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Tales of Legendia

Score: 6.9/10

As the game gets underway, players are introduced to the story's main character, Senel, an overly angsty teen that is trying to protect his sister, Shirley, from an elite military force eager to harness her powers.  While Senel does have a fairly pragmatic approach to doing things, his tendency towards shooting his mouth off is outweighed by the overall quality of the story.  It’s a fairly traditional tale of heroes trying to stop an evil empire, but thanks the Legendia’s ensemble cast, there’s a lot 

 

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of back and forth between the characters that makes  the whole thing more enjoyable.  However, after a while the story just drags on, and on.  What makes the whole thing particularly weird is that there is one ending for the game at about the 30-hour mark, but after that the game continues again.  The way this is done feels like an attempt by the developers to add another 40 hours or so to the game, but not taking the time to do it seamlessly.

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While it’s interesting to see each character’s individual story neatly wrapped up, most of the game from this point on was spent suffering through long dialogue sequences, which, by the way, lack voice acting, unlike dialogue in pre-first ending parts of the game.  Just a wee oversight there by Namco’s quality assurance team, no?  In any event, it didn’t feel necessary for the game to go beyond that first ending.  Everything wrapped up nicely, and the game was fun up to that point, but by continuing afterward it degraded the whole experience.  Tales of Legendia just didn’t know when to stop.

This is really too bad, too, because there is a lot to like about the game, largely due to its fast, mildly chaotic battle system.  Those who have played previous “Tales of…” games will feel at home here, and people new to the series should be able to jump right in.  What’s nice about the battles is that they take on the feel of being more an action game, as players only need control one character, and try to perform the biggest combos that they possibly can through regular attacks, special moves, and the help of other party members.  These combos can go right through the roof when one uses their special time freezing ability.  It’s a ton of fun, but there are some underlying issues that Tales of Legendia’s battle system suffers from, that being the fact that fights are way too easy unless you crank the difficult right up, and that as helpful as they may be, the AI of your team mates can be extremely questionable at times.

When not fighting through onslaughts of monsters, there's a fair amount of exploration to be done in the game.  That's not to say that the game is totally open-ended.  It is in fact quite linear.  The various levels do have quite a few areas to check out with branching paths, and usually some pretty nifty treasure for those that can be bothered to look.  A lot of these stages are absolutely massive too.  What makes the exploration a little more interesting is that there are large, dark gelatinous globules that players have to run through.  These are called Chaos Zones.  If players encounter monsters here, they'll discover that these enemies are much stronger than your average bad guy, but if one succeeds in getting through these areas they can expect to find some very nice loot on the other side.  It's a nice way to add to the way in which players navigate levels.  Will they take the easy way, or the hard way?

What really stood out while playing the game, though, were the visuals.  The whole aesthetic of the game manages to walk a line between giving the sense that the player is experiencing an anime, while at the same time seeing a wholly unique art style.  Between the use of colors, lighting, and style, the environments of this game are very easy on the eyes.  Meanwhile, the animation of many of the characters, and the undertones of whimsy mimic that which one might expect to find in a popular anime series.  All of this is generally enhanced by the musical score of Tales of Legendia, though there are some moments where the tunes do feel out of place.

At the end of the day, though, Tales of Legendia is a tough game to recommend picking up at a $50 price point.  It starts of with a bang, but then drags on and on.  This game should have been 30 hours, plain and simple, but it looks like Namco got caught up in the current trend of making RPGs ridiculously long.  If there were a lot more mini-games and what not here to distract players, Tales of Legendia’s 70 hours of gameplay would probably have been a lot more tolerable.  As it stands, though, it feels like Namco just didn’t know where to draw the line on content for this game.

Mr. Nash

(April 2, 2006)

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