Not only the weakest link in an other wise great series, but the worst RPG I've ever played all the way through.
After such a bold statement I feel I must explain myself, I do not believe that Tales of Legendia is the worst RPG ever made, just the worst I've finished. If I weren't doing a complete series playthrough of the Tales games I would have quit playing this game after the first five or so hours, so needless to say, after almost 80 hours of gameplay, I had more than had my fill.
I will start with the first thing every game presents to it's player, the graphics. Before I get bashed for putting too much importance on graphics you should know that I find it to be one of the least important things in a game, but in this game, it just brought down the experience even more. The games style is very colorful and anime inspired, much like the rest of the Tales games, but unlike the other games the graphical presentation is... questionable. The developers decided to make all the characters in an odd 3D chibi-ish style that leaves all the characters looking like Bobble Heads in and out of battle. I have to admit, I don't even know how I feel about the graphics in this game. At the beginning I felt the graphics were colorful, and the backgrounds were pretty, but the character design was just bad. I know this is an opinion thing, but even for JRPG veterans I think only a very small percentage of people would find the character design good. For some the character design may skirt by as 'cute' but it is still a bit of a stretch. Not only are the characters not well designed, but they don't animate well either, they have about three different animations out of battle, and none of them are compelling, especially after you've seen them done for the 200th time. It just strikes me as odd and disheartening that after releasing the beautiful (for the time) Tales of Symphonia, that the same company could be PROUD of a game that looks this bad. There are a couple anime cutscenes that do look good, but feel extremely out of place when compared to the aesthetic to the rest of the game.
Now for the next part of the presentation; the sound design. Once again this leaves me with mixed feelings. I guess I'll start with the voice acting. The voice acting in this game ranges from kind of passable to god awful. Moses has to have the least appropriate, generic 'redneck' sounding voice ever. It is completely out of place, pointless and stupid. Every time I heard him talk I wanted to throw my controller through the screen. Other weak performances include Shirley (the main characters 'sister') and Norma. The other voices, such as for the main character Senel, kind of match the character, and are passable, but really are mediocre over all. It almost seems like the developers realized this, because the entire second half of the game is completely unvoiced (but more on the two halfs of the game later). On the other hand, the games Violin heavy soundtrack is actually pretty decent, and has to be the highlight of the game. It's no where near the quality of say.. something by Nobuo Uematsu of Final Fantasy fame (then again, that's not a very fair comparison for pretty much any game soundtrack) but it was pleasant to the ears and served it's purposes... EXCEPT for one particular track that doesn't fit the game at ALL. There's one song that they play during moments that are supposed to be dramatic or inspirational, but it's the only song that's heavy on electric guitar, and instead of emphasizing the emotion of the moment it completely distracts and ruins any slight amount of emotion you may have been feeling.
Since we're talking about presentation I will wrap up this section with the story and characters. The Tales series is known for two things, first is it's unique action battle system, which I will get to later, and second is having fairly cliché Stories with very well developed characters. Once again Tales of Legendia dropped the ball. Tales of Legendia's story is COMPLETELY unmemorable. It has been less than a month since I completed this game and I can't even tell you the name of the main villian or why they were fighting. Not only that, but the cast of characters is some of the worst in the series, which is kind of pathetic considering the game has an entire half DEDICATED to developing these characters, even going as far as to give each of them there own chapter (each of which lasted roughly 5 hours). The story had one cool and fairly unique aspect, which was that the entire explorable world took place on a continent that was actually a giant ship, aside from that though, it wasn't very interesting. The dialogue is also repetitive and dull. It seems like in every scene they made it so EVERY character said at least one line of dialog so as not to be left out of the conversation, but half the time it was just annoying and time consuming. If a character has nothing to do with a conversation then don't force feed us more dialog anyway. The game and story are broken up into two almost completely unrelated halfs. The first half follows Senel and his attempts to rescue his constantly kidnapped 'sister' Shirley. This half of the game contains a bland story, unmemorable enemies, the questionable voice acting and close to no anime cutscenes all in one chunk. The second half of the game however consists of all of the 'character quests', which is a whole second half of the game which is longer than the first. Though this half of the game takes place AFTER the credits, it is actually not bonus content, it is a HUGE part of the 'experience'. The second half goes into further detail on each individual character, and is argueably better than the first half, but not by much. It also contains more anime cutscenes but for some reason drops the voice acting compeletely EXCEPT for in these scenes. It also throws a new antagonist at you (thank god) but the plot is still predictable and uninteresting. Essentially the two half system is a way to artificially lengthen the game. In the second half you revisist EVERY dungeon from the first with little to no change except for the strengthening of enemies. The game would have benefitted from a MAJOR cutback, they should have left the second half as the WHOLE game, so you would only have to suffer through 40 hours of gameplay instead of 70 to 80.
Ah, finally we get to the gameplay, the thing that really makes this game almost unbearable. On the surface, this game plays like the older Tales games. The battles take place on a 2D plane like in Tales of Eternia or Tales of Destiny, which was a nice throwback to the original style, but it got ruined in the execution. There have always been complaints about the Tales series being too much about button mashing, but experienced players could always find the depth hidden beneath all the repetitive combos. Tales of Legendia was built without any of this depth. You will go from the first battle to the final boss using the SAME three hit combo because it is truly the most useful attack in the entire game. I felt no incentive to use artes, no reason to cast spells (except for healing), the game was so lacking that it left not even an ounce of challenge or depth in it's battle system. The ONLY cool thing about the battles was the climax bar (yes, the climax bar). Once full you can activate climax mode, which makes time stop for your enemies for a short period of time, where you are free to make a combo of as many hits as you can get off before it runs out, but the game was so pathetically easy you will NEVER need it. I got an 80 hit combo in the first DUNGEON in this game because of the climax bar. That... is pathetic to be able to accomplish such a feat so early in the game. And don't get me started on the dungeons. The Tales series often has long dungeons filled with interesting and thought provoking puzzles, but not Tales of Legendia. The entire game consists of dungeons with long winding hallways filled with the highest random encounter rate seen in recent history. When I say these hallways are long, I mean it. There was a point where I traveled down a single path with no off branching paths that went over six screens where I encountered over twenty random battles (seriously, I counted). The only thing even remotely resembling a puzzle in this game are the 'Puzzle Booths' which are rooms you will encounter when teleporting through teleportation devices that show up in pretty much every dungeon. They are all block moving puzzles where you must make a path to light several beacons with an item called the Summoner's ring (familiar to any Tales fan) that can only be used IN these rooms. At first I was excited about these rooms, as they were the only thing in the game that ever made me THINK. It was only shortly after that though, that I realized a huge problem. The game developers actually had the audacity to put in a skip function for these rooms. The ONLY part of the game that was thought provoking, challenging or FUN, you could skip with no penalty! How pathetic did these developers really think we were? You know what? I actually ended up using the skip function after the first few puzzle rooms because I knew it was the one thing that would get me through the game just a LITTLE bit faster, that and when you are doing the character chapters, you revisit all the same dungeons with all the same damn puzzles.
Honestly, this game just feels completely out of place in a series of generally good RPGS, and I think that's the problem; EVERYTHING in this game is out of place. The cheesy art style doesn't match the epic music, the dull and unmemorable characters don't match the ever so slightly compelling world idea, the gameplay doesn't match... well anything at all really. It doesn't even stay in the tradition of referencing other tales games, (a Wonder baker instead of a wonder chef? Cmon! What happened to tradition!). The whole product is dull, unimaginitive, graphically unappealing, and worst of all, just plain not fun to play. I give this game a 5 out of 10 simply because I didn't find any glitches and the game was technically playable from beginning to end, but I highly doubt the new game + function will ever see any use because I can't imagine anyone who would want to suffer through this game more than once.
Note: This is truly my opinion of the game, but it was written in a 'harsh' manner for entertainment purposes as well as informative ones. I hope I didn't offend anyone with my writing of this... and honestly if I did, then go write your own review and tell people what you think. ^^