Another "Tales of..." Namco game with Fujishima's design.
The gameplay starts off rather bad. As you level, you gain new AD skills. AD skills allow you to do certain things while in battle. Such as Free Run, backstep, item thrower and more. Item thrower is the skill that actually all of the "Tales of..." normally set at standard. It's where you can select yourself and use items on another character. Free run is what made this game too easy for me. By holding L2, you can run around 3D on the battle field. This game applies more new features, such as Capacity Cores, Fon Slot Chambers, and Fields of Fonon. The C.Core are stuff that improves certain stats for certain cores each time you level. The Fon Slot Chambers are slots that help your tech skills, like increase damage, effectiveness, or decrease TP usage and for certain skills, allow you to use skills on low level FoFs. FoF are field elements that you can use to combine with your skills and it creates a new skill of the element of the field. But the skill you create with the FoF can only be reused with the same FoF that you used with. On the map screen, I hated the way the map scroll is. It makes it really hard to see my surroundings, especially with the monsters appearing on the map. I think that's enough talk on gameplay, Lol.
So the graphic on this one has a dramatic improvement compared to his Symphonia one. Though a certain scene has very noticeable bad side. But after playing for over 100 hours, you get used to about 99% of it and end up liking it.
So the story has your hero, Luke, who is confined in his manor. He lives a royalty life and loves sword training with his Master Van. He is always bored and sword training is the only thing that excites him. His adventure outside begins when a Seventh Fonist, Tear, came in to kill Master Van, but crossed weapons with Luke and created a hyperonsance(however it's spelled) and is warped to another place far away from Luke's home. As they progress through, they encounter new members such as Luke's best friend, Guy, Jade, Anise and Natalia. They all try to help the Fon Master Ion form a peace treaty between two opposing nation. All trouble lands when the Six God-Generals ruin everything and captures Ion to open sealed doors, which lead to the Sephiroth Tree. The Sephiroth Tree contains the passage rings which holds all the lands in place and keep it from falling into the Qliphoth.
For your characters, Luke and Guy are your sword users. Guy has some skills that resembles Stahn's skills. Luke's skills are more of the new ones with a couple very familar ones. Tear is your magical healer and has mostly holy spells. Natalia is an archer, also a healer, but also comes with support skills that increases defense, attack and resistances. Jade is the elemental magic caster of Fire, Water, Wind and Earth. He also has some decent physical attacks and skills. Anise is mostly dark element spells, with also nice physical attacks and skills. Each character comes with at least 2 Hi-ougi/Mystic Artes. The second Hi-ougi are useable on your 2nd playthrough and meet certain requirements. Another thing I hated throughout the gameplay were the skits. There's way too many of them and no voice acting for it. It made me just skip through all of them without reading, 5 hours into the play. The Japanese version has the skits voiced so most of them are worth watching. The American version doesn't have it voiced, but instead, added a new Hi-ougi/Mystic Artes almost all characters. After all that editing, is there something missing again? I feel like there's some more missing that hasn't been explained.
Cleaned up