Tales Series

Kongwai sounds like a bro already. Although I don't see how Ange could not pull off the better Natalia since her blue hair fits better.

Well, Innocence's graphics are...kinda terrible. Compare this◊ to this.◊ Cheria is just gorgeous in it, while Ange's blockiness just looks weird.

First link has a hotlink block. :/

Also played some Xillia 1 on Sunday. Ran into that crazy Presa bitch for the first time who..kinda groped Milla a bit looking for something. Kinda funny watching her phase through cloth trying to grope about Milla when the latter's cosplaying Dhaos and makes you wonder if Presa would get away with groping the real Dhaos. Then Alvin disturbs a camouflaged bug monster thing and chases her off and we ice the rock bug monster.

Alvin also wants to jump Jude's "Lance of Kresnik" by the way he hugs him which gets even funnier when Alvin's in his Kratos outfit.

I need the other cameo outfits.

Getting a "no hotlinking" message for the first one. ninja'd

Oh damn I was rusted, hadn't played in nearly a week. I guess it was a good thing I didn't know where to go for a little while so I got to practice on harmless enemies.

Also met Sheena (yay) and wow did she get straight to the point. I already like her, had a feeling she'd be an enemy at first though. Just wonder if choices affect her joining the party or not.

edited 1st Oct '14 1:50:30 PM by Niitris

Some people are really touchy feely like that, and given Alvin's persona, him trying to be the super friendly guy isn't surprising. Granted, I'm not a fan of people who walk up, pound the ever loving shit out of your shoulders when you're trying to have a drink, so there's that.

She joins regardless, some choices just affect when she will.

Played TOS 2 and put on Japanese voices for a laugh. Holy shit JP Tenebrae is ASB Hol Horse.

I guess. He's not too bad so far but his scarf just looks plain stupid so I put him in his Kratos outfit til further notice. Even belts like that don't stick out as badly as that frilly black piece of tatty crap.

edited 1st Oct '14 2:44:40 PM by MightyKombat

Confession: I had Alvin in his swimsuit for, like, the whole game.

I'm not sorry.

Better than having an exceedingly fey scarf hanging off your neck. I'm glad X2 Alvin dumped it for a fairly decent yellow tie.

I don't know, Alvins getup in Xillia 2 was...well. Weird. My friend swears up and down that Ludger would look a thousand times better if he lost "that daft tie", so I'll take her word for it.

edited 1st Oct '14 3:41:20 PM by SkormSnow-Strider

I dunno I honestly prefer Alvin's yellow tie to his old black scarf. And Ludger's tie looks just fine to me.

Straight outta Black Mesa.

You can just copy paste my link in the address bar to get past the hotlinking. >.>

Xillia 2 was teeeerrible at the outfit department. There was so little variety in everything! Everyone had the same tie-suit dressup except for Jude's labcoat and Milla and Muzet. The only person whose appearance was actually an improvement over the first game was Milla and that classy outfit. And Jude's hair. Everyone else was bleeeeeeeeeeeeeh. Ludger is the number one most boring Tales protagonist in both appearance and personality.

Btw, here's a treat for Colette fans!

Currently in Ashihara tombs. Still haven't met QQ.

Oh yeah and I met Ivar in Xillia 1. He's an annoying little tosser. Meh.

TOS 2 is eh and TOS 1 is still going alright although I gotta clear out the Book of Underworld next.

I remember a Xillia 1 skit where the party ponders how the monster drops system works. They chalk it up to monsters having to hand them off something for losing the battle. What would happen if they lost, though? Alvin says the monsters can keep Teepo. Teepo says they can keep Alvin's scarf, and he is like NO ONE TOUCHES MY SCARF.

If you have played Vesperia Ivar's fight style will ring a bell. He took it from Zagi! Which I fought again at the end of the Heracles mobile fortress. I HATE that place. Annoying enemies, narrow passages where you can seldom avoid such enemies and lots of floors designed to confuse you and waste time by fighting more enemies... have I mentioned annoying enemies?

My partner came to my help, and that is to be thankful for. (Friend: This has to be the second easiest Zagi Secret Mission since 'Don't let him touch Estelle'.) Yeah, everyone should suffer through the Heracles, or you can't say you have TRULY beat Vesperia... it is like a mini Dycroft.

The Blade Drifts of Zopheir! This icy dungeon has tough enemies, but at least you can avoid them via Sorcerer Ring. Whew. Raven rejoined at the start of the Heracles, and while he is NOT easily forgiven (Kombat will like this: all the others take turns in punching him) I am glad he is back with his Love Shot spammage. Karol had his Crowning Moment Of Awesome and got a new sword... the Secret Mission was achieved by Patty landing a big fire spell on Baitojoh's stinger.

edited 3rd Oct '14 1:04:35 AM by FlightMaster

So I'm reading up on Phantasia, I'll probably watch the animation over the weekend. Not that it replaces the game of course but how faithful is it to the actual game?

The Phantasia OVAs has the bare minimum and not much else. It's still good, but it's far from the best.

It makes Dhaos more sympathetic, I think. In the games, his motivations are like a big twist

How do you even pronounce Dhaos, anway? Is it pronounced like "douse," or do you say it like "chaos?"

You pronounce it like Douse I think.

So I'm jumping into the Tales series with Tales of the Abyss for 3DS. Any tips for the newb?

You know, I've been back and forth on whether Dhaos being made to be more sympathetic in the OVA (by making the humans more dumb by building weapons they don't even seem to need at all) was a good thing or bad thing, but then it hit me that since this OVA would have been made after the games, it's makes sense.

The twist is already revealed for most people, so there's no need to keep it under wraps; instead, they can give a bit more depth to his actions, though I do wonder if they had to make the humans bigger jerks in the process.

edited 3rd Oct '14 8:41:10 AM by HandsomeRob

Dhaos is pronounced as you see it. That "a" is an alpha, and the "o" is an omikron.

The OVA didn't make him sympathetic out of nowhere. His motives had already been retconned into sympathy with the 1999 novel and the original Narikiri Dungeon.

Get a sidequest guide and follow it to the letter. The game is terrible about missables.

Nowadays we kinda know Dhaos isn't a bad guy and was downright lovely way back when before things happened that steered him into becoming a laser spewing eco terrorist space hippie. It kinda woulda helped if it was made a bit more obvious sooner in the SNES version though, and if the side materials weren't fairly slow trickling down the line. He still can't hold a candle to motherfucking Van Grants though, he was the best written Tales baddie.

Also yeah Dhaos is pronounced like "douse", that's how Patrick Seitz says it in Vesperia. It also lends itself to a funny skit in the PSX version of Phantasia where Cless and/or Chester say something like

"I will douse Dhaos!" (one translation) "I will definitely repeat Dhaos! Dhaos." (another)

Mainly because the Japanese word for defeat ("taosu") and Dhaos' name are pronounced similar. Its a pun.

So...I'm not sure if this is old news or not but I've been looking at Talesof Zestiria trailers and I realized something.

I've always been able to forgive the Tales Of games for some lack luster animation. Because the scene's never really focused closely on the character models much. But now everything seems like its really up close, and it looks like something from MMD.

Maybe I'm wrong, and the animation in Zestria just isn't that great but I'm not sure.

edited 3rd Oct '14 9:16:22 AM by Azure

I swear I saw a GIF on Tumblr of Sorry or whatever his name is now pushing someone and running off, it looked pretty funny.

Between the fact that there was so little information on Dhaos to begin with and everything we heard about him mostly comes from those who suffered by his hand, I really couldn't call that a retcon. Now something like Dhaos not intending for Demital to go nuts and kill the Scarlets is another story.

Anyone that up and decides to turn to a demon army regardless of the circumstance probably isn't what I would call a lovely person. Nicer chap then what the games would have you believe, but there ya go. Granted, side material seems to indicate he doesn't have complete control over his mooks anyway.