I’m a big fan of the Tales Of series, but I’ve basically played them in reverse release order. I started with whatever the most recent at the time was, then Arise came out and I played it, but other than that I’ve been buying and working through them exactly backward. It’s such a good series that I would not likely have appreciated decades ago, because the games are very story heavy and I used to skip story. I’ve been expecting the series to tank at some point, like most game series do when you move toward their origins, but it genuinely hasn’t. Cutscenes I couldn’t skip used to be a dealbreaker for me, no joke, but I love RPGs for the mechanics, so I played them anyway (I was a huge reader at the time, games just weren’t where I was getting my stories, books were). I’ve grown up since teenhood, surprisingly, and I like the story and interpersonal bullshit now. So these have been a BIG hit for me.

I’m nearly done with the ones in English, currently playing Tales of Symphonia, which has been on my to-do list since it came out 23 years ago (talk about patient!!!). I originally bought it for gamecube when that was a current system, but never actually played it, so totally missed growing up with the franchise. I don’t really want to find cable adapters to use gamecube with a modern tv, so I recently picked up tales of symphonia chronicles for ps3, which includes the second symphonia game, dawn of a new world, as well, so that’s how I’m playing it.

As I step back in time, they get progressively less enjoyable from a combat mechanic standpoint, because they get so much grindier. Not unexpected, of course, and some of the old ones also have absolutely ludicrous achievements that require playing through the same 100+ hour game dozens of times as that’s just sort of what people did when they only owned a handful of titles. That doesn’t work today, so much, because we have a LOT of games to choose from now.

The story is still great, the non-combat gameplay is roughly as good as newer titles. Needing some 35k geld for better gear for the next boss, because I’ve been moving as fast through this one as through newer titles in the series despite being balanced differently, is not great, because now I’m drastically underpowered and dying frequently (old-school progress-demolishing save-reload-type deaths). Fights that don’t usually kill my teammates reward 2-500 geld. And none of this even considers consumables, which I also definitely need in double-digit quantities, just gear. Oof. So grindy.

General complaints:

• Camera on the world map is hot garbage, I genuinely can’t see where I’m going most of the time. Because the terrain changes view angle. Near a hill, like almost everywhere is? Look directly at the ground!
• I’m using and even buying consumables at a rate I have not in decades. Holy shit is staying alive difficult! I could probably keep both healers in my party, that’s probably why there are two of them and not two of anything else, but then combat will likely drag. I’m going to try that for a bit and see, I’ll report back. - update - dual-wielding healers is useful, and shockingly doesn’t really slow combat by that much. We are doing so much better I don’t know why the “glass cannon” option is the default (especially since it’s all glass and very little cannon)
• It isn’t easy like modern games, and that’s ok, but it does make it VERY grindy.
• The reference materials (including the map and what passes for glossary, bestiary, and collection trackers) are part of your inventory which just feels weird when those things are always part of the headers now.
• Its very easy for forget how to access certain things, because they aren’t where modern gamers expect them to be, related to above point but also not. Most controller buttons don’t do anything for a very long time, either, so you get the feeling those buttons might access those menus, and they don’t. (it does technically use the full controller, based on the mapping I can see, but not for the first quarter of the game at least) This is a problem of applying modern standards to old games, but since you are all here in the future with me, it’s worth mentioning.
• Some of the voice lines are quite tinny, especially for Colette, and the handoff between text and spoken lines is quite jarring, but does highlight important scenes I guess. If they talk, it’s story-centric
• Pausing on the world map or in town is different than pausing during combat. Outside of combat, you need to bring up a menu to pause. In combat, start pauses for you. On the world map start changes your minimap settings. The lack of consostencynis difficult to acclimate to.

General raves:

• Graphics didn’t age, much at all., which makes it amazingly playable today (ps3 era had a lot of titles like that, but this is a ps1 era game and those are uncommon!) The art style feels as modern as modern titles, just with some kinda crap borders involving movement. But they did their best to fix that and the whole thing visually isn’t dissimilar to modern low-res/high-density-pixel-art titles.
• You can change the color of your menu windows with RGB sliders, and there are also three whole texture options. Yes, to me that is very worth it for a game I’ll spend 100-ish hours with. Is it worth it for a developer? Almost certainly not. But nobody lets me change my boring parchment-colored background to a fully custom shade of purple (r176,g112,b176 with a black marble texture). This game does, and it just feels nice to see a color that sooths my soul (and mood; I find it calming) on screen for long games. Even better, the windows have well done shaded borders that give them a pop without being a forced-3d perspective.
• Also a good story with a seemingly good localization. Can’t confirm localization cuz my japanese is rusty af, but it plays well and makes sense.
• Runs pretty smoothly, but is on ps3 instead of ps1 where it was designed to be so that might be related.
• For how it was made to be balanced, it works decently, even though I’ve outgrown the grindy games. For example, if you are running across the world map, you can only dodge so many enemies before one spawns that bee-lines for you at breakneck pace to guarantee a fight, but otherwise you can seemingly stand on the map forever and not enter random-encounter combat. Thats very annoying, yes absolutely, but it does help to keep you from going broke, which is a huge balance, honestly.
• Autobattle is an awesome compromise for the grindy problem tbh, and probably why they included it in the first place. I can’t imagine putting out a game and being like “hey look most of the people who might like our game probably won’t even play it if it’s so grindy, maybe give them an option to afk…? It’s a long game already.” And then being just hands-down totally right about the feature as future-proofing. Wild.
• The characters, and their interactions, are very cute and easy to care about. Nobody is perfect, they do a lot of growing as a group (per JRPG standards, ime) and it’s just very believable and relatable for the most part.

Im not sure if I count this as a pro or con, but it is something worth being aware of. Gear and buffs only give very small increases in stat numbers but they do make combat tangibly easier anyway. They should have started with smaller numbers or made the gear worth more of an increase, basically, and the scaling would feel more accurate. 2 points makes a tangible difference even when you start with like 35 or whatever. But regardless, you can feel your upgrades, which is always nice.

I’m not really that far in, based on playtime on the other titles in the series, probably about 1/4 through everything if it led the later gamed to those standards, but that’s still about 24 hours of play. But because I’m currently stuck, and don’t feel like being frustrated, I’m going to spend probably another 4-5 hours just grinding money for gear and consumables. Does all my gear need to be upgraded? Probably not, but I’m going to do it anyway because the better I am now the less I have to slow down again at the next speed bump. Especially since you can sometimes upgrade gear by one-ish level for the cost of materials. Also its not really effort to grind, just boring, I’m doing it passively as I write this.

Credit where due: the newer games don’t at all have the above problems, even though they kept the option to auto-fight, which will never not be nice in a game with semi-random encounters.

I think my complaints above apply in full through vespiria, to a leaser extent, and then mostly just go away with titles after that, because it took me a TON longer than I thought, working backward, to hit a point where I felt meh about the combat, and even then, the story keeps you compelled on the older titles. But if grinding isn’t for you, vesperia and those older might not be, either, and that’s ok because most of the franchise is after that. Start with Arise, it’s genuinely amazing, and work backward like I did, it’s a fine thing to do with this specific series. Stop where it feels too old for you. Thats an ok stopping point. You aren’t missing much that youtube can’t full you in on, but if you really get into the series, some of the lore videos are compelling enough to play it. Like this one by EruptionFang

(Lmk if you catch typos or anything, I have autocorrect disabled and am not typing this on a reliable physical keyboard, so while I have proofed this, I’ve probably missed a lot because I already know what I’m trying to say and my brain skips the little problems. Standard editing problem. So let me know!)