I know how to solve this. Give up?
I bought Legendia having never played a Tales game besides Symphonia, and I expected something of a similar caliber. I was sorely disappointed. One is greeted, at first, by well-animated scenes of characters introducing them to some extent. After that, it's all downhill. One then sees a bland, slow-moving menu. When one plays, they are met with a fairly good, if not completely predictable storyline. This is the shining aspect of the game. The most important part of the storyline is set up over the course of the first half of the game, where one fights Vaclav. After that, one engages with Nerifes, followed by the dreadful character quests. However, the actual method this occurs by is awful.
The process is like this: you find out something that causes you to go to some location. You travel by land or transporter. Then you enter the dungeon. You fight countless random encounters in an annoyingly convoluted dungeon, which is marked by double paths - I like that, however, the forks only add to the ridiculous amount of encounters. Then, you encounter a boss at the end of the dungeon. But that's not all! No, before the boss is a ridiculous attempt at the type of puzzle-solving that made other Tales games so fun without being annoying. This, too, fails miserably. So you walk into a puzzle booth, a transporter that has encountered some kind of problem that causes a warp to another dimension. This blatant attempt at infusing puzzle-solving is, by far, the most hilarious part of the game. If one presses start, he can simply choose simply not to do the puzzle. The incentive to do these is a title, the game's way of saying, "Here you go! You get a gold star on your drawing of your home!" And it means just about as much as that gold star.
One shining moment of the game is its battle system, which, by and large, is somewhat enjoyable. However, it does not even attempt the usual advancement of a series. In fact, it regresses from the 3-d Symphonia to 2-d! Other than that, it's completely not worth mentioning, besides the fact that the "create your own combo" system is completely worthless in all but the strangest circumstances.
Of course, the game is not over when one finishes the main quest. Far from it, in fact! One can now go back to the dungeon he has trudged through with new, somewhat interesting stories to boot. The best part is that you just face all the same enemies, but with an X at the end of their name, which means they're kinda stronger I guess. How great.