Being 84 years old, I’m a big fan of JRPGs from the early Aughts. In the days of the PS2 and Gamecube, it seemed like everyone was making JRPGs. Most of them were bad, some were just janky, but they were all pretty interesting at least in concept. The genre holds a very special place in my heart and even though I can’t tell you with a straight face that they’re not frequently the most boring kinds of games in existence, I still love them. But it wasn’t until very recently that I thought to give a try to one of the longest-running JRPG franchises: the Tales of series. Spanning back to the 90s, the Tales of games have been pretty well-regarded and still are running strong today. But I wasn’t interested in any of that new horse hockey. Let me take you back past the Croatian period to the dusty year of 2005. Let me tell you about Tales of the Abyss.
It’s Saturday Morning Somewhere
For this story, you take the role of Luke fon Fabre, a spoiled rich kid with a bad attitude. You’re just going about your usual duties, berating the help, going through sword training with your master Van, the usual mundanities. Suddenly, a girl named Tear bursts into your home and tries to assassinate Van mid-lesson. You go to stop her when suddenly a light forms from your clashing blades, and the both of you are teleported continents away. Not feeling bitter about the fight to the death mere seconds ago, Tear agrees to help Luke get back home as she feels it’s her responsibility. From there, you meet a bunch of other characters who all have their own interweaving stories and motivations. Despite that sort of underwhelming synopsis, there are actually a lot of different places the story goes to after this, it just takes a good bunch of hours for the story to actually get good enough to talk about. Without getting too in the weeds on it, Tales of the Abyss does get interesting. For those of you who crave some good characters in your stories, Abyss also delivers. There is a story here worth seeing, you just have to push through a lot of boring early-game and some cliched plot points.
However, to enjoy the story, you’re going to need to get on board with a frustrating story quirk this game has. The story in Tales of the Abyss is one of those ones. You know the ones. The ones that are mostly dumb nonsense until they sporadically tackle much larger themes. This is essentially a baby game but every hour or so, you get a much more interesting game for a whole five minutes. This comes with no shortage of whiplash. Although, when it gets going, Abyss is actually pretty poignant. There’s certainly a lot of time spent discussing very grey topics and nebulous concepts. I mean, for chrissakes, this game was coined by its development team as “To Know The Meaning of One’s Birth RPG.” There’s a lot of heavy stuff to wade through in this game. The issue comes from the pace at which these interesting thoughts are doled out. I also don’t want to oversell it; Abyss does not treat all themes with an equal amount of care. When the game talks about the purpose for a person’s existence or their motivations, it’s firing on all cylinders. When it tries to take a swing at the control that organized religion has over the masses, the best it can offer is a Hitler Pope. It can be slightly disappointing when you know the writers have it in them to go much more in-depth with a topic. In the end, the greatest danger to the world of this JRPG is, surprise surprise, nihilism. To live imperfectly versus dying and for the world to be better off. The way that the overall themes tie into this conflict and how it resolves itself is so interesting and mature. But to get to that point, you’re going to have to deal with the occasional mascot character outburst, while it rolls around on screen, shitting itself. So there’s a trade-off there.
The Prince And The Puppet
The characters here are a standout. Tales of the Abyss has a pretty succinct core cast but they spend a lot of time delving into each one. All of your little friends are still caricatures at the end of the day, but they’re at least developed enough to be able to balance being both deeply serious characters, battling past trauma and existential dread over their uncertain futures, and also being the comic relief for their respective scenes. From what I gather through my research, the Tales of series is known for great character writing, and having only experienced this game’s cast, I’m inclined to agree. Every character has their own niche and they bounce off each other effortlessly. No one gets lost in the crowd, you don’t have a character who ends up fading into the background halfway through the story. This is also a game that isn’t afraid to give characters development. You’ll find that the set of people you start the game out with are not the same people that you finish the game with. And for a genre that too often just introduces characters only to lose them when the plot rears its ugly head, this is a breath of fresh air.
Not everything is peachy with the character writing though. Oftentimes, characters are pretty inconsistent or dense just to keep the plot going. There’s a lot of what I’ll call “anime writing” in Tales of the Abyss. People will express surprise at hearing that their trusted ally cares about them. People are really nonchalant about attempted murder and betrayals. You find the main antagonist just chilling in a library, he tells you to go away, and you just do it because, I don’t know, making too much noise would be rude. A fun drinking game would be taking a shot every time someone says something mysterious, an interested second party asks what that means, and the first character replies, “Oh, nothing. Let’s continue exploring this cave!” You could probably cut ten hours out of this game if the people here talked like people.
Unfortunately, one of the main drags in the story is from your playable character. Luke spends the entire first ten hours being the world’s biggest prick. Honestly, it’s pretty entertaining seeing how people bounce off him and gradually get more and more over his shit. Then after that, for story reasons, he loses his confidence and self-worth. And this is also super compelling. It’s cool that a character can be shown “losing it all” and it’s telling how he reacts to that event. But it just doesn’t stop with this guy. This is one of those frustrating stories where a character that you see grow in a scene just can’t bring it over to the rest of the story. Any bit of progress getting Luke out of his self-pity is only temporary until he gets the next opportunity to put himself down. And the weight of this depreciation is carried over until practically the ending moments of the game. It’s disappointing for a title that has both good writing and an interesting personal journey for the main character to fumble the bag so badly. Luke, unfortunately, becomes all but insufferable in almost every scene he’s in. Even saving the world isn’t enough for this guy to let it go. By the end of Abyss, you just want to buy the guy a bag of Dove chocolates and let him cry it out.
Tales Of The War Criminal
As far as gameplay goes, Tales of the Abyss is pretty fun but about as deep as a puddle. The combat takes place in real time, with you controlling your character on a 2D plane, ala Street Fighter. Different buttons do different commands and you can customize the commands you have access to. You can put points into your moves to strengthen them and even learn upgraded versions after enough time. You’re not really able to customize characters too heavily though, they all have a set path they go down with set skills. Your healer is always going to be your healer, in other words. But, I mean, that all sounds pretty good, so what’s the catch? Why is this such a shallow title? What if I told you that you can stun lock almost every single enemy with just a standard attack string? That would be kinda underwhelming, right? Well, what if I also told you that you were not locked into a strictly 2D plane? You can press a button at any time to be able to break out of that 2D plane and move all around the battlefield. While this is admittedly a pretty cool feature, it almost seems like it was put in the game without the combat designers’ permission. Because you can literally just walk around any big attack that’s coming. Big laser coming? Just a skip and jump to safety. Final boss getting his planet-destroying god-punch primed? Too slow, idiot, I’ve already moved two steps to the left. And when the unbeatable offense of stun-locking with basic attacks gets paired with the unbeatable defense of, uh, moving to the side, you get a pretty breezy game. It’s a fun time, but there’s not going to be much in the way of conflict, which can sometimes undermine big story moments. Because how tough can this guy be if I’m circling around his big heavy swings and stabbing him in the butt until he dies?
If there’s one big issue that Tales of the Abyss cannot shake, it’s the pacing. When this game is good, it’s very good. It can be incredibly compelling, the character work can hit, the environments can be beautiful and the story just feels like it’s giving everything you would want from an interactive medium. But that usually doesn’t last too long. This game sucks for whole hours at a time, only occasionally being interrupted by a cool dungeon. Or a cool plot point. But so much of this game is traveling from one town to another, talking to an NPC, hearing that your princess is in another castle, then fucking off to a town a continent away. Later on, you at least unlock fast travel, but after clicking through your list of towns over and over just to hear virtually the same dialogue, you barely even feel like you’re playing a video game. Off the top of my head, the game has three clear endpoints. Your party members keep giving the “Well, this is our final battle” speech so often that you start thinking about beating them to the punch and shutting the game off. As good as this game’s story is, it would probably be, at a minimum, a billion times better if they just cut out five or seven hours’ worth of gameplay. Frankly, we don’t need all the busy work going back and forth to people. If these people really cared about saving the world, they would send us a letter every once in a while instead of waiting on their asses for us to come to them. It would at least save us a few trips.
Haircut Equals Lifestyle Change
As far as the presentation in Tales of the Abyss goes, it’s fine. It does its job. Character designs can be pretty plain but every so often, there’s a burst of creativity when it comes to a character or a locale. I mean, you’ve seen the graphics up there. I’m partial to them but I’m not going to try to pull the wool over your eyes; the game can be somewhat sparse with detail. If you can get into the time period that this game was created in, I think you’ll be fine, but as a person who has actually lived through this period, I was still left wanting a little bit more effort. This was a 2005 PS2 game! That’s when God of War came out! We had the technology! Music is also a mixed bag. For every earworm of a town theme, you get some pretty generic and unmemorable dungeon music or battle theme. I wish I had more to say about it, but for better or worse, you don’t really notice the music much. Nothing is offensively bad but I recognize that’s sort of damning Abyss with faint praise. I don’t want to get too down on this game though, I think that the look and the sound that it goes for works for it. It’s a JRPG-ass JRPG. It’ll accommodate your base needs but it is under no obligation to go any further than that.
As far as what else Tales of the Abyss has to offer, you also have plenty of sidequests to run through. There’s a good amount of variety and also a good amount of scenes that are tied to these quests. You can get stuck finding some pigs around an eccentric king’s castle or end up serving a cafe as an impromptu maid. None of the side quests are exceptional, but the scenes they reward you with are engaging enough that they’re worth the cost of entry. With the characters being the by-and-far best part of this game, you’ll want to do what you can to get the most out of your time with them. You can also unlock different titles, either through story progression or other side quests. These titles can be applied to your characters and have either stat-benefits or in some cases, costume changes. These are fun little additions that don’t really add much but they’re perfect for a completionist run or a New Game+ file. Although as a warning, there are a lot of side quests and a lot of optional unlocks. So if you decide to go for any of them, maybe pace them out with story content so you don’t get overwhelmed.
Symphonia Shmin-Shmonia
Despite the somewhat middling things that I had to say at times, Tales of the Abyss is a fun game. At the very least, there was enough there to keep me hooked for the 40-odd hours of gameplay I put in. Whenever I started getting too bored just going back and forth across the world map, the game would throw an interesting plot twist or a cool dungeon my way. And although it felt like scraps at times, I was happy to experience those pockets of good interactive media. However, I am still half-and-half on recommending others to play it. Although the experience is fresh in my mind now, I wouldn’t be surprised if I come back to this review a few years on from now and barely remember it as anything other than “the kinda cool JRPG where you’re a dickhead for about a third of the runtime.” And maybe that’s fine. Ultimately, I feel like this game has a very specific vibe that will only resonate with a few nowadays. But if you’re up for a nostalgic romp with some interesting ideas and some fun characters, this might be the game for you.
If you’re in the mood to screw around with some wacky characters and pontificate life itself, you can pick up the Tales of the Abyss here for PS2 or here for the 3DS. Although this review was done with the PS2 version, I’ve experienced both and can vouch that they’re both essentially the same experience.