Tales of the Abyss sticks to its roots and gives you a story and characters that suck you in.
Great character development.
Worth the money.
Great Combat system, but feels recycled from older games.
Cons: Long story may not appeal to casual gamers.
Tales of the Abyss starts you off with the main character Luke fon Fabre, who's been living in his mansion for 7 years after he was kidnapped and since then he can't remember his childhood. After a failed assassination attempt on Lukes teacher, Luke and the assassin are warped far away from his home. This is the start of an epic journey to save the world.
Gameplay: You have your standard running around the world map and cities/dungeons like in most JRPGs. Although there are no random battles you can initiate battles by running into (or them running into you) the monsters you see throughout the game. The battle system is very similar to the older tales games but it's made a lot easier with the Free Run ability. While is past games you could run around enemy's and could only run back and forward and jump you can now run around them, making it a lot easier to dodge enemy attacks. Controls are fairly simple with X to attack, square+directional button to cast a vary of spells/techniques and O to block, while triangle brings up the menu for items ect. Over all its a fantastic blend of gameplay to make it a great combat system.
Graphics: Not bad for a PS2 game, as usual there's the anime cutscenes through out the game although they only appear at major plot lines, and at the opening and ending of the game.
Sound: Fantastic sound track, world map and battle music changes throughout the game to give a feeling of the story, although this happens twice in the game.
Once your finish the game you have the option of the new game plus by loading your clear data, depending on how well you did in battles you'll get grade points which you can use to spend on things in the grade shop when you start a new game plus, such as x2 experience, keeping all your abilitys, x2 gold ect.
If you've never played a Tales game before and are looking for something different then Tales of the Abyss is something to check out, it's nothing special from some of the other Tales games out there but it's definitely one of the best.