A look back at: Tales of Eternia

 

You know, perhaps it's just my overall familiarity with the JRPG genre that is causing me to start feeling senile towards many games I end up playing, or maybe I'm just trying my best to care but not finding it. But overall, Tales of Eternia didn't really do much in my opinion. It's thankfully not a BAD game, but it's just painfully average. I have quite a few pet peeves with the game overall. First and foremost, the title for the North American version is that of Tales of Destiny 2. This can EASILY be confused with the REAL Tales of Destiny 2, which would actually be the fourth game of the Tales franchise. Eternia, the real name of this game, has nothing to do with Tales of Destiny. That other sequel does.

Another pet peeve? The voice acting. It's HILARIOUSLY BAD. Like, wow. Farah's the kind of altruistic person with super messy hair so you'd expect her to be vibrant, yet her voice actor sounds boring. Reid's voice actor too, has barely any emotion for his somewhat wild personality. And then you have stupidly reused catchphrases like "You bet!", "No problem!", and my personal favorite "Yeah!" from Max, just, laugh out loud. You've got plenty of sidetracks in the game's plot that it is so easy to forget where you're actually supposed to go, especially after you get the Van Eltia. I spent way too much time sailing and doing sidequests involving Chat, Max, and other unimportant characters that I forgot what the plot was about very often.

But even when I remember what the game's plot is about, I remember not a lot in terms of overall excitement. All I know is: Meredy speaks a super weird Melnic's language and isn't understood for the first half of Disc 1, two worlds are about to collide (hello Star Ocean what are you doing in a Tales game), Keele's a scholar and kind of a jerk, the Inferian kingdom are the biggest douchebags in that entire world, Ras is a double agent, somehow Reid, Keele, and Farah destroyed their own town but it got rebuilt, and you can hop between worlds in a neat way. Oh yeah, and a nice little rebel movement to fight Balir except well it's his wife that does all the work. And of course, the ending is quite cookie-cutter, just barely saving the worlds from destruction even if it means the eternal separation. Well, it's better than Star Ocean 2's plot at least.

I even hear a lot of stuff was unfortunately cut from the North American release, including extra spells for Shizel during her final fight as well as a truckload of skits which would have made the game far more interesting plotwise. There's a lot of stupid references to previous games as well as Namco's other stuff, but somehow a lot of the stuff that would have mattered in the game was ultimately cut? Makes no sense. So overall, Tales of Destiny even beats this game, and I just don't know what I should do with regards to the rest of this franchise.