In honor of next week’s release of Namco’s new game in their flagship RPG series: Tales of Graces F, here’s a blog about my favorite Tales characters!

Tales of Legendia, my favorite game in the series

When you ask most Tales fans what they’re favorite game in the series is, they might say Symphonia, or Vesperia. But I bet NOBODY says Legendia is their favorite. Except me. Heck, one time when I said that was my favorite to a Namco employee, he just looked at me like I had three heads. Legendia was a PS2 game but it was headed by a different team than all the other Tales games. And it showed. Legendia almost had a ‘rebellious’ tone to it because the new team wanted to make it clear that this was different from a regular Tales game.

Legendia certainly had flaws. So many that sometimes even I wonder why it’s my favorite. Battles are 2-D like the older Tales games, but they’re only single player. Which is a big blemish because most other Tales games you could have other players join in as other characters in the fights. And that was a lot of fun and one of my most favorite aspects of other Tales games. Legendia was also pretty linear and should’ve ended about halfway through the game.

So why do I like Legendia so much then? Well, I do like the differences it brought to the table. Even though the game was linear, the storyline never meandered and got too complicated. You didn’t have to have a story refresher course if you continued playing after a couple of months. In fact, Legendia almost had a Super Nintendo ‘feel’ due to its simplicity. The graphics had a beautiful watercolor look to them. But my favorite part was the music. Normally one composer does the music to Tales games (can’t remember the name, but I’m sure someone here will correct me). This composer isn’t bad, but the songs that come from this musician are all forgettable. Much like the name. But in Legendia, the composer was different. His name is Go Shiina, and he’s my favorite video game music composer ever. He did the music for other games like Mr. Driller, Klonoa 2, and Tekken 6 as well. His music has a neat jazzy style, and helped separate Legendia from the rest of the pack.

And of course, Legendia had a large group of my favorite characters. Tales games feature their main characters pretty prominently, so here’s a list of my favorite ones in various Tales titles!

Grune

She’s one of the magic users in Legendia. Her ditzy silly exterior cracked me up. Plus, she wore green clothes and had green hair. Perfect for the upcoming St. Patrick’s Day! Heck, even her name means “Green” in German. And my favorite color is green, too. Even though she used magic, her weapon of choice was weird, too. Just a big clay pot that she’d bonk enemies over the head with! What a hoot!

Go Shiina

He’s not playable, but one of the traditions of Tales games is that the music composer is in the game somewhere. Usually it’s that other composer, but for Legendia, Go Shiina was in it! In order to unlock more songs for him to play in the game, you had to bring him food using the famous Tales cooking system. I read in an interview somewheres that the real life Go Shiina loves food, so that makes sense in the game, too. Needless to say that saving the world took a back seat in Legendia so I could give Go Shiina more food! I wish I could meet the real Go Shiina someday, but I doubt I will, what with him being in Japan and all. So if any of you ever get to meet him, tell him I said ‘hi.’

Otters

Another non-playable bunch of characters, these are the Moogles of the Legendia world. They’re a group of talking helpful otters who have their own village and everything. They even have their own little adorable song they sing: “Ors, Ors Ors Ors, Ors…”

Norma

She was a funny treasure hunter in Legendia, and would sometimes let her greed get carried away. She and Grune made for some great comedy. Normally I would rather skip the ‘skits’ that Tales games have, but not in Legendia when Norma and Grune were talking!

Moses

He was another thief type character in Legendia, but he was more of a bandit and was louder and more boisterous. And also funny. He had a crush on Grune (can’t blame him), and he fought with a cool blue wolf.

Repede

OK now we’re getting to characters in Vesperia. Speaking of blue wolves, Repede was a dog owned by the main character. But he was playable! When I would have friends over and we’d all play Vesperia together, we’d all fight over who would get to control the dog in battles!

Rita

Not really one of my favorite characters, but she was kind of a group favorite. Usually someone in my group of friends would pick her to play as. Which was good since she was a magic user. She wore goggles, so we always called her Goggolor. In fact, I had to look up her real name on the Internet because I got so used to calling her by that other name.

Judith

No real reason why I liked her. My friends called her the fan service character. But she was fun to play as, so if I didn’t get to be the dog, I’d try to be her.

Anise

The one and only Tales of the Abyss character on my list. The reason why I liked this little girl character is that in battle, she would ride on the back of a giant teddy bear who would fight for her! But that’s not all. You could equip this bear with various outfits that made references to other classic Namco titles. You could have Presea’s pink pigtails, a Valkyrie helmet, even the green head of the Prince from Katamari Damacy! I actually won a contest from Namco and got a plush toy of this weird bear. It came with an extra head that had Presea’s pigtails on it. I wanted the Katamari head, though. I actually won another Tales contest and got some Symphonia trading cards, too! Tales of the Abyss just came out on the 3DS, but I probably won’t get it since it’s just a single player game instead of multiplayer like it was on the PS2.

Genis

And finally, some Tales of Symphonia characters. I bet a lot of people would say Symphonia is their favorite since it was one of the only good GameCube RPGs. Only one I liked better was Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. Anyway, even though Genis was a bratty kid, he was very smart and ended up being pretty likable. He used a cup and ball toy as a weapon, but he was mostly a magic user. I loved some of the things he said when casting spells, like “Pancake Time!” His older sister Raine was pretty cool, too.

Sheena

She was a ninja with purple hair. So she’s automatically cool because of that.

Presea

And finally, Presea was a little girl with pink pigtails. But she was unusually strong and fought with a big axe. In fact, when I would play Symphonia with Jeff, he usually picked her because she was a tank! Another cool thing about Presea was one of her alternate outfits. Different unlockable outfits are one of the traditions of Tales games, and one of Presea’s made her look like Klonoa, the main character from one of my favorite Namco games! That’s another neat thing about Tales games is they usually have a lot of classic Namco references in them. Jeff and his friends even made Presea in Soul Calibur V!

The End

And that’s all my favorite characters. I wonder if there are any that I’ll like in Tales of Graces F. Show me if you think there will be. In the comments section, let me know YOUR favorite Tales games and characters! And if you don’t play Tales games, you can list your other favorite RPG characters, too! I would tell you mine, but I think it would be more fun for you to guess. So guess who my number one favorite Tales game character is (should be pretty easy), and my favorite Final Fantasy character, too (might not be who you would immediately think).

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