Another one of Namco's typically overlooked RPGs.  This is by the same development team as Tales of Symphonia.

The most noticeable change for me from Symphonia is that multiplayer battles are far more playable.  The camera will zoom out a lot more when human players are attacking different targets.  The free-run option is also useful, but it is not quite as easy to get behind an enemy, since the the enemy tends to try to face you, unless another character is hammering away at the enemy.

The battle system is much like Symphonia's, but the Fields of Fonon system is tricky to use and not reliable in my opinion.

I find battles generally harder than in Symphonia on the normal setting.  There are a lot more close calls in boss battles.  Money is a pain to get, as usual, but you get an item to boost money acquired by 50% fairly early on.

You can partially customize your character's stat growth, which is helpful.

The voice acting is excellent, and some Symphonia actors make a return. 

The plot opens up slowly for the first 6-10 hours (depending how fast you move), but the gravity of the situation becomes very apparent after this.

Guy Cecil is the anti-Zelos.

I'm also playing it right now. Was thinking about holding off, as I was in the midst of Baten Kaitos (the FIRST one). But when players began saying that it was "better than Symphonia" - which I really liked - I couldn't resist.

And I am indeed having a blast with it. The only thing that drives me NUTS is the loading on the overworld. It's gotten to where I'd prefer to do my leveling and money-gathering in the dungeons only.

I am fully in agreement with Stephen on the battle system. GOOD times.

Music-wise, I often wonder if Tales Studio is always getting the short end of the Sakuraba stick. (And I don't just mean the fact that he co-composes with Shinji Tamura.) Granted, the presence of streamed audio now means that his contributions here have the same instrumental quality as his other recent works for once, but the writing style still comes up a bit short, IMHO. It's still very serviceable, though, with the high point being some pretty fun battle themes.

Yep, I'm enjoying the heck out of this game.

Yes, the game's slow loading is a pain, especially post-battle loading.  The loading speed pales in comparison to Gamecube loading speeds.

The music is pretty uneventful to my ears.  The music isn't something I would want to listen to outside of the game.

Oh yeah, there was a LOT of "This would have been SOOOO much better on the GC!" going on at the GameFAQs board. And they're probably right...although it may have taken THREE of those tiny discs to hold it.

Ah well, I can live with it. It's a new Tales game that really rocks, so I'll take it.

I'm enjoying the game as well. About 10 hours in, the plot is really nothing special but the characters are amusing enough (about on par with Symphonia's cast). The battles are great (even if I can't manage the fields of fonon to save my life).

I wish the skits were fully voiced (or at least offered an option to make them move faster) and the load times reach Suikoden V level at times (especially from a battle to the overworld) but the sheer fun of the game manages to overcome its problems.

The music is some of Sakuraba's blandest in a *long* time. Then again, he's usually on auto-pilot when he's composing for a Tales game, so...

Time-wise this is very likely the case. In an interview with the DTM magazine about ToS Sakuraba mentioned that he'd start composing only in the last stage of development, doing everything related to it (music coordination, sample editing, arrangement) and composing up to 15-20 tracks a day (the interviewer asked several times regarding the fast pace as he first didn't accept it).

Abyss imo has the best music of all Tales games, there are plenty simple but excellently constructed pieces Sakuraba doesn't do often enough even outside Tales ("Oracel - Sorrow" and "Shurrey Hills" specifically). I really liked that the gamespot review called the game's music better than its graphics since I tend to agree. =P

Gaddamn!  Tha's A LOT of tracks in just one day.  Going at that rate, it's no wonder he's has been spitting out soundtracks left and right for the past few years.

From a battle theme perspective, "Everlasting Fight", "The Arrow Was Shot", "Awkward Justice" and especially "Fang Which Wants Blood" are some of my all time favorites from him. And "Crisis" is a sweet reference to the old music with Bloodbain (VP1). I think this might be his strongest work this year...Though, Tamura really didn't seem up for the project. Most of the tracks I tend to skip wind up being his.

No time for the game, unfortunately...I'm barely finding enough time for VP2.

Question: If I were to pick just one to play: Legendia or Abyss?

Oh, no context there. Abyss. Better story, better characters, better battle system. Better in general.

Though I haven't tried Legendia myself, it repeatedly gets SLAMMED by the majority of Tales fans. So I'm thinking Abyss is the way to go.

...INSANE.
No wonder...how on earth is it possible to come up with something inspiring under such "okay-we're-ready-for-all-of-your-music-RIGHT-NOW-hurry-hurry-hurry!" conditions?!?

But personally, Dat, do you feel that Sakuraba's relation with the tri-Folks, especially Goltanda, is a lot stronger than with Tales Studios?

(On a side note, I'm finally giving the PSF2 set from Tales of Rebirth a good listen. Quite pleasant, actually.)

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In North America: October 10th. If you want to try out Symphonia you better do it before Abyss as the latter beats the former in all regards except loading times and graphic post-filters (which you shouldn't care about). =P

Not necessarily, the main parts of traditional Tales games are just done by a rather small (and quite stable) core staff on a very tight budget and development schedule. Most main people which left at some point actually ended up at tri-Folks (nice word =P), but the exodus seems to have stopped with the formation of Tales Studio. I assume Sakuraba (being happy about sequels as he stated at several places) just never "left" that core staff. The big difference between Tales Studio and all the other developers Sakuraba composes for is that the latter are all completely independent (so the personal contacts help giving the music a higher priority) while the former completely relies on Namco's goodwill, where even though the Tales series is their biggest cash cow this generation nobody seemed to see an urge to increase the budget. (This may actually be changing as we speak, as the 12 tracks/40+ min arrangements Sakuraba is doing for the ToD PS2 pre-order DVD is hard to imagine as part of the above "greedy" scheme. There are also quite interesting changes in the management due to the Bandai Namco merger which may turn out being positive for Tales Studio as a developer, but I better stop somewhere...)

Ah, I gotcha. I was reading up about the Wolfteam splintering, and it sounded pretty contentious. I just wasn't sure how it all affected Sakuraba personally, and if there were loyalties involved. Of course, there are many who are quite loyal to HIM.

Aaaaand...I better stop hijacking the thread with all these Sakuraba queries now.

I've played this game some more (about 15 hours now) and it has REALLY gotten good. It definitely has the best story and characters out of all the Tales games (except Rebirth but we're not getting that one, so...).

I like the battle system but I wish the fields of fonon had undergone some tweaking. Because the fields are so unreliable, I mostly just ignore them. I haven't found many of the character customizing options to be very useful either.

I think Symphonia has a better character customization system.  You have EX gems and you can tailor a character's skills to be Physical or Magical base.

In Abyss, while you have some control using Capacity Cores, the AD skills seems unreliable.  AD skills seems to be related to the Enhancement rating, but without any idea how it works, a player will likely want to equip a core that raises Enhancement (Enhancement does not go up via leveling except as a Capacity Core level-up bonus)

I'm also a bit annoyed that there are a lot of doors, many of which are not openable.  Some doors beome accessible later, but it feels like they cut corners when they can't flesh out a castle or city.  Sidequests are also more tied to the story timeline than Symphonia.  Some sidequests can only be done between certain events in the story, so it's real easy to miss them the first time.  Symphonia had fewer of these.

And with just under 45 hours on the clock, TotA has been beaten! I skipped most of the side quests which gives you an idea of how big this game really is. It's certainly the longest Tales game I've played so far.

And what a story! And such great characters! This is the first RPG that has glued me to the television since Suikoden V. Now I'm depressed because I can't spend more time with the cast. How sad is that? I think this game has more voice acting than even Xenosaga III!

The final boss piece was awesome (and I'm pretty certain wasn't written by Sakuraba). The rest of the music was either extremely irritating (seriously, whose idea was it to use the same piece FOUR times but in slightly different arrangements?) or completely invisible. I suppose in that regard, it's at least a step above Legendia's invasive music.

Erm, Saga Frontier 2 anyone? Feldschlachts for all!

I think you may be right...The OST has 3 tracks credited right at the end to Motoo Fujiwara and all of them can pass for battle themes.

Well, in the case of SF2, Hamauzu at least varied his arrangements. In TotA, it is literally the same piece but with different instrumentation (and in one case, a faster tempo). In fact, I think Sakuraba did the same thing in ToS. Maybe it's a tradition.

The final battle piece is called "Finish the Promise" (according to the end-game sound test.
Handy, that...)

I didn't care for most of Sakuraba's music in this game (although Tamura did a big chunk) but his battle themes were as catchy as always. Part of me wonders  he can keep churning them out.

Yep, "Finish the Promise" be the one. Fujiwara had two others right before it on the OST ("Time to Raise the Cross" and "A Place in the Sun"). It is really good and is decidedly un-Sakuraba like...Almost reminds me of Hamauzu's "Decisive Battle" from FFX (at least the piano part...the rest is a tad too bombastic).

Edit: Shoot, thought I recognized the opening...EXACTLY the same as "Slasher Blue" from Atelier Iris 2.

I wonder the same as well...He's reaching the point of diminishing returns with me a little bit with them...I think I would've played the daylights out of "The Arrow Was Shot" a couple years ago, now it's like "Awesome...You pass the test. NEXT!" I think I'm going to make a Sakuraba battle music collection one of these days and see just how many I end up with.