Tales of the Abyss (2005)

The "Tales" series of video games really are not sequels to each other or anything, they all have their own plots set in different worlds and such. What they share in common is the fighting engine which consists of real time combat, cooking, and funny little skits you can access at certain points in the game. They are all rather fun too, however, this one is the best of the series to date. Graphics wise it blows its predecessors away as the characters look really good as do the backdrops. The fighting is a bit better too as they add a couple of new techniques, basically the field of fonons effect.

The story is also very good as you just don't know where it is going at times and then wham you are hit with plot point after plot point. Don't get me wrong though it has its flaws also. The fighting system kind of makes you want to use one character all the time, in my case Luke, rather than change up with someone I am not used to. The ending to this one was also a bit of a letdown, especially considering how good the story was as a whole. Still, you get a fast paced story driven rpg which are exactly the type of rpg's I like. The story follows a bit of a spoiled member of royalty. One day a mysterious youth named Tear comes to his castle to assassinate Luke's instructor Van, when Luke interferes with this both he and Tear get warped into a far away land and must rely on each other to make it back to his home. Of course this is only the beginning as the journey will stretch over a rather big land and many calamities and hardships will befall the travelers as they must deal with entire towns falling into the ground, a religious orders knights dedicated to their cause and many other pitfalls and challenges. It is hard to sum up as I don't want to give anything away. Still for my money it is a great game with a great story.

I recently played and won this game on the 3DS video game system. Essentially it is the exact same game as the one released for the PS2 with no real changes being made in the story or in the things you do. The only thing that is different is the fact that it has now been converted to 3D. It is not really the in your face 3D, it is more like added depth making the game look a bit better. It amazes me that the voices and such are still all in tact making me think that instead of discs, it may be time to go back to a cartridge based video game system. Seriously, it is not like they ever make the newer systems backwards compatible anyways, why not simply make a nice flash drive type game, rather than a disc that can get scratched? Still a fun game, at some point though I want to play Xillia and Graces to see if either of those can replace this one as my favorite 'Tales' game.