a very, superior tales of game
Storyline 8/10 a bit diffrent
you take on the role of Luke who's a duke (ignore the ryme) with a personilty of an ignorant person (at first) being confined and have nothing to look foward to then sword practice, alot of things happen from then and you get seperated from you land and castle being teleported far away from interfearing with Tears assassnation atempt on your master teacher sword's man Van by your own resionating powers with hers, oddly enough Tear wants to help Luke to get back and with Luke not knowing to much of anything outside of his wall's...it's pretty logical he accepts oh though of course not fully eager, eventually this plot turns into two sides going into a war and you as a duke decides that you want to try and stop it along with saving the world on the way on your travels, you'll meet awesome chars along the way like Jade,a mage who has the most twisted humor you'd probaly ever see in the game, or Guy, a samurai like sword's man who literaly is like a... guy but is afraid of women touching him, and so on, for the most part the storyline is good and not to fully perdictible at times, however sometimes the game consist of way to much back tracking then it should be kind of making it a bit irriatible if you dont have much patiance, but when the plot does move foward at a decent rate it's not bad,
Gameplay 9/10 fun
nearly in any tales of game, battle's are all done in real time, however tales of abyss has many diffrent elements that serperate it from being to similar to its series, whats diffrent about this is you are now allowed to freely move along the feild as you desire, meaning instead of moving on the line to your enemy, your free to break away moving south or north giving you alot more freedom, what else is new is AD skills, you can learn various techniqs that give you more button options to passive skills and there are quite alot of them to gain most of them proving advatageous during combat, a new leveling up system is created by using capacity cores to level your char in the direction you desire in stat's wise, and if that wasent enough fon slot chambers to enchance ANY of your move's leaving each move capable of having 1 diffrent effects out of 4, now to the actuall combat, what's diffrent in combat in this game is fonon feilds (basicly white or colored circles appear after a spell or move was used during combat on the ground for a limited time) which is a bit hard to explain but if that element is charged enough in place, and you use a certain move that can link to that elem, you go into a nicely made specil move sequence and attack to hit your enemy with, and there are alot of linkible skill's to several elements keeping the game looking very entertaining, your ally's will be able to use these as well (even combined with magic) and vice versa may apply with enemys adding more factors in combat to play with,
Graphic's 8/10 alright
i dont really care to much about graphics but everything really does seem fine in this game, there arent alot of reused move's from past tales of games and spell's look great along with sword moves and espicly the nice mystic art specil moves are done ratherly well, i guess things could use some improvement but what makes the current graphic's in this game superior it hardly effects the frame rate of gameplay,
Music 9/10 suprising
nearly none of the music in this game was taken from other tales of series and alot of the original music of the game has many track's reaching epic level's, whenever it is in battle's or traveling the map or a boss battle the music really stand's out of time's making the gameplay even better to go through even if your suffering in grinding,
Replay value 9/10 also suprising
again, like mostley any tales game you earn grade during battle and can earn bonus's for a new gameplus at your pick, what's diffrent in tales of abyss however from the other series is the amount of sidequests, they arent breath taking and often require back tracking half the time but certian quests give your characters alternate costums which are alot in this game actually or you would do side quests to gain a new skill and such, and with such great gameplay theres a decent amount of reasons why play again,
final word's...i would give this game a 8.8 or 8.9 if i wasent for some reason forced to round, anyway tales of abyss comes out to be a superior game in the series and is a great rpg for ether who wants a nice change in the tales of series style and even better if your new to this series, i personaly think this is one of the top 10 rpg's game's for the ps2 somewere under 8 but there's way to many rpg's to state that i guess, you'd just have to play the game and judge for yourself,