I’m pretty sure I reviewed Tales of Legendia for EGM, but honestly I remember very little of the game. It exists in my memory as 30-35 hours of bland, generic meaninglessness. The most remarkable thing my reviewing experience, if I’m recalling correctly, was that somewhere around the 10-hour mark my wife’s then-roommate’s pit bull busted into the room where I was playing and pinned me to the ground so it could smother me with joyful affection. Yes, I was attacked by a pit bull, but she was a very friendly and loving pit bull, so I got away with a face slathered in slobber rather than, I dunno, a torn jugular spraying the wall with a layer of red. Of course, this has nothing to do with the game itself, but based on Tales/Star Ocean devotee Andrew Bentley’s unenthusiastic write-up of Legendia, it seems I’m hardly alone in finding it wholly forgettable.
I do kind of like the title, though. I hope someday Sonic Team gives us Legend of Tails so we can mash the two games together and cause them to cancel out one another’s existence, like mirrored sound waves.
“30-50 hours of bland, generic meaninglessness” basically describes all Tales games, though are a little more fun than others.
Legend of Tails would’ve been the perfect subtitle if Bioware had ever made another Sonic RPG.
I thought Legendia was one of the better Tales games in the series, if only for being different, and if only slightly. The art was pretty slick as well as the music and the setting of a giant mechanical-island-ship-thing was somewhat interesting. The sense of humor was truly bizarre, with one of the most hysterical translations I’ve ever encountered (There’s my horny gal!). The combat was indeed sluggish, and the characters had way too much to say every time they used a spell, but had some decent depth to how different moves combined together to make new ones and the 2D aspect brought back a more fighting-game mentality to the design, rather than the action-rpg styling of Symphonia.
I also tend to remember this one a little more fondly because I played it after Symphonia, which I also liked, but before all the rest which have kind of transformed my relationship with the Tales games into a “Oh, another one of the those games again.” situation. On one hand, the Tales games aren’t any more serialized than any other ongoing series of games, but on the other, they are all so freaking alike in their design that it’s haunting. I have a hard time imagining how even the most hard-up Japanophile can genuinely appreciate a series like this after playing more than a few of its entries, but I suppose the kind of person to lust for a new Tales game after playing every other one doesn’t concern themselves much with the value of surprises, or perhaps very easily achieves them.
Or, you know, happens to like the gameplay of the games and is willing to put up with a lot of things including condescension from people who apparently know better.
While most Tails Of X games are pretty damned bland, Tales of Vesperia is actually a pretty interesting game. Though yeah, most of the rest of the series is oh so bland.
I think most of the reason I was able to stomach Vesperia was the top-notch voice acting, actually.