Topic: Tales of Graces

Finish Final Fantasy X, dang it, anyway you can. and then you'll know! I'm not spoiling any of those great plot twists, especially since the one in question was one that I honestly never saw coming, and had a huge impact on the rest of the game. (but it's not so subtle in ToS). Plus, if there's a character you dislike in FFX, perhaps you'll like them by the end, since each of the characters have hidden depth, and evolve over the course of the game as the events that occur have major effects on how they live and how they see the world. Personally, I love that in any story, and I feel like a lot of games tend to miss that aspect of character evolution, and I fell like FFX got that just right. With that said, I still didn't like the overall plot and it tended to disappoint me on many levels, but at least it got the characters just right by the end.

I wish ATLUS owned this series instead of Namco. If they did, we would already be playing it.

I agree. Then again, I hated the entire cast of FFX (minus Rikku maybe) and liked most of the cast from Symphonia. I tried to play FFX but really couldn't get into it.

How did you play tales of destiny 2 and tales of rebirth? Neither were released outside of Japan and I don't think there were any fan translations, unless there are fan translations for those games that I haven't heard of.

He's from Korea.

That explains how he played tales of rebirth since that came to Korea but tales of destiny 2 only came out in Japan and Taiwan.

Japan and Taiwan aren't that far from South Korea, and if I recall correctly, Asian countries outside of Japan all uses the same region coding (I could be wrong, though), so maybe he imported? But rather than just guess, I'll wait for him to answer your question.

Pretty much that. I could get those games easily, but because they'd be in Japanese I couldn't properly play them anyway.

I got Destiny, Destiny 2, VS, and Eternia from one of the electronics markets in Seoul. If you ever get the chance to go to Korea, you should really check it out. Most of the games are in Japanese or Korean, but it's just incredible to see the selection. They even have a lot of neat stuff like DS cases and game merchandise. I wound up getting the Korean? version of VS, Destiny and Destiny 2 because they were a lot cheaper. The game is all in Japanese, but the instruction manual and box art are in Korean. I did manage to get Eternia completely in Japanese (though I would have preferred the PSX or PSP English version...)

Besides that, I imported Rebirth, Hearts, Innocence, Tempest, and now Graces from play-asia and yesasia. Rebirth is one of my favorites, so I'd really like to see that one get localized so I could play it in English. Hearts is a lot of fun and Innocence is okay (there's actually an English patched rom floating around on the internet of that game), but I can't recommend Tempest, despite the fact that it's fully translated.

Speaking of translations, Rebirth does have a translated play through available on youtube. And several of the games have translations guides available if you know where to look.

All the rest of the Tales games I have (Symphonia, Abyss, DotNW, Vesperia, Phantasia, World: RM, and Legendia) are in NA region.

@feder I have the English PSX version of Eternia, and it is awesome. The cover actually says "Tales of Destiny 2", but it features Reid, etc. in the background. If you can find it, it's really worth it!

My friend has that game (it was her first tales game), so I was able to play it for a little bit, though it's hard for me to get into games that aren't mine. I really do like the Japanese version, but it's frustrating at times because it's not fully voiced which makes it harder to follow along with the story. >_<

@feder

Geez, you got a lot of Tales games! I got, like, 5, and I thought that was too much. I can't wait to try ReBirth, it just looks appealing to me. And I figured Tales of the Tempest wouldn't be that interesting, judging from the looks of it. And the English voice acting in Eternia is hilariously bad.

Considering when Eternia was released, it's not too bad. Most RPGs at that time didn't even HAVE voice acting (coughcoughfinalfantasy).

I collect Tales mothership games. As long as I have the system and can find it cheap enough, you can be sure I'll get the game.

I kinda like Tempest for what it could have been, but the story is too weak, and the gameplay is not very good either. There are only about two puzzles in the entire game, and most of the time you're just walking a lot. You never get any kind of mode of transportation, there are no FMVs- not even the opening is full FMV, and the side quests are kind of lame. "Go bring this letter to so-and-so and he'll give you a bunch of gald!". Meh. The battle system is similar to Rebirth's in the fact that it's line based, but it's a lot harder. I had a lot of trouble shifting lanes if another character was in a different lane in front of me. I wound up having to use magic to get away with it because it would mean he would automatically shift lanes and I wouldn't have to worry about not being able to do it because another character was in the way. This also made running away from battles a pain, and you couldn't use magic to your advantage in that... At least the game didn't have random battles, though.

Yeah, that's what I thought from watching the trailer. Then again, most of the so-called "escort titles" don't interest me much, and I'll probably collect the main games once I have the funds. I mostly just have the 3 PSX games, Symphonia, and Innocence, but I intend to get the PS2, PS3, and PSP games, as well as Tales of Hearts, when I can. Speaking of which, have you played Tales of Hearts yet? It seems the most interesting to me from a gameplay perspective, judging from the trailer.

I loved ToS, Phantasia was pretty good, but the story really didn`t keep me. The loved the personality on the characters in Phantasia though. I want to get Vesperia, just haven`t gotten around to it yet, how does it compare to ToS story-wise? Also, is DotNW worth playing? I have heard kind of mixed things about it; and I don`t know if it is good that they took out the world map part of wandering around.

Also, did anyone else get those demon weapons in Tales of Symphonia? Getting them was certainly not easy; probably one of the, if not the, hardest bosses in the game. Those weapons made everything else a cake walk though

Tales of Hearts has a super fun battle system; it's probably the best one of the DS tales games. It's kind of similar to Symphonia in that you don't have free run, but I think it's a little more fun. You can have up to three characters in your fighting team, and you can assign two shortcut keys for the AIs which you can use at any time during the game. I usually assign Kohak's first aid as a shortcut key in case she gets lazy about casting it.

Vesperia is a lot of fun to play, though the story is kind of generic and it kind of loses it after the third arc. I feel like it was originally intended to be two arcs, but they added another arc to make it longer. It's not really one of my favorite Tales games, to be honest, though I have a lot of biased against it. I was really upset with Namco that they put it on the 360 and saying it was 360 only, forcing fans to get a 360, and then put it on the PS3 with enhanced features a year later. I felt like it was kind of dirty of them.

When I first played ToS:dotnw in 2008, I wrote a blurb on good and bad points of the game, so I'll just put them here for you.

• good trait
• bad trait
  +/- good or bad
  = no opinion

Battle System
The Good

• improved free-run
• controls work well for the game
• monsters can be taught skills, such as heal
  /- monster system: similar to pokemon, but has its own unique traits (good/band)

The Bad

• slight pause after combos and mystic artes
• sometimes monsters are a necessity in battles, especially at the beginning
• some battles are ridiculously cheap (light-frog!!! >_<)
• must keep switching over in the middle of battle to play as a Symphonia character for first player

No Opinion On
= varied loading times for battles. First battle load slowly, while all battles in that area after that load fast (unless you change characters or stats)
= monsters who join with unison attacks vary by elements on the element grid
= battle system relies heavily on the elemental chart
= equipped character stats to make fighting more intense

Graphics

The Good

• close attention to facial expressions
• improved from Tales of the Abyss
• realistic character movements thanks to motion capture

The Bad

• jagged, rough edges
• washed out colors (see Tales of the Abyss)

Characters

The Good

• good character development among the main characters
• plenty of character interaction
• new characters were able to stand on their own and not rely on Symphonia

The Bad

• Symphonia characters often feel tacked in and have no changed much from the previous game

Music

The Good

• new tracks sound nice

The Bad

• most tracks are forgettable
• several tracks are remixed from the original game
• opening song is not in sync in with animation

Voice Acting
The Good
fitting voices for most of the cast

The Bad:
some minor problems with JYB in the beginning and with Decus' voice actor

Presentation

The Good

• voiced skits and increase in voice acting
• skits are enjoyable and easy to read (I'm looking at you, Abyss)
• linear storyline keeps gamers on task
• introduction of quests
• easy to understand menu
• variety of side quests where players can learn more about characters
  /- 2D map makes traveling easier, but takes away from overall thrill of exploration (good and bad)
• additional temples/dungeons
• plenty of next game prizes to bring over to a second game
• extra dungeon and side quests for the second play through

The Bad

• on a second play through, players cannot load their Symphonia data
• no costumes
• some of the puzzles are the same as the first Symphonia game
• no new character models from Symphonia cast
• very short

No Opinion
= on-screen characters can only be Emil or Marta

Story
The Good

• lots of fun twists
• multiple endings

The Bad

• reliance on old jokes that have no major bearing on the overall story

The game takes place in the Symphonia world and you do run into Symphonia characters, but the focus is always on Emil and Marta. Also, since Namco did the dubbing this time, most of the voice actors were changed. Lloyd should have his same voice that he had in ToW: RM, though.

@feder

Just what I wanted to hear. Tales of Hearts is probably my most wanted Tales of game after Tales of the Abyss, and I'll be sure to grab it once I'm done with Innocence.

Which version are you planning on getting, the CG or the anime styled?

Anime of course. The CG didn't look that good last time I looked, and the anime art style has always been big in Tales of games, anyways.