Tales of Legendia.

Finished it in Japanese, loved it, started playing it in English but then my PS2 died.

It sucks that the localization got chopped up AGAIN. In the original game, the Character Quests were voiced just as much as the main section, but now it is complete silence. Mimmy had voiced scenes as well.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by RYU

me too,i love it,is really great but is too short is only 30 hours to finish game

That sounds about right for the 'main quest', but that's not the end of the game. The character quests are basically the 2nd half of the game, not doing them is losing half the experience. Because the dungeons are re-used they are almost entirely story/character driven. But still, they have the true ending of the game and tie up almost all lose ends around the plot.

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Abyss didn't have as great of a cast of characters as Legendia, and no Tales game can beat Legendia's soundtrack. Gameplay alone Abyss holds its own VS all other Tales games. It seems to take the best parts of all the different Tales games and put them together in one nicely polished package. Fans of Symphonia will love the battle system, fans of a system like SO3 might enjoy the free run option (lets you leave your line), it even borrows some ideas from Tales of Destiny 2 (jp), such as setting extra abilities to your skills which can level up as you use them (extra damage, for example.)

But yeah. I think Abyss has a high chance only because of the sheer numbers of rabid Symphonia fans.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

I know a ton of people want Rebirth over here badly, mostly based on the high quality 2D graphics alone. For some reason I couldn't get into that game as much as the others. I played through it once and tried to start again with grade shop bonuses but just got bored.

On the other hand, my Tales of Destiny 2 (jp) play time is like, 250 hours. Some of this is the auto-level trick, I let the game run overnight 2-3 times.

It took me 105 hours to finish Legendia the first time, but I left my PS2 on a couple of times accidentally, unlike ToD2j.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

ToD2 is a love or hate game.

Here's why: the battle system has many features never seen in a Tales game, those that like this game have found ways to appreciate them or ignore them, but most people who hate this game hate it because of them.

1. Magic is your main damage source. Your fighters can still dish out enough damage for most of the game, but there are certain boss fights where you spend most of your time guarding your casters while waiting for them to do the major damage. You can still do big combos, and fighters use hi-ougis like crazy. The system is very fast paced.

2. SP bar. This is similar to Star Ocean 3's guts/fury guage. I liked this, but I guess most people like to spam their attacks endlessly. Doesn't recover nearly as fast as it does in SO3, but guarding attacks helps raise it faster.

3. If you go behind an enemy, your max SP and TP are cut in half. That's right, you can't swarm an enemy from both sides without a penalty. To top it off, some enemies can teleport and will teleport over to your side, and anyone left on the enemy's side of the battle field takes a penalty. It's just simply not fair.

On the other hand, we have things like ACTION ENCHANTS, which let you set special abilities onto your attacks (as I mentioned before). Man, I love these things, I wish all Tales games had this system. Some of the passive enchants are a little useless (increase damage doesn't help much) but being able to extend your skills for extra hits, and extend ougis into hi-ougis is very fun.

I don't know much about the story except what I read in someone's translation guide, I mostly play this game for the battle system and bonus dungeon stuff. I recommend it, but someone else will probably tell you not to waste your time.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by yangxu

Rebirth has a really mediocore story, a very simple theme about race difference with a crappy ending that didn't stir up any sympathy in me... what's horrible about Rebirth's battle system is that you can't ask anyone to heal you, each character's skills are executed whenever AI sees fit, so when you're almost screwed over by a boss and see Annie at the back casting Grave, it's like "I'm dying here honey, use your brain a little and heal me..."

I had this problem too, and the only way I stopped myself from dying in random battles was to limit Annie's circles to 2x the healing circle and gave her 2x the resurrect skill.

One thing I like that came with the force cube was the ability to have 8 skills set. Yeah, you can't do ougi without a regular skill, but I still thought it was an interesting idea.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

The red, 30% healing gummi in Rebirth was not available in shops anywhere if I remember right. This is unlike most Tales games. Instead you had that purple, 50% recovery gummi... can't remember what the name of it was.

FELIPE NO

I assumed they changed the default healing item to be 50% instead of 30% because of the major change to game mechanics; nobody has a real "heal" spell anymore.

Aren't they somewhat expensive, though?

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I never used Mao and Tytree because... I don't know why. I generally like to keep a party of "normal" people and those two didn't fit that description.

So Veigue, Eugene, Annie and Hilda the whole game.

How ya doing, buddy?

Originally Posted by Rocca

By the way, what's everyone's Max Combo in Legendia? I only managed 253 hits and that's without a Climax Mode. Kinda sucky, I've always done much higher in the other Tales games.

999... it's extremely easy once you know how to do it. Chloe and Senel both have a multi hitting attack, control one and set the other's skill to L2/R2. Tell them to use it, and before it ends, use yours, just keep spamming L2 also so the computer doesn't go off and do something else. If the enemy has enough HP you can get to 999 hits.

Oh, and there's a video of someone doing it on that YouTube place.

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Originally Posted by Rocca

About YouTube: That place is spawning quite a huge list of Tales fan films and performances. It's kind of nice to see so many people uploading stuff there. So far, it's the best alternative to Holystar's RPG Media Files.

On the other hand, there have been reports of people uploading movies taken from Holystar's webpage and crediting themselves for it. That's to be expected, I guess...

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by Rocca

In the beginning, there was even talk of each character in Legendia having their own special hi-ougi, but the idea was canned once the Japanese launch was near. I think Holystar still has a .rar file of the canned hi-ougi voices.

Actually something interesting about this, apparently the producer for the original game said that the extras were cut out of development to make sure the game made it to America on time.

How ya doing, buddy?