at least people agree that Symphonia II is terrible.

Let's give the players an aggravatingly spineless main character we have a hard time relating to.

Then let's show that the world we've saved is in dire condition.

AND THEN! Let's take the characters we once loved, assassinate their personalities, say that it's a new game so let's not worry about why or how we liked them in a previous game, raise the issue of why give a damn about them in the current game, and that leads to the old games again, and... RARGH!

Oh, and the combat rips off the Shin Megumi Tensei games (eg., Nocturne), which furthermore ticks off every completionist who wants to catch or level ALL of the things.

You know what? That's enough bad decisions for me. I don't want to know any more about this game.
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Entity13 posted...

Let's give the players an aggravatingly spineless main character we have a hard time relating to.

Then let's show that the world we've saved is in dire condition.

(Truncated)

You know what? That's enough bad decisions for me. I don't want to know any more about this game.

Hey, I don't disagree with you: Symphonia II was garbage.
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I just started Tales from the Borderlands. Does that count?
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The_tall_midget posted...

Entity13 posted...

Let's give the players an aggravatingly spineless main character we have a hard time relating to.

Then let's show that the world we've saved is in dire condition.

(Truncated)

You know what? That's enough bad decisions for me. I don't want to know any more about this game.

Hey, I don't disagree with you: Symphonia II was garbage.

It really was. I'm not saying you were disagreeing with me, either. =p

_EggplantWizard posted...

I just started Tales from the Borderlands. Does that count?

mmnope.
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Legendias soundtrack is so good I still listen to it when baking. Go Shiina needs to hurry up and compose an entire Tales game again. Story and characters arent bad either but the battle system is SO bad.

Vesperia is still one of my favorite games of all time, but the soundtrack is only above average, if not average.

Graces F has the best battle system (how is the healer the most fun to play as???)

Xillia is about as okay a JRPG as you can get. Its the textbook definition of alright.
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What's the difference between the SNES and GBA ports of Phantasia and why are they ranked so differently?
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trodi_911 posted...

What's the difference between the SNES and GBA ports of Phantasia and why are they ranked so differently?

The SNES version never got an official translation, and the one the GBA version got was laughably bad, with the "Kangaroo" incident being chief among them.

The GBA version also did a dumb with input delays, which are a danger to any Tales game.

Basically when we finally got a version of it in the US it was a less than subpar version at best, making it that much worse for people like me who loved either the SNES or PS versions.
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