Can be fun but entirely uncompelling.
Tales of Eternia certainly has good looks, crisp 2D with fluid animations, all the characters are in an anime style but they look quite detailed, the backgrounds look very good, their stills so one would hope they look good.
The 3d map however is pretty poor and bland - afterall this is pretty much a port from an older playstation 1 game when 3d graphics were in their infancy , but still it would have been nice to see the map spruced up.
Gameplay wise, its quite fun (in short intense action heavy burts with little room for tactics, strategy and not entirely RPG like in the sense its twitch based combat), the combat is in real time but feels more like street fighter , you have a standard attack and can activate combos with D-pad controls, and you can learn skills which are like powerful attacks, these can be activated with a press of a button and d pad movement - chosen by the player., these attacks however take up your 'TP' bar which is essentially a mana/magic point bar.
Not only this there are also a few characters that accompany you along the way and you can tell them to use certain skills, magic attacks and so on and you can even set their default behaviour/formation and what not.
It should also be mentioned there are alot of enemies to fight in the game all with their strenghts and weaknesses offcourse and some can be fairly challenging - especially the greater 'craymel' (summons) fights and boss battles and most of the enemies look unique although theres at times a fair bit of 'use same monster model change the shade'.
Most of the battles you'll get into will be classic random encounters and I should say the random encounter rate is pretty steep you'll be getting into a battle every 10 seconds at most.
After youve killed enough monsters you'll offcourse level up , the more skill attacks you use the more skills you'll learn and can assign to your character, all pretty standard RPG stuff.
The storyline in Tales of Eternia is actually one of its weakest parts and is terrible when considering that this is an RPG and an RPG needs a strong storyline to make the game compelling, to make a player want to continue.
Luckily though tales of Eternia at least carries on the JRPG tradition of having characters with decent backstory so you may actually end up liking one of two of them and wanting to see what happens to them. (although it must be said its not quite as strong as say FF7, or even some western RPG's like finding out what happened to Virgil in Arcanum).
There are a few minigames thrown in to the mix aswell, but theyre not entirely fun to play things like the card game, finding specific items or the cooking stuff. also there are a few side quests but again mainly fed ex style.
The storyline in tales of eternia is that there are two worlds very close together, infact look up from either and you'll see the other taking up the sky, and inbetween is something called the Orbus barrier that prevents the two worlds from colliding, however the Orbus Barrier is failing and the worlds are moving closer and closer together , one of the worlds (celestia) is more technologically advanced and sends a craymel mage to the world of 'infernia' to gather help.
So you and you're childhood freind find the downed craft and craymel mage who you intially cant understand and get attacked, you leave town to venture forth and find out who the mysterious girl is, whats happening and how to stop the collision.
Seems ok doesnt it? but the world is so bland and most of the NPC's are pretty lifeless with only a handful of towns and dungeons on the map(s) the major boss types are well...boring theres too little back story on the likes neirid etc which gives very little reason to feel a particular want or need to fight this big bad person so the game doesnt compel one to keep playing for the sake of the storyline but rather to have a fun battle.
The atmosphere of the game is pretty poor aswell, I say this because not only is the world map devoid of many places to visit but also each town feels samey and thus boring.
Sound wise, tales of eternia features good enough voice acting, its not too wooden and the voice actors actually sound pretty good, the music on the otherhand is entirely average, nothing is memorable from the game which is a real shame, saying that the music never irritates though.
I would say that the main fault though is...the timed related puzzles, has it even really been fun to activate a switch at a precise moment over and over and over again? or even match up obscure tiny little pictures after defeating a boss?
the worse of these is the fire puzzle near the end of the game, absolutely pathetic idea.
However tales of eternia as I mentioned does have some fun battles - although this feeling of fun is mitigated by the sheer number of random encounters, and even with the poor story its quite a big game in that its at least 25-30 hours long but the story and atmosphere is poor and...these days tales of eternia is cheap so if you want a pretty good not so great RPG or you want a new RPG and just like the look and description of it, then id recommend this but I gave this game a chance and its failed to make me a fan of the tales series and I found it to be quite tedious and unfufilling. Myabe it was considered ground breaking back on the origina playstation, or the only viable counter balance to the final fantasy series on plasyation but it is only average these days.
Pros:
.Good pleasant graphics in towns and battles - done in a anime style
.Sometimes the combat can be quite fun, usually in boss battles which last long enough to allow for some degree of tactics and strategy
.Decent backstory on characters
.Interesting setting with two worlds to explore
.Voice acting is a'ok.
.Some mini games thrown into the mix
.Many many monster types to battle
.Long game at least 25-30 hours on first play through.
Cons:
.The story line is poor
.Vast yet desolate world with little to actually find
.Combat can just feel twitch based
.Overland map graphics are bad
.Random encounter rate is too high
.Boring NPC's with little to say
.Too few side quests and those that are present are of the fed ex style.
.Whilst there are mini games present most of boring.
.Soundtrack is bland with no memorable moments.
.Terrible "timed puzzles" such as guiding a fireballs at the precious split second moment through doors.