Volver a tocar este juego ha sido un poco tortura y un poco alegria por igual
Puedo entender a la gente que no quiera acabarse este juego al tener una primera mitad muy poco atractiva y los demas elementos del juego parece que no ayudan al paquete, pero la magia de Tales of Legendia es para mi su segunda mitad, hacer un juego donde el "post" la aventura principal es igual o hasta mas importante que la "historia principal" sigue pareciendo uno de los mejores conceptos que he visto en un rpg y es gracias a esta narrativa que podemos ver arcos de personajes muy buenos y a la altura otras entregas
Mis favoritos siendo
Chloe
Jay
Norma
Pero en general todos son destacables a su manera y la batalla final real del juego me parece de las mejores de la franquicia hablando de el concepto de la misma, puesto que en lugar de ser la tipica batalla de jefe de bueno contra el malo, es una batalla mucho mas metaforica que me cierra bastante bien.
Tales of Legendia es un juego que de verdad tiene corazon detras, pero entre cosas como el combate que se vuelve monotono a la larga, sus mazmorras las cuales son poco interesantes y se vuelven aburridas de recorrer dos veces hacen dificil siquiera llegar a la parte que hace que de verdad quieras al juego.
Destacare el soundtrack de Go shiina que para alguien que se encuentra un poco aburrido de Motoi Sakuraba ahora mismo es genial tener un soundtrack unico de verdad, con tonadas que recordare de una u otra forma.
La verdad de cierta forma fue lindo revisitar el juego y recordarme que
Aun con nuestros problemas,debilidades, ciclos abusivos, ambiciones etc.
Nuestra fuerza de crecer y mejorar mos recuerda lo valiosos que somos los humanos y todos valemos y podemos vencer cosas como el estancamiento.

I've always been fascinated by Tales of Legendia. Not developed by the usual Tales Studios but instead Project MelFes, a team combined of both Tales and Tekken/SoulCalibur devs, it has always been a strange black sheep among the Tales family post-Phantasia. It spent over four years in development, in which time the normal Tales team released both Tales of Rebirth and Tales of Destiny 2, and the time clearly spent trying to remedy the growing pains encountered when trying to blend a more fighting game-like combat system with the normal Tales styles does shine through. That said, I still enjoyed it quite a lot, and would peg it at one of the higher B-tier entries in the series. It took me 67 hours to play through it on the normal difficulty on the American version.

This review is a BIT on the long side, so for simplicity's sake I'm going to spoiler the two main parts just so the page is easier to navigate:

Story & Presentation:
The story and localization are things immediately worth mentioning, as most Tales games are 30-ish hours, and the reason to why Legendia isn't is mostly an answer of "but it is (kinda)" x3 . A bit like the original Zelda's Second Quest, there is effectively another whole game's worth of content in Legendia once the first credits role that reuse the same dungeons and maps but with a whole new story and (much) tougher monsters. Legendia calls this section its "Character Quest," I guess because it's more focused on the characters development themselves, but I just call it "second quest" for simplicity's sake. The main quest took me about 30 hours, and then the character quest and some side quests took me another 37.

The Character Quest does not actually have any voice work in it outside of the animated cutscenes (of which there are quite a few, but hardly enough to pop up more than half a dozen times over 30 hours), but this isn't exactly a bad thing. Compared to sister games Tales of Symphonia or Tales of the Abyss released around the same time, the VA work in Legendia is terrible, especially for a Namco game. Outside of one member of the main cast (who actually is also Kratos in Symphonia) and one of the main bad guys, the main cast's VA ranges from acceptable to downright awful. The Character Quest actually has all of its story lines (of which there are MANY) voiced in the Japanese version, but not in the English version. This isn't even RE-style of "so bad it's good," it's just poor acting.

The bad voice cast really drag down a story that already really drags its feet for the first half of the main quest, which is such a shame because the second half of the main quest and the character quest all had the best story bits by far for me. Never has a game had such tender, human moments to bring me to tears so many times, but I could totally understand most people never even reaching those points because of how rough the first half of the main quest is.

The story itself is quite good, with the main quest's overall plot being better than the overall plot of the character quest, but the pieces that make up the character quest better than those of the main quest. It also has a very noticeably sillier element to it than other Tales games, at least at first. For example, the first town you go into has you meeting with the town guard who proceed to sing at you about how bad you are for breaking the town rules by fighting in town. The sillier moments really help flesh out the characters relations to one another and make the main town feel far more homey, and it was a welcome change of pace from the more purely character driven comedy that a lot of the other games rely on in skits. This game has virtually no skits, so basically all of its comedy and character-building moments are done through the main story, which I thought worked quite well (even though I really would've liked more kits because I like skits).

In my opinion, what really boosts up this game's narrative beyond its bad voice work is the absolutely stellar soundtrack. While looking online a bit about this game, I saw it mentioned on some list of "Underwhelming RPG's with Overwhelming Soundtracks," and that couldn't've hit the nail on the head better. The soundtrack does a ton of the heavy lifting for setting the proper atmosphere for story moments in the main quest, and the lack of VA in the character quest allows it to effectively do all of it. It really stands out, and really kicks in when it needs to, and really brings up the narrative from the bad VA and occasionally less than stellar translation dragging it down.


Mechanics & Design:
Even in its main design, Legendia is a bit of an odd-ball among Tales games. Instead of a large series of towns over a world map, you never actually leave the "continent" you're on. The game takes place on a giant ship made of land (it's complicated), and there is really only one main town with an inn, shops that get updated every now and then, and where most all NPC's live. This means there are no teleportation spells or even any kind of vehicles, but instead a "duct" system that allows you to teleport between the main town and the dungeons you'll go to. It means you can easily zip back to town before going to most dungeons, and you can zip right back to a dungeon whenever you may feel the need. I'm not sure I prefer it to a more typical on foot -> boat -> airship style of terrain progression and content gating in an RPG, but it's not bad.

What is bad are the dungeon designs. Dungeons are effectively all corridors with occasional branching paths for better loot. The branching paths of often very clearly marked by being blocked with a "chaos zone," where a dungeon-specific more powerful version of a normal monster will spawn for you to fight. It means most dungeons really aren't memorable past the scenery, which while nice to look at, is really the only real difference between most dungeons other than the monsters.

There are some 50 or so enemy types in the game with most boss monsters taking the form of more scary/powerful versions of those enemies. Some are HORRIBLY annoying to fight because of how short they are, how they recoil when hit, or because they're fast and can fly. Some dungeons are an absolute nightmare because they're a perfect storm of very annoying to hit casters and flyers that systematically hunt down your casters. They're alright for the most part, though, even though most dungeons are really just re-assortments of somewhat differently powered but familiar enemy types.

The combat is also somewhat of a mixed bag. Now I haven't played that much of other Tales games with 2D-plan battle systems, but the combat in this, by design, is much faster and combo focused. Especially when you try and coordinate with your party members hits, you can get some crazy combos going when you start to stagger even a boss enemy, and it just feel so awesome. The physical spell users in your party can even unlock new spells by using "base" spells 50 times and unlocking new spells that are combos of previously mastered ones, meaning your physical attackers get a ton of special moves to choose from, but that are handed out to you in a very reasonable pace. Unfortunately, this fun, quick combat is hampered by dumb AI, lack of special move hotkey functions, and an annoying targeting system.

The AI is just not very bright. The amount of times that I wished my allies would just protect themselves by running away from the giant monster trying to kill them or would actually run towards the allies they're supposed to be protecting was innumerable. However, a lot of this problem I think is down to the bad targeting system. Sure, like most Tales games, you can press R1 to re-select an enemy to target. However, if an enemy hits you, you'll target them. If you TURN AROUND, you'll target the enemy you're facing and your next button commands will be directed at them, and if you play on semi-automatic play like I do, this means a lot of running far away from the enemy you're trying to focus on because your character ran across the field to the new shiny he just saw. Particularly with shorter enemies and flying enemies this can be an absolute nightmare, and there were several encounters I had where the party nearly wiped just because my character was having so much trouble actually attacking what was in front of him. This could be remedied a bit with specific hotkeys to trigger allies moves, but you only get two: The R2 and L2 button. This game doesn't use the right control stick AT ALL in battle, which absolutely baffles me, since plenty of other Tales games use up, left, right, and down on the right stick as an additional four special move-hotkey commands. It just feels like this game wasn't developed with dualshock in mind (which is certainly possible considering that development started in 2000, but this game came out in 2005!).

All of this adds up for a combat system that frequently revolves between being very fun and quick to being very irritating and annoying due to some very obvious problems.


Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. I really liked this game, but I also really didn't like it at times. It really reminded me of Symphonia in that it has some really prevalent problems that are impossible to ignore, but also some really great things that are exemplary for the genre. This all adds up to a game I can really only recommend to people really fanatic about Tales that just want to play them all (like me), or to people who just really wanna play every PS2 RPG out there. There are enough other Tales games in a similar style out there that you can very safely pick for a more reliably fun experience than Legendia, even though there is plenty of potential fun to be had with Legendia.