Tales of the Abyss

Originally written: October 14th, 2008

This analysis of Tales of the Abyss essentially started a series of rants/analysis for me. It wasn't intended to be read in a blog format, but it did launch my current views on game design, so I've decided to include it for archive's sake.

First off: the dialogue. So much of it is pointless repetition (especially during the skits), with terrible prose and believability. The cutscenes are dull and boring to watch. At least with Final Fantasy X or Shadow Hearts: Covenant the camera is an active participant in the cutscenes, zooming in on people when they're talking or changing to show action, but in Abyss the camera is completely static in the cutscene and it amounts to nothing more than talking heads.

Not to mention many of the the characters are just plain dull. Luke is the personification of everything that is wrong with RPG leads; he's a dick, emo, whiny, and stupid. The characters often don't know how to react to certain events, and their actions don't even make sense. Woah, Guy saw Sync's face and acts really surprised...wait, why the hell are you keeping what you saw a secret from us? So we can all be surprised later on? That makes no sense from a believability standpoint. It's not like it's personal or anything. Even so, none of the characters press him for it, which irritates me even more. Also, I never quite understood why Asch was eternally pissed off. Yeah, Luke "stole" his life from him and his anger's fine for a little while, but after a point it's like "Dude, just shut up and stop yelling all the time."

Not to mention that many scenes in the game just serve to make the game longer for no reason. I recall the characters walking out of some building and see somebody running off. Rather than chasing after the guy and confronting him right away, they're content to just stand there and discuss the fact that he ran off, speculated on who he could have been, and who should go after him. If they had just ran after the guy instead of spending all this time talking about it they would have already captured him! This kind of blatant disregard for prose irritated me for most of the game.

Now, I'll admit that not all of the story was bad. There are lines in the game that are genuinely funny, and the parts of the five God-Generals (Asch not included) were well written. Also, for the first 15 hours or so, I didn't have much of a problem with the story. It was typical RPG fare, sure, but the story moved briskly and tried to keep things fresh. However, once Luke sheds his long hair and it seems like the game is approaching its finale, everything just stops. Suddenly the game pulls all these punches to make you drag through as much pointless dialogue as possible just so they can put "40+ Hours of gameplay!" on the back of the box. The part following the fake ending was especially grating, as it was three solid hours doing nothing but going from city to city watching cutscenes. No fighting, no puzzle solving, just mountains of exposition. It was hell.

That said, the actual battle system of the game was decent enough to not detract from the game. A bit of a button masher, but it was still fun, and boss battles required a decent amount of maintenance for your party members, and while none of the fights in the game seemed overly difficult, I'd say it was a success. As for the puzzle solving and exploration outside of the fights, I give a "meh". Nothing spectacularly fun, but on the other hand, it wasn't painfully dull. Standard RPG fare, I see nothing wrong with it.

So the gameplay is the important part of a game, right? So if I thought the gameplay was good and the story was bad, why do I hold it in such low regard? The main problem was the the gameplay is -not- the crux of the game. One of my favorite game series ever, Fire Emblem, suffers from the "talking heads" style of cutscenes that I really wish they would grow out of. However, I don't despise the game for a few reasons. For one, the story moves at a brisk pace, so even if the cutscenes are dull they don't last long, and even better, I don't have to read them; I can skip them if I wish. And more importantly, the battle system is far deeper than TotA's. While I liked playing TotA's battle system, it really wasn't very rewarding. I never bothered to learn how to chain those element circles or whatever, and some of the stuff I did in the menus didn't seem to have much effect, but I still managed to beat the game just fine, so what was the point of it all?

Ultimately, what killed TotA for me was pacing. The game gets off to a great start, but ultimately slows to a crawl, to the point where I was begging the game to shut up with all its exposition just so I could go kill stuff again. I recently replayed Golden Sun, and I admit, it was rather bland compared to how I remembered it the first time I played it. The story wasn't all that interesting, and the battle system was meh, but I still enjoyed it. Why? Well for one thing, the story didn't dominate the game. Some talking about what's going on, a couple of tips on where the party needs to be going, and that's that; you get to go onto the next dungeon to fight and solve puzzles. Ultimately, there wasn't anything really wrong with TotA's gameplay. However, the insufferable story that refuses to give control back to the player and drags on and on just to say it's a long game for the sake of a long game is a terrible, terrible idea. I'm all for getting the most of your money, but as Shadow Hearts taught us, a 20-hour long RPG with a quick pace and good direction is a much better use of your money than a 40-hour long borefest. Hell, Shadow Hearts has some of the traits I mentioned; static camera, poor voice acting, etc. But the characters were believable (as quirky as they were) and interesting, and more importantly, likeable. TotA's storytelling is its greatest flaw, and had they cut out a third of the dialogue in the game it could have been vastly improved.