Tales of the Abyss is an awkward game. On the one hand it had to follow Tales of Legendia which was a lackluster entry in the series, but it strove to be compared to Tales of Symphonia, one of the best entries in the series. So while we're quick to praise Tales of the Abyss for improving once again on the formula, it also falls short of greatest. I'll elaborate.
Graphically, both Symphonia and Legendia did the job. Graphics were colorful, smooth, well-animated; nothing insulting your eyes for the thirty hours you put into the story. Tales of the Abyss drops that ball right off the bat. You could cut glass on these graphics they're so jagged. The subtle pixelated edges that characterized by the Playstation 2 era of gaming is painfully apparent in this game all the time. Namco decided to use a different graphics engine for this game in order to accentuate the facial expressions of the characters, giving them a more anime-looking style. But what all that really amounted to was a graphical downgrade both aesthetically and technically. First off, you never get a good look at anyone's facial expressions since they change infrequently, and you rarely see them transition from emotion to emotion in one scene. Also, a lot of the characters have hair covering half their face; so the design doesn't match the intention. Technically speaking, the graphics not only don't look as good, they don't perform as good. No point in the game better represents this than the world map. It's a lag fest. The camera doesn't rotate fast enough to keep up with the character movements, and when more than 2 enemies spawn on the screen, there is a noticeable slowdown. And there will always be enemies on the screen.
Another complaint: this is one of the only RPGs were I've had a legitimate issue with depth perception. Whenever I tried to approach an enemy, shoot a fire ball to some distant object, I always was a bit off. Just thought I'd bring that up.
The character roundup of this game is strong. You get a variety of cliches that grow into unique personalities and overall well-rounded individuals. A major emphasis is placed on human error and living past the mistakes you've made in the past which draws a great deal of sympathy and understanding, and makes it much easier to want to see the plot's resolution. Except for Mieu. Filling in the role of standard, annoying animal most-likely-to-be-a-plushie is a little furball you meet in the beginning of the game that not only looks annoying, but sounds annoying. Mieu speaks in that high-pitched squeak that grinds against the eardrum the same way nails grind against a chalkboard. It wouldn't be terrible if it shut up and stayed in the back, but while not only providing nothing to the plot or game, Namco artificially forced it to be in charge of the sorcerer's ring. If you're familiar with any game in the Tales of series, you'll know that this ring will act as a puzzling solve device during some dungeons. Mieu has been put in charge of that, but doesn't actually use it; the main character still does. But every time you use it, you have to hear 'Mieeuuuu' or 'Fire!' from this pip-squeak. So be prepared for hundreds of instances of Mieu firing off one of a few select audio phrases in the middle of your puzzle-solving.
The plot is a cut above most JRPGs, but that's like saying Eminem is better than most rappers, the competition isn't exactly swarming with talent. It starts off slow, but during the first major turning point, the plot does a good job of reaching the player and making you care about what happens next. You slowly learn all the faults of the characters which makes them seem more human, and thus more easily identifiable with. The plot also blurs the lines of good and evil by throwing in a little moral ambiguity. Sure the bad guy is overall insane, but at least there's some effort to make his point of view make some twisted sense.
The battle system is really the only upgrade for the series; built off the system devised from Symphonia, improvements include being able to move freely around the battlefield and that's about it. While just a minor change, it is a firm step in the right direction. Everything else remains solid. As for the battle AI itself, that's another story. With the free-movement button, you can now dodge arte attacks and enemy melee attacks. You can, but the AI can't. Either due to a lack of L2 button for them or just a general lack of intelligence, enemies will have no problem landing hits on your stand-still partners as they look blissfully and stoically into the oncoming advances. I've seen my comrades move away from the enemy, only to stop and stand there to get hit with a magical attack over and over. Healing is also a bit too much for the AI to handle considering you have to be near death for the AI to realize some assistance is needed. This isn't a problem usually since most standard fights are easily handled by mashing the attack button until something dies. Boss fights that actually require strategy is where the AI's lack of awareness is painfully apparent.
Plot also demands a lot of backtracking through almost all the cities in the world. It wouldn't be a stretch to say you visit most cities at least five times during the course of the story, which makes the game drag on more than it should. The almost-ending does help either. The game makes it seem like it's over seven hours before it's actually over, making that seven hours seem all the longer.
Harping on the technical short-comings just a little more, I've again run into a strange glitch in the game similar to the one I found in Beyond Good and Evil. My airship was removed from the world map about 30 hours into the game. Luckily I didn't have to replay any section of the game, but how I got my airship back was just as strange as it randomly disappearing. Apparently if your airship disappears, locate your nearest port city and watch it materialize out of thin air. I'm serious, I watched as my airship dropped from thin air out of the sky, into the water and I was able to board it again. It's like the creators knew there was a glitch and decide to just patch it by making the airship always drop from space whenever the need arises. Odd method, but effective.
The usual Tales of padding is here, titles but they're useless, cooking but its unnecessary, crafting but I didn't care and skits that didn't offer details into the characters or plot as much as they did reiterate what I was going to do in-game anyways. I still get a kick of skits that stop the game play to only have the characters talk about how much of a hurry they're all in, and there's about a half dozen of them in this game.
Overall, if you're into Tales of games and haven't played this one, you're not missing much. There are better games and better Tales of games. The characters and plot allow the game to shine, but it's quickly dulled by technical issues.
No comments:
Post a Comment