Tales of Legendia.

It's unfortunate that Namco US decided to remove all the voice acting for the character quests... I can't believe they would be so cheap at trying to save every bit of their money to avoid paying the VAs for the works they suppose to finish.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

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..."

On another note, since when did Apple Gel become a rare item in Rebirth... it's supposed to be a cheap healing item that can be bought anywhere in the shop, but they made it a rare item with a poor healing effect... -___-ll

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Vkamicht

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.

That works, though in Rebirth, I tend to rely on items a lot more often than spells, which decreases the grade rating at the end of each battle, oh well... =/

The Force Cube is a major change to the traditional Tales battle system, I like the idea, too. The fact that you can pull out a skill with an ougi in consecutive manner is very satifying... the only problem with this is the damage decreases as the quadrants in the Force Cube begin to drain, but thanks to the new trilinear system, you can switch positions freely to restore the lost forces while the AIs help you defend for the time being.

ToD2 and Rebirth seem to have the same way for counting damages you deal to an enemy... the numbers that pop out when you execute combos are the sum of the total damage you delt to that particular enemy... when I first saw a clip of Judas pulling out his final hi-ougi, I was totally amazed by how much damage he was able to pull off (first 5xx times 4, then 2xxx times 7, etc), but when I got my hands on the game and used a miracle lens on the enemy, I realized that it's the total damage he did, not individual damages represented in Phantasia or Eternia, lol.

Originally Posted by Rocca

? There are Apple Gels available everywhere in Tales of Rebirth. Are you sure you're talking about the right item? Maybe you mean Miracle Gels.

edit: My bad, I was thinking of the red gel icon allocated to Gel items.

Yeah, it's rather confusing since they messed around with the healing items in Rebirth... I don't know if Namco wanted to make the game harder or what, but whatever the reason is, changing something like that is somewhat unnecessary... If I need to heal outside the battle, I usually turn to cookings since many recipes have multiple healing effects.

How ya doing, buddy?

Originally Posted by Rocca

I didn't use that many items at all in Rebirth, but that's only because I seriously overleveled before every new dungeon/city/boss battle. And I seriously mean a good 5 levels over everytime, so that might explain it (level 70 and everything). Cooking was really helpful toward the end. The toppings system was pretty cool too.

And it's strange, but I absolutely never used Annie in battles. Her healing circles really did nothing for me so I stook to really strong HP Regeneration. At any rate, my party was almost always composed of Veigue, Tytree, Mao and Eugene (swapped in and out with Hilda). Tytree used to start losing mad health at one point, so I just gave him a Black Onyx and he was fine since.

Wow... Level 70... ever since I got pawned by the enemies under the temple where Shaorin resides, I started using holy bottles like mad, it's good for avoiding random battles and speeding the story up a bit, but of coures, the downside would be a severely underleveled team taking on a boss fight more than I could handle. Fortunately the final boss wasn't too hard (I had a much much harder time trying to take down the four stars near the entrance of the Beast Mountains than trying to kill the final boss).

The only reason I use Annie is because she has a strong hi-ougi with Eugene, useful during boss fights... other than that, she's pretty useless. And dammit, I can't accept the fact that Mao is a boy @#$@%^@#$.... whoever chose his voice actress is a evil evil man.... :biggrin: Tytree's position is practically reserved in my party because he could really keep the enemy busy with his combos.

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

Originally Posted by Vkamicht

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.

Haha, you know, every one of them went

Spoiler:

berserk

at a certain point during the game, so none of them is normal in that sense... But I do know what you mean.

Originally Posted by Rocca

At the current moment, I'm in the midst of finishing Chloé's Character Quests and one of my characters died for the first time in the entire game. Field of Effect monsters seem to be popping up everywhere now. I'll try and finish Chloe's quest by Sunday evening.

What levels are your characters at? If you trained like you did in Rebirth, I'm sure your characters can take on the arena battles easily now (fighter class, at least). The rewards are pretty good, though some battles are REALLY hard...

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by Dopple

You'd have to have high expectations to not agree that the localization is good. The first half is amazingly well done (good voices!), while the second half is a bit disappointing with no voices. Namco was pressed for time, and the decision to cut out CQ voices was made when TOL was still unreleased in Japan. If you hear "Character Quests", you would think it's just a sidequest, but... oops. I do say that they should have done a bit more research before cutting, but mistakes are for learning.

I don't mind if people don't like the game, but bashing Namco because of the cuts ticks me off. They really spent a lot of effort on Legendia, I can tell, and if we encourage them (give suggestions rather than complain and whine) we may get Tales of the Abyss. Calling their current efforts cheap may make the company think we're too demanding of a series, and they obviously won't pour tons of money into a series that hasn't sold well here in the past.

Do you mind giving me the link to their official forum? I can't seem to find it on the website... =/

For now, I'll respond based on what you wrote, forgive me if I misunderstood something.

How are they pressed for time to make a decision to cut out the English version's CQ voices when the Japanese version hasn't even released? If Legendia turns out to have a crappy sales in Japan, I doubt they'll even bother to release it here.

A large coporation like Namco should know what's appreciated by gamers and what's not, not to mention that they treat gamers in two different countries differently. If they want to have good sales, if they want positive comments instead of complaints, then they should at least try to keep things they can keep from the Japanese version. Instead of removing the intro's theme song and recomposing a totally new instrumental track just to make the game feel more "mainstream", they could focus on more voice acting. They could even leave the Japanese voice track on without any English dub and I bet the game will sell as well as it did as the current half-voiced-game. When they have spent so much effort on this game, I don't think there's no reason to go an extra step and finish something that's supposed to be there.

Double Post:

Originally Posted by Rocca

Everyone save Grune are at level 71. There's a Duct in the South East regions of the Quiet Lands that takes you to a remote island with Gentleman monsters. They're ridiculously weak and easy, so comboing them is very simple. If you can combo properly, they dish out +2 Grade and 2000 EXP minimum every time.

Ahh... I haven't bothered visiting the Quiet Lands ever since the main quest's done. Thanks for the tip Rocca... I remember fighting Gentlemen back in Gnome's cave in Eternia, I couldn't stop to give it a O__o expression when I first saw them...

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

The problem with cutting CQ's voices is, people see CQ as sidequests, so it doesn't matter if there are voices in there or not... but the fact is, CQ contains another huge portion of the game's story (unlike sidequests from Symphonia or Phantasia) that goes on for a good 15 hours...

The way I see this is that it all goes back to the words "Character Quest", if they weren't there, or if the whole chapter separation screen was never there, perhaps the whole game would be dubbed. Rebirth had a similar trend as far as how the story's told,

Spoiler:

you beat the "final boss" Beast King that planned to elimiate the Huma race after about 20 hours, but you get the true boss much later.

If the development team puts the first ending theme and staff scroll there and classifies the next part into something like CQ, I bet when Rebirth is localized, the second half of the game will be unvoiced for that reason.

Originally Posted by Vkamicht

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.

That's really too bad, I'd prefer seeing some hi-ougis in Legendia like the other Tales games...

Originally Posted by Rocca

Speaking of Japanese tracks, you reminded me one of the reasons why I loved Destiny on the PSX for so much; how they kept all the original japanese voices during battles. That was truly cool, albeit lazy, but I'm 100% sure I would have preferred those voices instead of lame English dubs.

I think it would be nice, granted developers had the disc space, to always include Japanese and English voices. Capcom is notorious for this in its Onimusha series, Shin Onimusha JAP is entirely dubbed and subbed in English or Japanese. It's why I imported it instead of waiting for the American release this Spring. ;D

No kidding, I swear leaving the Japanese voices be in the localized ToP would avoid a lot of complaints... "IT ENDS, HYEAAA... INdigNAtion~~!"... -___-lll

That's why I like .hack series even though Bandai decided to release something that could be on two DVDs into 4 separate DVDs... the complete Japanese voiceover is kept there for gamers to choose.

FELIPE NO

Would be nice if they could redo all the ToP musics the symphony orchestra way... since a majority of tracks in there are string based...

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

One thing Symphonia can't overdo Legendia is its voice acting... Legendia has SUPERB VA this time around, Namco really hired some good people to do a spetacular job at it. That factor alone boosts up my over impression with the game.

Jam it back in, in the dark.