I Played Tales of the Tempest

Last year, I played and informally reviewed Star Ocean. This was off the back of playing Tales of Phantasia, my first ever Tales game. I actually dropped Phantasia after around 15 hours. It was pretty, but not very fun to play… At the start of this year, I watched a big streamer event based in Japan called Newtown. One streamer had plans to play Tales of the Abyss, and only thought about checking Newtown out for a day or two, but he got swept up in a grand story, and his plans to play Abyss fell to the wayside. Then, around a month later, when the emotional moment came for everyone to bid farewell to one another and return to their normal lives, tears were broken up by a joke: “at least now you can finally play Abyss.” Fueled by those emotions, I decided to put aside my usual mandate of playing franchises in release order, and I skipped right from Phantasia to Abyss! My first impression was a mix of curiosity and comparison to what I knew from Phantasia and Star Ocean. By the 15-hour…