Tales Series

I agree that Tear, Jade and Anise were unpleasant during the first act, but I still found them easier to tolerate than Luke. I also don't think Natalia deseves to be lumped in with them when she was only annoying for 10 minutes.

I'm just saying, Luke's an asshole to all of them except Guy, but the moment Ion's in danger he pulls his sword out and charges into like six heavily armed dudes so he can save him.

Maybe if they stopped openly insulting Luke for things that are only tangentially his fault he'd have warmed up to them faster.

Edited by Mr.Badguy on Sep 14th 2018 at 5:56:20 AM

@Mr. Badguy: I'll do a quick TL:DR of the points because they did get a bit rambly. Luke was left without supervision as everyone else worked and that gave Van the opportunity to drag him off to nuke Akzeriuth, and while it's understandable for Luke to trust Van, he did so in spite of actively knowing many people distrusted him, so him not telling anyone partially puts him at fault.

Justifications for Luke being an asshole don't make him not an asshole, they just provide context both for why he's a cunt and where his few nicer traits come from, as well as why he's so easily manipulated by Van.

The party point you bring up so I'll get to that a bit later. Tear is rude to Luke and has little patience with him to start, but is still at least helpful and willing to teach him when she realizes his ignorance and his arrogance are not connected. Guy is nice enough but has some baggage that takes effect later.

Jade's issues with explaining things comes from his (for lack of a better term at the moment) sociopathy and is his primary flaw throughout the game. His jokes are primarily teasing, but he definitely gets short with Luke because he isn't good at empathizing with Luke's situation, and only after Luke develops and takes charge does Jade begin to develop and change through Luke's influence, which is when Jade begins to learn to empathize with people.

Natalia's honestly pretty nice outside of the Old Factory dungeon where she's basically Luke-Lite until she gets called out and she begins to show off her more noble traits.

Anise's arc is essentially a followup of Luke's wherein we see what would have happened had the party been developed prior to Akzeriuth; greater support and forgiveness for the machinations of other people toward someone who was ultimately being manipulated, and this all from Luke's development being the catalyst of everyone elses growth in some way.

Hopefully this makes them less rambling.

Onto your new points, basically, Luke was at fault (Akzeriuth wouldn't have fallen without him) but not to blame (Van was the mastermind) meaning Luke shares a portion of the culpability but it's understandable why he did it and why he's clearly not the one to go after. What sets everyone off (prior they're just confused about what happened and upset Luke didn't bring anything up with them) was Luke pinning the blame on the one man he refused to blame for anything prior to get the heat off himself.

Ignoring that I found them plenty likable so I can't fully understand your Unlikability point, the complexity comes from the mixture of their allied nature (they all want to stop a war) with their own vices limiting them, and only after they all fail along the way does Luke eventually destroy Akzeriuth and the party tries to move on to deal with Van. The party with Asch doesn't work out because Asch is just a more competent version of douche Luke and the party didn't work with douche Luke, so only after Luke changes can the party properly affect change on the world because his influence ultimately benefits them all. Jade learns empathy from him and even while teasing becomes far more amicable to the group, Tear helps guide him and becomes less guarded through seeing Luke be more open, Guy is able to work past his grudge and find new purpose unrelated to his work with Van and his vengeance, Natalia receives support in her role as princess and in dealing with her own origins, and Anise receives forgiveness for her failure and the emotional support to pull herself together.

As for openly insulting him, he's generally the person who picks the fight or does some dumb shit that causes problems. They're hardly terribly sensitive to him, and they do shit talk (even Guy isn't above it all the time), but he's usually the instigator in party conflicts, especially during the ambassador segment.

EDIT: I feel I should specify that I really liked the writing of the game precisely because everyone was so flawed, including Luke, and that Luke is one of my favorite characters in gaming in general for the huge amount of development he went through and the more subtle ways it changed everyone else in the party. My points aren't that Luke is badly written for the first act parts, but that he's a very well written asshole that nevertheless has some good traits who plays well off the rest of the party, all of whom save maybe Natalia and Guy are kinda douchebags in their own way to begin with.

Also that got long again... I really like writing about the game, so sorry if it's a bit of a trudge to read through.

Edited by Alfric on Sep 14th 2018 at 3:07:36 AM

So when I said that the game justifies Luke's behaviour I don't mean we're supposed to accept it, I mean that every time he does something wrong, be it his ignorance of the world and even the concept of currency or his trust in Van, the game explicitly points out why he is the way he is, ultimately culminating in the reveal that he's a blank slate forced to become someone else who's ten years older than him. To be perfectly clear on how I think of this, it does too good a job at explaining and justifying Luke's behaviour to the point that, coupled with the at best difficult people he's surrounded with, I can't fault him for much.

When Luke blames Van for what happened I know I'm supposed to think "god Luke is such an asshole for passing the buck" but I don't because the game's spent so much time contextualizing his worse behaviours that I bloody well can't blame him for it, let alone for the in-universe fact that Jade is right there and could explain everything but he's still right there shitting on Luke.

And, to be frank, I thought it was an extremely cheap move from the writers to have Van show up and press the reset button on Luke's growth. It robbed him of a proper character arc, instead forcing him to decide to be a better person and then just kind of automatically doing so. Yeah he yells at Mieu a few times. Like I care. Mieu fucking sucks.

Edited by Mr.Badguy on Sep 14th 2018 at 6:31:21 AM

That's what I meant though. We're given context on why Luke is the way he is, but that doesn't excuse it, only explain it. Knowing why he is the way he is doesn't mean what he's doing is okay, but it allows us to simultaneously agree with Luke getting told off for being a jerk and understand that he ultimately isn't just a one note jackass, that he's capable of growing.

As for Akzeriuth, I dunno that we're supposed to think Luke's entirely an asshole, since as the viewers we have complete context on his interactions with Van and the grooming that was done to him. No one in the party does, so they see someone who turns on the one person he absolutely refused to turn on no matter the suspicion to try to take the heat off himself. Jade may know he's mentally seven, but we've already mentioned he's bad with empathy and doesn't know about Luke grooming Van, while Guy might have known about the grooming but definitely doesn't know about the hyperresonance or Luke's replica nature.

I don't think it was cheap to have Van hit the reset button on his development because Luke was already drawing near to how he ends up being post Akzeriuth prior to Van's interruption. Van interfered because it made sure his plan would work. He didn't expect Luke to survive Akzeriuth, so his plans likely never extended further so he only needed Luke to work for a little bit longer.

It's cheap to me in the sense that instead of continuing Luke's gradual shift from entitled, spoiled jackass to someone more noble, he just kind of stops being all those thing and turns into a nice guy. It basically renders all the subtle growth and change, everything I liked about Luke in the first act, completely meaningless because it jumps straight to the opposite extreme, a Luke who's nothing but positive qualities except for his own self loathing.

As for the game's defending of Luke's character, it does really just too good a job at doing so. I never felt like Luke was going overboard with, well, any of his party members because they're all a pack of disfunctional jackasses at first. Like, he never fires off on Guy despite him being his servant, because he loves and admires Guy, and that's not even getting into the fact that he is, in comparison to how he acts with the other characters, a total bro to Ion. When the game eventually explains that he is a literal child forced to act over twice his age I just don't have any resentment for him left in me, and it's clear that I'm supposed to resent Luke in the first act to some degree.

Edited by Mr.Badguy on Sep 14th 2018 at 6:43:56 AM

But that's just it, we already see him making the shift, and the factor that stopped him was the one thing really holding him back, Van. Once he inadvertantly breaks free from Van and faces his mistakes, he jumps back up to where he was heading to, that of a more noble person. He has new issues to deal with due to his struggling with his identity, self-loathing, and working against his past flaws, but in doing so he regain everyone's trust in the short term and begins the process of self-actualization and helping everyone else grow in the long term. The shock of Akzeriuth just pushed him from struggling with the last vestiges of his arrogance that kept him pushing people away to now struggling with the new problems that his nature as a Replica brings about.

We only learn he's a child forced to act over twice his age by the end of the first act though. We have the context of his amnesia up to that point, which definitely does a solid job of making his flaws understandable, but I felt it still made it clear he was a dick overall. He's close with Guy, but he's not above making fun of him and bossing him around (Guy even jokes at one point that this is one of the nicer things about Luke; he's equally bossy to those above and below him socially). As for Ion, he's definitely got a soft spot for him early, but he's a complete shitheel to him about his weakness during the Ambassador segment which doesn't help the party's patience with him. He's mostly Tsundere for Ion, where his bitchiness comes out but he's still clearly cares for him.

Edited by Alfric on Sep 14th 2018 at 3:52:14 AM

But the problem I have with post-Akzeriuth Luke is that he doesn't organically follow up on who he was in the first act. The game justifies why he's dropped his ego, but it doesn't naturally lead from the entitled jackass with a hidden heart of gold to someone who bounces around committing good deeds wherever he goes.

Long Haired Luke was subtly built up into someone I could cringe and root for in equal aplomb. Short Hair Luke, while on paper totally makes sense as a character because Luke is trying his ample best to be a good person while dealing with crippling self loathing, doesn't follow up his prior self in a rewarding way. He just drops all of his negative character traits and replaces them with hating himself.

As for your edited in paragraph I disagree wholeheartedly. When Tear chews him out again over his ignorance Luke just bluntly stating that he couldn't even remember his parents' faces is enough for me to view the depths of how deep his amnesia runs, and moreover how much it bothers him. That one sentence contextualized almost all of Luke's foibles to me.

Edited by Mr.Badguy on Sep 14th 2018 at 6:58:47 AM

I feel it does though; at the end of the first half of the first act, prior to Van setting Luke up for Akzeriuth, he's becoming less entitled of a jackass and more friendly with everyone, even if he's still decently haughty. After the massive shock of Akzeriuth, Luke realizes that the traits that pushed everyone away were also partially why he was so easily manipulated by Van, and after seeing Asch exemplify all of those awful traits of his even further, the identity shock leads to his enormous step forward on his prior growth.

I understand how it connects on paper, I just feel like, if instead of getting brute forced into committing an atrocity, Luke got the chance to subtly alter his behaviour over the course of the game, it'd make for a better written character arc.

I mean, I can agree with you that it was a sudden shift, but I felt it was organic enough given the context of Van and the rest of the overarching plot. I felt the shock was a solid reason for the more sudden shift in his character, and it still felt like it incorporated parts of his prior development so while the shift was very dramatic, I felt it was good in terms of context and in terms of feeling like a direction of his character from his prior growth.

I will say that I agree the character arc Luke was on was a strong one, but I felt the dramatic shift worked when taking the rest of the story context of Van and his machinations into account.

Edited by Alfric on Sep 14th 2018 at 4:40:36 AM

Well, yeah. He blew up a city and the people who were the closest thing to friends in his whole life abandoned him because they now hated him, and he had to live with the revelation that it's because of what he did, and who he was. Add to that Asch revealing he's just a replica, and he undergoes a massive identity crisis that takes a lot of time for him to recover from.

You'd hate yourself too if you had an ounce of decency in you, which Luke did. I kinda look at it like a tragedy. Luke could have changed on his own and maybe not end up hating himself to such extremes. Van kinda took that from him, and from that point on, even if he didn't start slowly but surely dying, he can't really look at himself the same way again.

Id hardly call Asch a competent Douche Luke considering how he tends to dick about and was all for said atrocity in the first place. He only started whining when he found out Vans plan was to replace everyone with Replicas. I'd easily call him a Genocidal Douche Luke who decided to not Genocide because of his Fantastic Racism for Replicas reeeeeeeee!

Tear is also not a person to use as an example of any real good teaching early on. She outright doesn't teach Luke the value of money just to see him get in trouble when he takes something because he has no idea about buying. Any lessons she ends up teaching early on tend to be a side effect of letting Luke get hurt just to smugly teach him about said thing.

Edited by OmegaRadiance on Sep 14th 2018 at 5:47:40 AM

All of this hatred of Abyss and its characters is making me sad. Especially Tear.

It's hard to go any farther than "Abyss is my favorite Tales game" but I think "Luke/Tear is one of my favorite romances period" probably tops it.

I have no problem with it being one peoples favorite game, because despite my dislike for most of the characters I like the game.

But uh.... I won't comment on that next part save that I'd was not a fan. At all.

Edited by OmegaRadiance on Sep 14th 2018 at 6:08:38 AM

Wow, sorry for opening up this can of worms (again?).

The thing about Long Haired Luke is that he has no moral fibre. Moral fibre is doing the right thing when the right thing is hard.

He does improve slightly during his first excursion, mainly because he's forced to, but when the chips are down and Van basically offers him a way to write off Luke's own horrific bad attitude as everyone else's problem Luke jumps on it and immediately begins trying to sideline everyone else. Luke's bad attitude during the first trip could be seen as largely driven by his bad experiences; but his bad attitude during the second trip, which is miles worse than his original attitude, is utterly inexcusable.

Luke doesn't immediately drop all his character traits when he cuts his hair, but it does mark the point where he is genuinely invested in changing the way his life is going and developing moral fibre. It's not the end of his character development, but it is a sea-change in it.

Basically, if this was an average RPG, there would be no second trip; Luke's character development wouldn't actively retract after it started getting going; but it's the very fact that Luke is given the opportunity to wind it back, the temptation, and then takes it, and then has to deal with the consequences of that, that make him interesting.

Edited by Sigilbreaker26 on Sep 15th 2018 at 10:23:20 AM

https://www.reddit.com/r/tales/comments/9fx426/were_translating_tales_of_asterias_story/

Guys, I think I found our savior.

I forgive Anise for anything given that she's far and away the best character gameplay wise and basically saved my ass against Nebilim

antlion doll op

Finally went back to playing Phantasia.

Moria Mines is finally done and dusted. Maxwell was a bit of a pain since his attacks go off instantly and often have no downtime between them but he wasn't nearly as bad as Gnome. Now I have Manual, Combo Exp, the upgraded Gungnir, and various other goodies. Manual, in particular, is a godsend for how useful it is. After that, I went around the world to grab a few spells for Arche that I had missed before continuing on with the plot. When I stopped, I had just gotten all of the Basilisk Scales that I needed to summon Edward.

Geez, almost 2 pages worth of Abyss and its characters' discussion.

Me? I think I made it pretty clear that I love Abyss and its characters (Anise the most! Jade the least... at least story wise.) I spend close to four years looking for a (cheap) copy of the 3DS version after trying the PS 2 one in an emulator and going close to halfway through... that's how MUCH I love the game.

Remakes... now that Baba is out of the picture I hope non-japanese, non-Pony gamers can finally play the best of this series. Squeenix is basically releasing FIVE mainline Final Fantasy's on Nintendo's little wonder, that's a hard act to follow! (6? If you count 'Chibi FFXV'.)

1st: Symphonia Chronicles on Switch. RIGHT NOW. (5 years ago the hipster thing was to hate the Wii U, and now it's to lick the Switch's ass... with old ports. Not the level of respect I'd want, but much better than devs making excuses for not doing Wii U versions of games.)

2nd: Tempest remake. Close the story about the Triverse Gate. This should be a no brainer, but... release it on a proper console, not a zombified portable / on mobile. And bundle it with ports of Innocence (finally localized!) and Hearts. Yeah, this makes my Hearts R copy obsolete, but I'll be happy nonetheless.

3rd: LEGENDIA! I think someone else suggested this? An almost complete remake like the DS to Vita games. Proper battle system. NON random encounters. Character quests integrated into the main story. Mystic artes. Costumes. (Maybe a 'Walter Mode'?) There is a lot to improve here.

4th: Destiny R+2 bundle. I will keep saying this till the end of time. Maybe throw in Rebirth too to make it the 'Cyclorg Trilogy' someone suggested. (Which Leon do we use? Vanilla Destiny's asshole or Destiny R's Anti-Hero?)

Edited by FlightMaster on Sep 17th 2018 at 12:14:48 PM

@Which Leon to use: Both. Leave both unaltered, let people pick. Don't change OG Destiny. Please.

Also, the Hearts translation was really bad so I honestly have no hope any localizations of older games wouldn't be butchered. This shouldn't be a problem in 2018 but apparently it still is...

Edited by PhiSat on Sep 17th 2018 at 10:59:00 AM

Hearts R itself is a problem, honestly. Mostly because of it adding that fucking scene where Hisui punches Beryl that nobody ever mentions because apparently that's okay or something

https://twitter.com/to_crestoria/status/1042356293686636544

Well that was weird.

Looks like some Crazy shit.

So, from what little we see, everyone in the world has this strange earring, and if you (supposedly) commit a crime, it becomes a mark and you are chased by monsters (perhaps Dementors style).

So maybe the heroes are rebelling against this, perhaps because they've all been set up and said system is corrupt or something and they opt to embrace their criminal status.