Reviews

As someone who had played the original game long before watching the anime, I say the adaptation is rather bad. Indeed the plot did not go under any major changes, no important events present in the game was removed while some scenes not shown in the games are not bad(some are anime-original, while some are taken from official anthology). What is terrible is how battles are carried out. The anime took the word 'random battle encounter' in the game too literally, it is a 'battle encounter' and the event, along with the feeling it gives is 'random'. In the game you would not really care if all animals and monsters in the area would suddenly join forces with its natural predator or prey to prioritize killing you and your party for exactly zero reason since in game you would want to fight a great variations of enemies and not just 1 or 2 kinds per stage anyway. But out of game mechanics when this logic is placed into anime format, it is too random, weak, and pretty much just a waste of screen time just to show some fancy moves they are capable of in the original game. The boss battles are even worse, not only that bosses with supposedly 50,000+ HP would be reduced into dying within 2-4 blows, the human bosses present near to zero strength or tension in the battle. Boss battle against human characters consisted of elongated speech while they just parry, guard or dodge against each other's strikes and nobody takes any hit, and when the conversation reach peak the party would just decide to pull off some lame tricks(sleep inducing, bitchslap, or simple arrow shots) and the boss will fall just like that. It seem like the bosses are incredibly weak, and the party always had the option to kill them pretty much easily right from the second the battle start but they just wanna wait until the long talk end before they think the bosses should have been put out for good. Then there's go the 50,000+ HP within seconds and the tension it gives? None. The characters struggling in the heat of the battle are just the guys doing all the parrying and dodging, and there's just someone who get to stand there doing the talk until the time came that they became bored of talking, which is when the lame trick happen.

As for story as a fan of Tales series who have played many other games Namco gave me, Abyss is among those that have mediocre score for story. How Luke changed didn't make him any much likable to me, actually his development leap is done too quick(both in game and anime), changing from one person to a totally different one doesn't happen in 5 minutes. How Luke manage to act all goody-goody without slipping out his former douche self for a single second made me feel unreal. I prefer him to "try" becoming good, struggling with his speeches and how to react in different situation, and gradually become better and better, not just perfectly have the instant soul change he did.

Further on Luke, I did not quite enjoy Tear's romantic development towards him either, because similarly to Luke, it happen pretty much too sudden. Tear was introduced as a stubborn girl that have the body and mind of a 20-22 years old woman even when she is still 16, she was depicted as taking her duty seriously and will not hesitate to kill someone in self-defense. Her relationship with Luke started out terrible with her being unable to cope with his endless immaturity, but then suddenly show signs that she had developed some feelings for him as soon as he cut his hair, even before seeing the results that 'could he really changed or not?' So what happen to that mature tsuntsun girl we had earlier, is cutting hair all it take to turn her dere? That could've been better

The other characters I am too lazy to describe them all but I liked Jade the most of the entire cast, he's a mature leader figure that will often time make childish jokes and hold some grand sarcasm in his arsenal(it's sad that he isn't the leader of the party). However, his sarcasm, which is his biggest appeal, was toned down for some odd reason within the anime, which is alittle disappointing. (His ability to troll people was demonstrated to greater extent in the game and several preorder CDs for other Tales game which he did show up as the commentator)

The art of the anime was good, though some choices of camera viewpoint could have been better. The music, though was somewhat disappointing, I would have not mind and even encourage them to use the original BGMs that were in the game, the OST the original game offers are fitting enough to each scene(though the battles in the anime might not be able to meet up with the battle BGMs the game used). I have no further comments on the voicing because all roles are directly reprised from the original game so they already knew how hey should portray each character.