The world map had some issues alright, but I enjoyed the game so much, that I just beared with it, and got used to it eventually. It's only really bad when you are on foot. Did anyone else have that bug, where at some point in the game, the world map music wouldn't play at all? it would continue the song that was playing in the area you just exit.

That happened to everyone in the U.S version I think. It only lasted a couple of parts but it was still pretty sad that something that obvious slipped by.

On the plus side, the ridiculous save times are lessened by almost half on the PS3. It almost makes me want to replay it.

I don't remember ever having the world map music glitch, but everything else about it was pretty screwy. It was so nice once you have the Tartarus or the Albiore and no longer have to avoid the battles' ridiculous load times and fight the camera at every turn. Fixing those map issues would've made the beginning parts of the game much more enjoyable.

That's the thing though. If the battles on the overworld map were random, I would have gone insane, but 90% of the time you could easily avoid them, and yeah...because of the loadtimes you wanted to avoid them like the plague.

I was pretty surprised reading about how you can abuse the worldmap by removing the disc. Getting Asch really early on, and getting some overpowered weapons from towns you'd normally won't be able to access.

Of course, the biggest mistake was checking the battle details after a fight on the world map. That seemed to add an additional 10-20 seconds to the load time.

Now that I've beaten the game, I'm tempted to go back and try some of these glitches. Permanently replacing Luke with Asch by walking through the world map mountains during the Mushroom Road sidequest sounded interesting.

Interesting, but crappy. Asch can't ever change his gear so it doesn't take long for him to be the absolute worst party member in your team if you do it. All of the cutscenes still use Luke anyway, so it isn't really that cool of a glitch. :(

To be fair, I believe that many testers don't worry about what happens when the disc tray is open. Because really, if there's a bug with that, that's the user's fault for opening the disc tray.

Now, the other bugs... yeah, no excuse there.

I definitely agree with enjoying the game so much that the overworld map wasn't that big an issue. Once I started using the Tartarus and the Albiore I forgot about it for the most part. I don't recall running into that bug, but I have a pretty awful memory. I never had any problems with bugs while I played.


I loved Asch and I really wanted to use him in my party, but not being able to upgrade his equipment is the exact reason I didn't use the glitch. I don't really care about the cut scenes or not using Luke (I do like him, don't get me wrong >.>) since I controlled Guy almost always.

I used Guy more often too, reminded me of Lloyd from ToS.

I thought the story between Asch and Luke was great. Something I like about the Tales series was the fact that it had good story to it

Heh, glad I'm not alone in using Guy for awhile. I played as him a lot towards the beginning since I'd just finished up Symphonia a few days before starting Abyss, but eventually I warmed up to Luke's fighting method. Once you had some AD skills to make Luke more mobile he was much easier to manage.

Yeah, but I was always one who was more combo oriented and I liked Guys combos more than Lukes. That and Lukes Special Skill was useless if they enemy jumped back

I'm old fashioned, and always stick with the main characters, even if the other characters are so much cooler to play with. Guy was pretty tempting, I have to say. When I played him in the Arena, I noticed what a big difference it was between them. He's so much more agile, and his center skill was awesomeness. It restored a huge portion of his health in a instant. Tempest I couldn't help but love either, it's a lot better then in ToD.

Ha, I always choose the main character no matter what usually, so it was 99% Llo...Luke for me. I did try Guy out and yes, he's a lot faster and Center was awesome, but Luke isn't terrible by any means. Some of his moves resemble Lloyd's, so I was fine with that, since aside from playing Kratos and Zelos for a bit, I was exclusively Lloyd, haha. I loved playing with him. When I played with my sister, she was begging me to play someone else one time XD My sister played Guy in our first game, but refused to let me play him in our second, so I couldn't play him even if I wanted to.

Luke is less likely to be interrupted during a normal attack. I know that doesn't really matter a whole lot at the end of the game when all that matters is spamming your techs but still.

Then again you can have a center-like skill for Luke, just applying the right thing to his crit-up skill. Of course it wasn't as powerful as center, but still.

And ToD PS1? Otherwise I'd be quite alarmed.

Yes, ToD for the PS1. As I recall when Stahn used it he jumped a bit too high in the air, so it had the potential to miss a lot if the enemy was pretty small.

I generally organize my party around the characters I like the most. In Tales of the Abyss case this meant that Anise never left my party. Guy also went in and this meant that the other girls did as well to help him with his "girl" problem. Although I tried every combination of characters to see what quotes I'd get.

I'm glad to see all the Guy love! There's nothing wrong with poor ol' Luke, but I really do enjoy Guy's skill set more and he's so damn fast. I also like a lot of his outfits. ^^

I liked using Lloyd, but I ended up using Zelos most of the time, especially when I played Symphonia with my friend.

I also thought the story and development between Asch and Luke was great. I wish they had included more scenes with Asch, but what can ya do~ Not all of the Tales games have the greatest plots, but I do love the series and most installments are usually pretty good. I think Abyss has the best plot out of the ones I've gotten to play so far.

The load times were aggravating when playing from disc... so if you have HD Loader .8b or .8c just install it to the hard drive (if you have one)... the battle load times are at least gone but the world map issue is still there...

But I'm 40 hours in... and so far I liked Tales of Symphonia better... it just flowed a lot better than Abyss... (and the characters were more memorable)

I dunno..I thought guy and is gynophobia was pretty memorable

Guy is the exception... Jade was ok too... but can you honestly say you were interested from the start of Abyss? The real storyline takes 10 or 20 hours to get kick started... Symphonia threw you in knowing at least a little of what was going on and you had a clear idea of an organization that you were against... can't say much about Abyss without spoilers but yeah.

Wow, I'm no longer the only one. Everyone I know says Abyss is better. Abyss is good and all, but Symphonia has better characters, is funnier and there isn't any stupid cutesy annoying animal in it. It's something I'd rather play more than once as well. I also liked the towns and such more. I love Abyss' Free Run though.

don't remind me of those stupid cheagles... good god... "mieu mieu mieu mieu!!!" "DIE BITCH!!!" I think the issue is that a lot of PS2 owners never got the chance to play Symphonia all the way through and really can't compare it without having either a GC or a Wii.... I happened to pick it up right after I got a Wii. I will admit some of the plot twists in Symphonia were extremely predictable but thats not a bad thing at all when the execution is solid.

And lets not forget in Symphonia you often get a choice of going alternate routes in the game... I've not seen a lick of this in Abyss what so ever. Instead you get a choice of : you go here... then you go there... followed by going back there....

I´m approx. 40hrs in Abyss, and after jumping from one old location to another in the last ten hours or so I began wondering if there isn´t another world to explore (think Sylvarant-Tehtealla). This would be a severe backstep from previous parts of the series (even Phantasia had a second world map if I remember correctly). And no summons, wtf? (Got Undine at the casino, but unfortunatly it´s just a weapon, and not even a very good one). Still like the story though.

TotA was a good step into the right direction story-wise. The gameplay was ok, and the graphics had some nice effects too, aside from all the shoddy character models and textures.

Really, I liked this way more than ToS, but the loading times and the world map lagging sucked so much it hurt. And I wonder why the heck it lagged, since it wasn't exactly breathtaking graphically, and there wasn't much going on either.