Help with the "Tales of" Series

This is a series that I've never really gotten into, but I've tried a couple of times (with Tales of Symphonia and now Tales of the Abyss). I really like the world and characters, but a lot of the mechanics and gameplay just don't really flow for me, and it makes it hard to keep playing.

I'll use Tales of the Abyss for starters, since that's what I'm working on now. I just got the Fields of Fonons tutorial. And, frankly, my opinion of them is pretty much the same as Luke's: They're cool, but useless. Since I can't control my party members, and Luke can't use Fonons, I have no reliable way to set them up, and am counting entirely on the AI to do it for me. And since the game features fast moving combat on a 3D field, the chances of the AI placing fields where they'll stack and activate is pretty much non-existent. So how am I supposed to use and manipulate these? Combat for me is still just pretty much spamming Luke's sword attacks, with no real thought and very little strategy, and I can't see a way to change this.

I'm also finding the entire Cooking system to be a chaotic mess. How do I find recipes, how do I learn which character likes which foods the best, etcetera. It may add a little depth to the role playing, but it's a pain in the butt for actually figuring out and learning the systems.

So, yeah, if anyone could give kind of a starter's guide or overview for actually taking advantage of the gameplay systems available, I'd appreciate it.

Luke will get many skills later that it will get much easier to manipulate. Plus he will have skills that will change based on being inside different elemental circles so you can chain a lot of awesome stuff. Its really a mechanic that is worthless early on but almost constabt later on.

Cooking was always a wasted mechanic for me that I never bothered much with except for extra little healings after battle. I never gave it much thought.

THE JACKEL

I have only played tales of symphonia/phantasia/vesperia. While you can only use one character at a time, you can tell the other characters what to do via gambits if you want. The joy I find with the series is the battles. The more skills you get, the more you can experiment and find a broken combo that wins the game.

Cooking isn't something that I ever really did.

I played Tales of Destiny and rather liked it. ^_^

I love the "Tales of" series, though I wish I had a 360 so I could play Tales of Vesperia. My favorite parts were always the skits that goes on between the characters. The battle system wasn't so bad as well. It was much better in Tales of the Abyss than it was for Tales of Symphonia because of free run. It takes awhile to get used to though, but for me it seems to be mostly button mashing. :p

Like has already been mentioned, the Fonon Fields become more useful later on and are kinda worthless in the begining. And cooking, while kinda fun in all of the Tales of games, is only an actually important feature in Tales of Graces (cooking in that game is very useful in fact).

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Originally Posted by Agent Proto

I love the "Tales of" series, though I wish I had a 360 so I could play Tales of Vesperia.

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Vesperia is one of the best (if you ask me anyway). Yuri Lowell is possibly my favourite RPG MC of all time. And Rita is just as awesome a mage as Jade (but even better in battles).