The "Tales" saga started over ten years ago, in 1995 with Tales of Phantasia for the SNES. Also the Tales series is the third most successful from Japan, only being beaten out by Final Fantasy, and Dragon Quest. Mainly the earlier games were Japan exclusives, as it was believed that it would never generate enough profit from the North American audience. A remake of the original game was then released on the PS1 in 1997 (for Japan), which allowed them to further tune the game, including more voice acting. A few more games had then been released on the PS1, enjoying success with their side scrolling battle system.

More recently in 2004 Tales of Symphonia was released on the Nintendo Gamecube. Having personally played the game, I can honestly say that it was fantastic, mainly for the fact that multiple people could battle at the same time. It allowed for up to four players to take control of various people, which made it an RPG that everyone could play. It had a fantastic storyline, which interweaved many aspects. It was such a hit, that it was further ported to the PS2 in Japan, but no release in North America on the PS2 has been planned. Does this game follow the same mean of the previous games? That is a very good question, and the answer is yes... but not as well.

The game starts off with Senel Coolidge, and he is a young expert in the skill of "Iron Eres". You start off drifting in the ocean on a small boat, currently lacking a working engine, with a younger sister named Shirley. Shirley is quite the unusual girl, and finds the sea air poisonous, and she needs clean water to survive. Being drawn out onto the deck with a growing concern for her brother, they are immediately attacked by a large worm creature. This huge worm creature catered multiple mouths filing down its body, and emitted a scream that sounds like a goat. This creature attacks them, and after dispatching the creature a giant ship runs over their boat, sending them into the ocean. Senel wakes up on a beach, and finds his sister passed out. A person passing by comes to their aid named Will, who then assists in directing Senel to a pond of water to submerge her.

The game has a rehashed storyline, which follows Shirley, whom is a Radiant (a person of the water) that is destined to bring about a change for all the people of the water. However, because of an attack on her village three years prior to the beginning of the game, she is on the run from an empire bent on talking over the world. Senel, the hero of the game, considers Shirley to be his sister, and likewise Shirley does the same for Senel, but in actuality they are not from the same blood, nor race. Shirley’s main purpose in the game seems to be about being the bait of various people, kidnapping her, which then allows Senel to go and rescue her.

I have several issues with Tales of Legendia. Firstly and foremost are the camera angles that you can play the game in. On the world map you have free rotation of the map, even a different styled compass that uses degrees like the o’clock. 12 o’clock appears to be north and 3 o’clock seems to be east. In the world map though not everything looks terribly pretty, but on the same cord nothing looks horrible. It looks mainly mediocre, but there are a few nice touches from place to place, enough to keep you wanting to explore the world, for each and every place.

In the cities and other areas it is an entirely different story. There are a lot of nice things to look at, but there is a huge limitation on the camera angles. In fact you can only look through a single perspective, looking down from above. Indeed this allows for them to play cleaver tricks on where to hide treasure chests, but overall it does remove some of the fun from the game, especially when they include invisible walls. The buildings do look nice, and there are nice touches like when you walk past a body of water, you will see a reflection of what is near the shoreline, which may include yourself.

I also have a love/hate relationship with the battle style. In Tales of Symphonia you had a good range for battle, being able to shuffled upwards, downwards, and side to side, but in this game they have removed the upwards and downwards. Now you are on the X-axis only, which may make it easier for you to tag your enemies with attacks, but it also makes it easier for them to do the same to you. This appears to have reduced the strategy required in battling your opponents, as now it is much more difficult to sneak in your shots. Something that the game lacked was the multi-player aspect seen in Tales Of Symphonia.

In this battle style as well, you may have issues when you are trying to hit an enemy after you have dizzied them by knocking them down on the ground. In the early part, there is no way to continue the ground and pound, so techniques were introduced to resolve this issue. This would be in the style of your magic attacks for the game, which was also seen in Tales of Symphonia. Rather than allowing you to jump on top of them and deliver a patch of vicious strikes, you can send them back into the air. Honestly I would have preferred to attack them either way, and as such I felt very limited when I did not want to use the techniques.

Back outside of the battle, the character models are very interactive with each other, and in some scenes they will physically grab hold of one another and can even drag them around. In one case a person was thrown over the side of a cliff, which was a very nice and unexpected touch. On the poor side though, the characters do not appear to be very detailed, and even turn up to be fairly blocky, which shows off the average trend in Japanese RPG games. It’s a different style, it’s not the worst out there, but there does not appear to be a sense of emotion in them.

One thing I can praise in the game is the cinematics, as each of the anime scenes between the major events are fantastic, and fun to watch. These really draw you in, much more the conversations that happen outside of them, so it would have been nice to seen even more of them, but sadly that was not the case. I could even see them making a television show on them, if they really wanted to, or at least a movie, but I can only wish for something like that.