Chasing Tales

As ever, the spambots have failed in their struggle to keep me from posting!

Since I can't do online stuff with my BorderlandsBox, I've decided to jump back into my original gaming specialty, the old-school JRPG.  A month or so ago, I decided to go ahead and get into the Tales series.  This foray met immediate resistance due to my insipient DAR Syndrome deciding to manifest.  In English, I bought Tales from The Abyss and then a guide for Tales of Legendia by mistake.  After realizing what happened, I had to choose between shilling $40-70 (!) for an Abyss guide, or just grabbing Legendia for $20-$30.

I bought Legendia.  And it's a fun little JRPG.  It's got lots of old time flavor:  The endless random battles, the angsty hero, ridiculous stuff to use as weapons, inexplicably cute things trying to murder you, evil empires and magitek, the list goes on.

Some of the fun stuff included a real-time battle system built like an RPG take on 2-D fighting games.  It's actually somewhat refreshing, and helps a lot that it's not built for the dexterous finesse fighting games usually required (the only fighting series I don't suck at is Soul Calibur).  Another nice thing is that your protagonist is a martial-artist monk type instead of a swordsman.  Unfortunately, while you can suplex all sorts of huge monstrosities, trains are not on the list.

Unfortunately, there are some bits I don't like, mostly characters I don't really think much of.  The main love interest is your typical high-pitched bubblehead with an addiction to getting captured.  It would have help immensely if she didn't sound like Pinkie Pie on helium.  I've been given to understand once she becomes Calypsophiroth, she's much more enjoyable, so we'll see.  The early villains really come across as lame (except for the first Big Bad), and one minor villain really come across like a crappy Pokemon villain knockoff.

The good news is that we get Will Reynard in return.  He's the closest thing JRPGs will get to the muscle wizard.  He's this built dude that hauls around a hammer usually reserved for industrial machinery and fries fools.  He even gets to dope-slap the other characters when they're being too JRPG-ey to stand.  He gets this game's awesomesauce award, and need a fic where he and Space Elf Robocop and Iron Bull tear about the multiverse in the name of manly nerds everywhere.

Well, I need to wander off, but more inanities about this game are incoming, so beware!