Tales of the Abyss

Tales of the Abyss is an excellent RPG that tells an engaging story full of complex characters and fascinating discussions about identity and free will. The core of its combat system may be too simple for its own good, but the quality of the narrative more than makes up for that.

The protagonist is a young man named Luke, the nephew of a king, who had to grow up locked in a mansion after being kidnapped when he was just a child – a traumatic event that erased all his memories of his earlier years. With no contact with the outside world, living a comfortable but tedious life, Luke grows to become a spoiled, entitled young man. His only friends are his youthful servant Guy and his sword instructor, Van. One day, however, while he’s training with them, a woman manages to sneak into the mansion and make an attempt on Van’s life. Luke tries to defend him, but ends up triggering a magical effect that sends both him and the woman far away across the country. Lost and with no clue of how the real world functions, Luke sees himself having to work with the same person who tried to murder his master – her name is Tear, and she’s awesome – if he’s to have any chance of getting back home.

There’s more to Luke than meets the eye. Initially, he acts like a spoiled brat, wanting everyone to serve him while spouting toxic masculinity at every chance. We truly get why Tear wants to punch him down and leave him unconscious in a ditch, because Luke is indeed insufferable. But his long journey with her will eventually mold him into another person altogether – for instead of leaving him in a ditch, Tear said, “I can fix him,” and somehow really did it. But that is just scratching the surface of his character arc.

Let’s start with his lack of knowledge of the outside world, which serves three main purposes. It primarily works as an easy way of contextualizing exposition: since Luke doesn’t know stuff, people must explain the lore to him – and thus to us – all the time (“Lorelei? Isofons? Fonon Frequencies? What the heck are you talking about?” he asks). This sometimes can seem a bit forced, though: it’s one thing to lack specific knowledge about certain subjects, another entirely to not know anything about one’s own world – he lived in a mansion, not in a cavern. But his ignorance can also lead to moments that are both funny and revealing, such as when he displays his entitled side and lack of social skills by telling a random villager, “You’re dismissed,” after just asking a simple question. And it also serves to picture Luke as a bit naïve, which helps mitigate any antipathy we may harbor against him: Luke is unbearable, no one can deny, but is that his fault? Did he have a chance to become anyone else with the pampered, secluded life his parents gave him?

And if you combine entitlement to being a man, you get a dangerous mixture. It’s no surprise, for example, that Luke constantly shows signs of toxic masculinity: he finds the voice of his bunny-like friend Mew annoying precisely because its feminine, and he diminishes Mew in the process; he has competitive issues with other men, feeling the need to prove that he’s the stronger, dominant one; and he also feels he must suppress all his feelings, lest he be deemed weak by those around him – especially if he’s near a woman, like Tear. For Luke, men don’t cry; they endure in silence.

It’s easy, then, to dismiss Luke as a complete douchebag at the beginning, since he’s bossy and full of this foolish male pride, but he can also show more compassion than his friends: Tear may be the kindest person in Luke’s group – she manages to put up with him, after all –, but she still murder her enemies without blinking twice. She’s sorry that she has to do it for the greater good, but still sees their death as “how the world works.” Luke doesn’t know that world and, therefore, refuses to accept that as the truth: for him, human life is invaluable – even the lives of his enemies – and should be protected at all costs.

During his journey, Luke finds many friends, like the aforementioned Mew, the princess Natalia, Colonel Jade Curtiss, and the girl Elise. However, just living with people better than him doesn’t automatically make Luke a better person. On the contrary, being constantly juxtaposed to them appears to just bring out the worst in him, who does the impossible and becomes even more insufferable with time. How can a person like that change? Tales of the Abyss shows that to break this entitlement, you also have to break the sense of self of a person: for change to happen, there must be destruction first. In the story, after a strong plot twist, Luke has to face the fact that he has been lied to his whole life. What he knows about his identity is put into question, and that is precisely what allows him a chance to become someone different.

As his appreciation for human life already indicated, Luke wasn’t a bad person altogether. But an intense, earth-shattering moment was still needed to wake him up from his state of moral stasis. In Tales of the Abyss’ narrative, experience and logic are depicted as insufficient to change a person’s personality: you also need shock value (and not just a slap in the face, you need to shake them up to their core) because something inside them must first shatter to allow them room to grow. Otherwise, they will simply refuse to listen to the fact that there’s something significant in their nature, in their actions, that is wrong. Luke’s narrative arc, then, becomes even more complex when he gets to face the problem of becoming a better person: he finally realizes he must, but how does one do that? Change? He suddenly finds himself lost.

It’s at this point in the story that it becomes so moving, because it’s his friends, especially Tear, who get to play the role of a guide. Without them, the trauma, the shock, the urge to change, all would be for nothing. But since they are there for him, to give him a second chance without simply forgiving him for the things he said and did, Luke is able to grow into a tragic but heroic figure. His mindset goes from “I’m the best” to “I’m the worst” to finally reach the ideal “I’m deeply flawed, but as long as I always strive to be better, that’s okay.” If he is incapable of self-sacrifice at the beginning, and proceeds to crave it as a form of redemption, by the end, he’s starting to realize what self-sacrifice truly means for him and for those who love him.

But there is even more to his character arc, for we must still tackle how Luke is heavily dependent on Van, seeking his master’s approval at all times. If Van is not there to order him around, Luke simply doesn’t know what to do: Van is not only a teacher to Luke, but a role model. And it’s not hard to figure out why, when we remember Luke’s toxic masculinity: of course he would drool over the only jacked, commanding male figure in his life, taking his every word as gospel.

And that, as you can expect, rubs Tear the wrong way. “You base all your actions on what others say and never try to understand things for yourself,” she accuses him. Van is Luke’s master in every sense of the word, teaching him swordplay, yes, but also claiming ownership over him, as Luke does what Van tells him to do, no matter what it is. However, it’s not just “think for yourself” the lesson that Tear is trying to impart to her dear friend, because being full of himself, Luke is also unwilling to accept different points of view. Therein lies the Luke paradox: he gets punished because he doesn’t listen to the people around him, but also because he doesn’t think for himself. What Tear is trying to teach Luke, then, is the ability to develop critical thinking: he needs to listen to everyone, but question everything, and expand his way of seeing the world. That’s Luke’s real journey.

His friends may not be as complex as he is, but they are no less tragic in their own way. They appear to be mystery boxes at the beginning, hinting at secrets: Tear is too kind to Luke, but nonetheless tried to kill Van in cold blood; Guy appears to know too much about the world for a commoner; Jade may claim to want peace above everything else, but has the ominous title of “Necromancer”; and even Elise, who appears to transit between just two simple modes at the beginning – Luke’s fangirl or total psychopath –, has some surprises up her sleeve.

The bad guys, the Oracle Knights, are also a mystery at first. Luke knows they want to start a war between his kingdom, Kimlasca, and the neighboring one, Malkuth, but doesn’t understand their reasons. Their leader is Van of all people, who denies any involvement with their actions, but they also respond to Mohs, Tear’s own boss, who she assures only wants peace. Tales of the Abyss’ plot doesn’t take long to get very complex, rapidly increasing in scope. The story takes some ideas and terms from Judaism, mainly the Kabbalah, such as names like Sephiroth, Daath, and Malkuth, tying them with the notion of spiritual trees that hold life together – and it’s certainly guilty of getting carried away with its own terminology.

In the game, the world is bound by what they call the Score, which is a sort of written prophecy. There is a whole religion formed around it, which tries to enforce it in any way possible. The Score deals with big subjects, like prosperity and war, but also with more mundane matters, sounding like astrology gone wrong: “According to the Score, drinking golden tea will help my luck with money,” a villager claims. Crimes can be justified based on the Score; destruction and death can be enacted just because they were predicted.

Since we’re dealing with prophecy, the question of free will naturally becomes one of the main points of contention between Luke’s party and the antagonists. Both sides agree that the Score represents a philosophical problem: if what is written is going to happen, individuality is irrelevant, and free will is a lie. But they disagree on how to change that. Luke’s group claims that humanity can break free from the Score by themselves – using Luke’s growth as a person as an example –, while the antagonists defend that a major breaking point, a violent moment of rapture, is still necessary – and Luke’s change also proves their point.

It’s no wonder that they never cease to try to convince each other of who is right and who is wrong: since their problem is a logical one, they believe words and not violence is the solution, and they often try to sit down and talk. However, direct conflict eventually becomes inevitable when the antagonists’ beliefs grow into a cult and they start to form a religion: talking and logic, then, both fail because one of the sides becomes tainted by faith and the problematic certainty, the righteousness, that often comes with it. Tragedy inevitably follows.

If Tales of the Abyss has a great narrative, it sadly doesn’t have a great combat system to accompany it. The combat is too simple and quickly becomes repetitive. There is an attack button and a special button, and that’s basically it. In every battle, we keep pressing “attack” until the monster dies. If the monster is strong, we keep attacking them, but now also using some special moves – here, called arts – that stagger them for a while. Characters gain more arts when they level up, but the only things that change are the animation and the damage.

We can change the character we’re playing with to make battles feel different, but even that soon becomes old during the 50 hours that the game takes to finish. There are some additional elements to combat, such as Core Crystals that change how our characters level up, and orbs that can increase the damage of arts, decrease their MP cost, or increase their ability to stagger, but their effect is so minimal that, on normal difficulty at least, players can safely ignore them and keep just mashing the attack button. The only impactful mechanic is what is called Overlimit: when activating it, our character cannot be staggered by enemy arts and can use some flashy special moves.

Tales of the Abyss may tell a story of epic proportions, with the whole world at stake and all that, but its strength lies in its little moments of character development. So, its combat system may be lacking and its graphical presentation may even be dated nowadays, but ultimately, none of that matters, because today, almost fifteen years after its initial release, Tales of the Abyss remains as fascinating and moving as ever.

August 08, 2025.

Review originally published on April 01, 2019.