Tales of the Abyss review
The 3D effect works well during battles, with a lot of flashy effects that are still fairly easy on the eyes. Given that fights are all about characters’ positions on the battlefield, the 3D effect actually makes it a lot easier to judge depth. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the rest of the game, since almost every scene suffers from a lousy 3D conversion. Tales of the Abyss was never designed to be in 3D and it shows; parts of the background jump to the foreground for no good reason, speech bubbles are pushed miles in front of characters’ faces, and anything not right at the front of the screen becomes a mess of pixels. I suppose this port deserves some credit for looking very similar to the PS2 version even with a lower resolution, but it’s still an ugly game even without the 3D turned up. Rather than the striking cel-shaded look of Tales of Symphonia or Vesperia, Abyss’s graphics blur together in a mess of bland textures and that doesn’t look particularly appealing, nor does it work well with the 3D effect. It becomes even worse later in the game when almost every location takes on a much darker tone, to the point where I often had to focus really hard to make out what was even going on. That said, there are a few areas in the game that look really nice and even make fairly good use of the 3D effect. One location inside a volcano stood out to me, with bursts of magma and a dragon breathing fireballs toward the screen that looked amazing in 3D. It’s just a shame that most of the locations feel too derivative of other games in the series (though the same can’t be said of K?suke Fujishima’s flamboyant and often downright androgynous character designs).
Yes ladies, those are visible abs
The game’s voice acting is generally pretty good, at least for the major characters. The voices for minor NPCs are understandably weaker, but at the very least they fit with the melodramatic dialogue. The real problem with voice acting in Tales of the Abyss is the fact that there are sections that really should have voiced dialogue but don’t. One of the defining elements of the Tales series are “skits” —optional segments where the characters (depicted as talking heads) share their thoughts on the current situation as a nice aside to the actual plot. They work well to further explore the characters, but the fact that they’re all accompanied by dead silence (the Japanese version had full voice acting) makes them feel like they drag on for far too long. To be fair, the PS2 version also lacked any English voice acting, but would it have really been that difficult to add the ability to scroll text faster? There are almost 500 skits, and reading them all becomes a pain, even when some are necessary to figure out what on earth is going on with the plot. In typical Tales fashion, Motoi Sakuraba composed most of the music in Tales of the Abyss. While I thought some of the dungeon themes were really great, the majority of the game’s music sounds awfully bland and derivative. Rather than Sakuraba’s contributions, the highlight of the soundtrack is the opening theme by the fantastically named band, Bump of Chicken, which has numerous arrangements that play throughout the game.
The soundtrack isn’t the only thing that should be familiar if you’ve played any other Tales game, as plenty of other features from previous games return like cooking, puzzles solved by using the Sorcerer’s Ring, and a grade store that rewards players with New Game+ content. Unfortunately, the game is also filled with antiquated series traditions like lengthy, unskippable cutscenes before tough boss fights and fetch quests that require going back and forth across the world map in the slowest airship ever made. Moving the game to the 3DS doesn’t really add to the original North American version. You can add shortcuts to the touch screen to give commands to your allies, but the often brain-dead AI rarely takes orders anyway, so it isn’t really worth the effort. In fact, the touch screen is barely used at all – not even for navigating menus. And while it does fix the long loading times that plagued the PS2 version of the game, the 3DS version still suffers from occasional slowdown – particularly while roaming the world map.
Skits are a great idea, but the execution is horrible
Tales of the Abyss is a decent enough game, but this 3DS version is a lazy port. It could’ve been a must-play RPG but instead it suffers from poor implementation of the 3D effect and a stubborn refusal to take advantage of many of the console’s features or even update the game in any way. Still, if you missed the original the first time around (or just happen to live in Europe), it’s worth checking out. Though the plot is weak and filled with obtuse terminology, the characters are genuinely interesting and the battle system that ties the whole game together is one of the Tales series’ best. At the end of the day, at least it’s better than the Game Boy Advance version of Tales of Phantasia
Final Score: 6/10
