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The game starts off fairly well but decides to go into stupid valley within 10 hours of gameplay. The game introduces very interesting elements into the plot and either does nothing with them, makes them as mundane as possible to the point where you have almost no motivation in completing tasks or relies on asspulls that people who aren't fans of the tales series (aka me) can't follow, causing the plot to feel like a combination of fanfiction mixed with a good dose of M Night Shyamalan.

The game starts off by introducing the concept of exspheres, which are these spheres that essentially absorb the life force of the initial host, to provide additional power to people later. The first part of the game explains the process, which is reminiscent of nazi prison camps. It's actually quite an interesting plot point but it isn't explored very well – while the first encounter hits the hammer right on the head, future encounters feel extremely mundane and more of an optional side quest or collecting additional items rather than helping out people who are imprisoned and turned into monsters. By the point that they actually do something with this plot element besides the first sequence, its already too late, and the element feels like a huge missed opportunity. Later in the game they hold your hand so much with this concept that Lloyd just shutting the fuck up would help the story tremendously. Of course, he doesn't.

For a game that loves to force your tears (Regal and Persea basically EXIST for this purpose) it misses great opportunities to actually exploit this. There are several sequences in the game that could have easily been used to exploit this – one of the most prominent that comes to mind is the apparent racism that Raine and Genis supposedly face. I say "supposedly" because it's only there when the plot decides its convenient – there is almost no indication that there is racism against half elves other than plot mentions. This is so incredibly frustrating because all they had to do was to insert additional NPC dialog with a few edgy racists here and there and it would have made this so much more believable.

Speaking of Raine and Genis, they're the only enjoyable playable characters, and Genis is ruined by complete plot stupidity during the Mithos arc. He drops pretty much everything for some crappy transparent SJW before SJWs were a thing whose motives are so see-through you can predict the plot hours in advance. His "big reveal" wasn't really much more than a "oh I guess that happened" than a horrifying discovery. Thankfully Raine wasn't turned into a complete retard because I really like her, and she's the only character that I don't have any major complaints about.

Besides Lloyd essentially existing as an exposition device in many scenes, he's grating because of his extremely naive attitude. Unlike Tales of the Abyss, where Luke goes through traumatic events and evolves by the end of the game, I don't feel like Lloyd really did this. He's slightly more mature but not to the point that the events should signify.

Colette has no personality to speak of and basically exists to be cute. She is very cute though.

Sheena really splits me in two, because I don't think her character is bad, but she feels extremely out of place. She essentially derails the main objective of the game for a "gotta catch 'em all" thing which, while kind of cool because the summon spirit's designs are cool, is pretty tedious, since you need to find all of the locations. Did I mention that there's pretty much no lead up to her entrance? It basically feels like, "Oh hi we're collecting summon spirits now, bai!". I think this subplot could have been handled much better.

Speaking of the summon spirits subplot, the way it resolves is absolutely mind numbingly retarded. tl;dr collecting all of them causes a GIANT TREE to appear (this is never even hinted at; the closest indication in regular gameplay we get is that "nobody's ever done it before"). This apparently causes a massive loss of life, and you have to destroy the tree. Again, for unexplained reasons, this is done by using the summon spirits who inhabit the other world (can't remember its name). The tree disintegrates and nobody even fucking brings up that shit again. I'm dead fucking serious; that whole 30 minutes or whatever of the game may as well not exist. Fans of the Tales series tell me that I need to play Tales of Phantasia in order to understand it, and I'm thinking, "what the fuck? Why do I have to play another game just to understand this one?". Games, like novels, should be closed stories, and not rely on other resourceful just to tell the fucking story.

Zelos isn't really all that bad, he's mildly annoying but at least he's plot relevant.

Persea and Regal, as stated previously, have very minor relevance in the plot, and their inclusion feels very forced. Neither of them have any personality to speak of. Persea's lack of personality is given an excuse, since she was a host for an exsphere (although it's hard to feel bad for her since we don't know anything about what Persea was actually like, outside of some scant flashback scenes). Regal is pretty much devoid of any personality either; his main character trait is feeling regret for killing his wife. While I don't know how to "fix" Regal, Persea could have been written so much better as a character who has an exsphere forced onto her soon after meeting Lloyd and co., and watching her decline through the game, with a goal of removal. Again, the writers completely missed an opportunity to use this plot element well.

Kratos, who is playable for a short period of time, has no personality other than "I'm serious". I don't remember if it was because of the exsphere thing but frankly I don't care. Apparently exspheres just exist as a lazy copout for the writers to not write characters with any discernible personality.

The plot itself is pretty retarded, as well. Our big bad, "Yggdrasil", also known as "Mithos", attempts to be a menacing villain who is trying to resurrect his sister by creating a whole religion around this angel ascension thing, and that angel thing is what you're trying to do with Colette – and it ends in their death. And racism against half elves is involved. Again, this plot point with the racism is never explored outside of the main plot, and even there it's incredibly forced. What causes the admittedly interesting plot to fall flat is that it's poorly written and extremely predictable. As stated earlier, Mithos attempts to sabotage Lloyd and co's work by essentially becoming a mole, and trying to pit Genis and Raine against the others, for being half elves. Now ignoring the fact that the racism theme is poorly executed, Mithos still does an extremely poor job at trying to convert these people. Again, Genis's character is essentially pissed on, as a young, intelligent boy is turned into a complete retard for the sake of plot convenience.

After a while, each plot twist feels like it was thrown in by a generator.

So the story is insufferably retarded with annoying characters, but is the gameplay worth it? Long story short… not really.

The battles are fun at first. ToS is a real time RPG where you input commands and you have to run around a field to attack. Most tales games function in this way. You also gain additional powers as you level up, as well as different battle techniques, such as defending or free run. All nice and dandy, except that's about as far as it goes. As a casual player of the game, I wasn't very interested in learning the billion ways to do things, and I just spammed one attack through the whole game, only switching it with upgrades. It wasn't even particularly hard either – just buy tons of gels and you're pretty much golden.

Tales of the Abyss does something interesting to try to avoid this monotony (which, while the game suffers from similar problems, is less worse because of this) – FoF circles. Basically what these are, are elemental circles that if you use certain abilities on, can change that ability and allow you to execute that power at a lower level and with less AP. ToS doesn't have that. ToS has spamming Pow Hammer. And yes, that's literally all I did.

"But Hodgson-kun! You… you just played it on the normal difficulty setting!"

Yes, because I'm a casual player. This is the first time I played through the game, I didn't want to play through at higher difficulties, because this is my first rundown of the game – what if I run into a surprise boss or something? The point is that the game offers no real challenge outside of what attacks are used and what the stats are, and all changing the difficulty does is change those numbers around a bit.

However, quite honestly, as monotonous as the battles are, they are tolerable. What is not tolerable is the absolutely shit dungeon design in the later part of the game.

In the beginning of the game, the dungeon design is passable. It's not particularly interesting and nothing really sticks out as "holy shit that was awesome", although that's not particularly a bad thing either. However, FOUR dungeons still stick with me today as the WORST dungeons I have ever played in an RPG, and they are ALL from this title.

First thing that comes to mind is the Dark temple, where you gather the darkness summon spirit. It's not too bad at first until you start having to herd these little darkness spirits everywhere. They have pretty terrible AI, forget to follow you, fall through shit, get lost, separate from the group, and worst of all, there's a lot of places where you can fall and screw up the whole thing. It took hours to complete this piece of shit dungeon.

Of course we have a fucking sewer level. There HAS to be a fucking sewer level. And of course, in the fucking sewer level there has to be a retarded gimmick. Draw out of a hat… oh, shrinking and growing. Alright, this is a fun gimmick in many games, but it's completely random and poorly executed here. First off, what the hell does sneaking through a sewer have anything to do with changing size? If you can change size, why not just fucking change size to avoid the guards and change your size back once you pass through the holes in the gates? Second off, the dungeon design is extremely frustrating – you have to push boxes in a certain way at certain sizes and it's way too easy to fuck up.

Another level that made me want to tear my eyes out was the marsh, where you have to pass through to go to the elf village. The gimmick of the day is that you have to summon animals by playing an instrument, to traverse to new places in the level. In a way, it's kind of like the Saffron Silph Co. Building, where you have to use teleporters to scale the tower. However, unlike Silph Co, you're given absolutely no reference to where you are, everything looks the same and it's quite large. I spent 4 fucking hours on this shitty dungeon, and believe me, after we got that cutscene in the elf village, no fucking way was I going back there again.

Yet another piece of shit level is the Mountain you have to climb with the bubbles or whatever. Essentially, you have to ride on the bubbles, which will carry you to other places of the level, but some of them lead to dead ends or impede progress. It's almost impossible to tell where the bubbles will land later in the level, making it a lot up to chance. Riding on the bubbles is extremely slow. And to top it all off, this dungeon (as I'm sure many others as well) don't have a return passage! That's right, if you forget to do the cutscene at the end like I did (because the plot is so fucking predictable I knew what it was about anyways), you have to do that shit ALL OVER AGAIN.

Now while these were the four absolute shit levels that come to mind, there are still many other parts of the game that are unspeakably frustrating for all the wrong reasons. We have the part where you have to navigate narrow passageways in the dark, lest you fall (lightning temple). We have the first time you go to the angel place, which is essentially a huge boring maze. We have the mine, with confusing parts and sense of no direction. We have the incredibly dull final level which feels like they were just exhausted with ideas up to that point.

And what do I get for all this shit? What was the final payoff?

Oh, Lloyd with wings. Great. Okay, yeah, no.