Anyone who experienced Tales of Symphonia’s release on the Nintendo Gamecube a few years back should know what to expect from Legendia. Anime styled cut scenes, younger characters set out to uncover hidden powers and save the world, a real time combat based system that allows you to dodge attacks, string combo’s together, and more. However, Legendia suffers in some of the same fields that Symphonia did as well.

The storyline is extremely stiff and boring, based on old school RPG stereotypes. You begin the game on a ship with the main character and his sister, as they battle over a huge storm that has swelled up, and also against monsters that are attacking the ship. The ship is bowled over, and they are both washed on shore. We learn the sister has some type of reaction to the salt water, and after encountering one of the locals, is rushed to a fresh water fountain. There she regains her strength and we learn of a particularly unique power she possesses. However, she’s quickly kidnapped by bandits, and the game starts off from there. Legendia does give you a fairly large cast to work with, including an Elvis impersonator, but none of the characters (outside of the Elvis guy) manage to stand out from the rest. They all fall into the typical RPG hero role, and at the 15 hour mark you’ll find yourself reaching for excuses to finish the game.

The voice over work is pretty grating on the ears, and makes a decent argument for the strength of subtitles only. It’s unfortunate, because on the other hand, the music is fantastic. I could do without the Jazz theme that plays early in the beginning (it got old really quick) but for the most part the orchestrated pieces are outstanding. In fact, the music serves as the biggest highlight to the game.

The combat system, while fairly unique to the Tales series, doesn’t hold up after the first 10 hours or so. Most of the work can be done with bashing a single button over and over again, until a boss fight requires the use of a bit more thinking and combo selection. Setting up sufficient combo’s can be a bit of a pain as well, especially since you rely on the strength of your friends AI to accomplish the task. Even with being able to set up tactics for your group, the AI tends to not do what you’d like. You’ll waste a lot of time and energy keeping them alive and healed as well, which gets to be incredibly annoying later on in the game. Using Eres, special abilities that you gain as you level, seems to be a bit hit or miss as well. You map out a particular Eres to the D-Pad, but they don’t always seem to activate when they should.

Graphically, the game doesn’t manage to excite either. Character models are small, and detail is easily lost in them. The actual anime scenes are all pretty to look at, and are easily the best “graphic” feature of the game. The dungeons are all pretty plain and boring, and tend to get repetitive in design after a while. Towns are small and cartoon like, and also borrow design from town to town quite heavily. Even during battle, when the camera pulls in close for the characters and enemies, there’s nothing that screams out pretty.

Tales of Legendia is a pretty disappointing addition to a series of RPG’s that has managed to grow stale in the past few years. Namco really needs to step it up a bit in the presentation department, and breathe some fresh life into the storyline structure and combat system. I’ve heard a lot of praise for Tales of the Abyss, but haven’t seen much of it. However, if its anything at all like Legendia, I’d avoid it like the plague.