Tales of the Abyss brings you one entertaining experience after the other, and remains incredibly engaging.
Abyss is a vast improvement over Symphonia in a lot of ways. In fact, there are minimal things it does worse. As far as story goes, Abyss has a pretty predictable story. Does that make it any worse? No, actually. It helps it make sense. It gives you an idea of what's going to happen, and when it does, you'll feel satisfied that it turned out the way it should have. The story involves a young, arrogant and sheltered Duke's son, Luke, and how his life gets changed radically when he ends up meeting a mysterious woman named Tear, and as their adventure through war and peace between countries continues, they meet a handful of additional quirky characters to help them out. The main point of Tales games is the battle system. Frankly, I didn't expect the system to improve as much as it did. The inclusion of free-run and the Field of Fonons (an 'attack enhancer') brings force more playability, and the fixed multiplayer camera makes it a game everyone can enjoy. For those who don't know, the battle system is real time, so that means you have to be quick with the controls to survive. The driving force behind this system, represented by a whole load of menus, can add even more depth than there previous was. This includes being able to alter the core stats of your characters, changing principles of certain special moves you learn (like alterting the attack power and TP usage), among endless other things.
In short, the game is very deep. Even outside of battle, where the more traditional aspects of an RPG are present, the game is very well designed. Much moreso than Symphonia, where no dungeons at all feel unfinished or poorly thought out. The game flows incredibly well, and you'll be sure to notice.
The graphics are a bit underwhelming and no longer akin to the cel-shading Symphonia used. Although, there's a tradeoff. The characters are a lot more expressive and less robotic than in Symphonia, which gives a new layer of depth to the cutscenes. Speaking of cutscenes, the animated cutscenes of the game are numerous, which is a very welcome addition to the already super-slick presentation. Important scenes are highlighted with excellent animation and direction, so the game knows how to keep the player interested.
The music and voice acting in the game is simply fantastic. The voices are well suited and the themes inside and outside of more action-packed scenes remain likeable. Unfortunately, the skits of this game lack voice acting, which is disappointing.
The flaws, like I mentioned before, are hard to pinpoint. The more obvious one is the sometimes lengthly loading times. This includes up to 10 seconds after a battle on the world map due to having to reload the map. It's not terribly bad, but it's distracting.
Tales of the Abyss is a masterpiece. As much of a masterpiece as ToS is. And as well as ToS, I can feel safe adding TotA to my list of favorite games ever. Its engaging story and characters, as well as its top-of-the-line gameplay, make it so incredibly enjoyable that, well, I've been thinking about playing it constantly even when I'm but a short distance from my PS2.