Tales of Destiny II (2000)

Finally done with this one. While I'm glad I finished it, and ended up at least liking the narrative this was easily the weakest entry so far for me. Even beyond the frustrating combat, the last area was very underwhelming, the villain about as bland as generic brand white bread, and the characters lackluster especially compared to the two games that sandwich this one. I'm just happy to be done with the PSX era tales games and hyped to move on to Tales of Symphonia.

This game is a total struggle to finish. Not because the story is bad, or the characters are annoying, hell I even like the terrible English dub. Its because every single combat encounter is an exercise in frustration. The enemies in this game overlap attacks, have way too much armor, projectiles that can go full screen and through your entire party. This is compounded by the fact that your parties spell charge time is incredibly long especially in comparison to the enemies who can cast two full screen aoe spells in the time it takes for my healer to cast heal once. Even in fights where you aren't really taking much damage its still just not fun as you spend more time in hitstun then actually attacking the enemy. When bosses are exactly as annoying or difficult as any given enemy encounter you've done something incorrect. I can't believe I'm saying this but I miss Gnome from Tales of Phantasia. I'll take one annoying 10 minute fight, over 2000 annoying 30 second fights.

Holy smokes. This game? This game right here? Oh my god. So much to be explored. Do you have what it takes bro?

The first thing that comes to mind whenever I see the cover of this game again after so many years is the voice acting. This is one of the first times where regular dialogue during the game sequence was voice acted (at least in my experience, this was definitely a rarity back then). It was pretty great! I mean it wasn't spectacular, and it was a little irksome to hear one of the characters speaking in a made-up foreign language out loud which consisted of gibberish and almost sounded pig-latin-esque.

Oh man, the battle mechanics. I mean you can't tweak em better man. The more you use skills the stronger they get, and let me tell you how fun it is to use special skills. (super fun). The magic is based on combining specific ethers in the crystals and when you do it in a decent combination you get decent bonuses and spells.

I havent played this in forever. The story has to do with two planets being destined to collide? I remember there being a team of evil baddies behind the whole thing. Kinda reminds me of Star Ocean the 2nd Story tbh. I think I might be getting the two messed up.

I do remember a very iconic scene though, which has stuck with me throughout the years. After entering a cave and defeating these bears for their lens and food, much later afterward in the game something happens to you and you are reincarnated as the bear you killed. You have little bear cubs and you have to face yourself. It is a weird thing for a game to do, and I liked how ToE did it.