ToA, spoilers (pffft to whom still anyway..)

[boogietiere]

(Okay me, I've been up for 20 hours on 2 hours of sleep, so I hope that I'll be able to force myself into bed as soon as possible while pragmatically neglecting to write this blog entry in a manner any less poorly than how a 20-year-old mom of three would write about her Mary Sue's relationship with Jesus in a Twilight series-based universe.

Comments

[psychox]

I have no clue what game this is, but you make it seem interesting.

[boogietiere]

That would be Tales of the Abyss (the spiritual successor to the Gamecube's Tales of Symphonia). To summarize, it's a heavily story-based J-RPG that seems to explode with characters and (sub)plots that flesh them out nicely. Also comes with extensive made-up science about sound particles, political intrigues, real time battling, pretty guys -of which one voiced by a former power ranger-, and strong fatalist themes. In spite of how I managed to put it down for long periods, it's always been fulfilling to play, although I think the American voice-acting doesn't always carry the drama well enough where it concerns certain minor characters (and Sync..).

Now what would make it a lot more convenient for you than it has been for me is that it's an NTSC game, and so unlike me you wouldn't need to rely on a bothersome swap disc method at every boot. In case you ever plan to play it though, do mind that this entry's contents were all sorta massive spoilers for the game's finale ahah.

[mr_bipolar]

tl;dr - Tales of the Abyss is simply awesome and I've finished it 3 times.

[boogietiere]

Well there you go, all the text walls I've been neglecting to post in the past few month stacked in a convenient tl;dr friendly format. Consider it a service you never have to read any entries by me at all this way, heh.

It's a pretty swell game yes. I think I especially enjoyed the part leading up to Luke's downfall in the first chapter, where he was still all like 'Screw those dirty sick people. I'm the goodwill ambassador damnit!!' Lawl, oh Luke. I also thought that his actual mental collapse was very cleverly built up to.

Three run-throughs would take up a lot of free hours I suppose, but hey, if I could just play this game on my regular, well-functioning PS2, I'd probably have finished it once or twice by now too.