overdrive's Tales of the Abyss review

Good review, Mr. OD. I'm considering getting this for the 3DS soon, since the PS2 version never got a release here. I think Namco flips a coin in Japan to decide whether the US gets each Tales game, and then from those that make it to the states, they flip another coin to decide if it goes to Europe/Australia.

If they flipped a coin, we'd have a lot more Tales games in North America.

the odds of the coin toss are 50/50 but go flip a coin 20 times and I bet you don't get 10 heads and 10 tails.

Because we certainly didn't get 10 Tales.

Interesting review, especially with the comments about Legendia. I really enjoyed that game (with some reservations) and found Abyss's battle system much more difficult that you did, and with a few exceptions (Tear and Jade) the characters not as memorable or interesting. You're right about the skits getting dull after a while and the tedious travelling. I never quite got why people preferred it to Legendia, until I reminded myself about Shirley.

I thought all of the characters in Abyss were pretty memorable and interesting. The skits were definitely annoying after a while, though. You'll be told by an NPC to go to the snow city and then you'll get five skits on the way there saying "It's cold in the snow city!" "We have to go to he snow city now!" "Where are we headed? Oh, yeah, the snow city!" Skits are handled by the redundancy department of redundancy.

Legendia is pretty butt in general, though. :P All of the characters were annoying and the second half of the game felt so tacked on. It took so many steps back from Symphonia it was pretty depressing. At least it had a great soundtrack.

there's a meme about three-quarters of the script in TotA being repeated pronunciation of the word Fonons, and honestly at some points I'm inclined to agree