A troubled young hero with a bad haircut, an insecure yet powerful whiny girl (read: she's got baggage), and lots of puzzled townsfolk that do "..." a lot. Yup, in some ways, Namco's Tales of Legendia is about as cookie cutter an RPG as they come. Our hero has this uncontrollable rage that gets him into trouble, there's a bunch of people who are banking on some mysterious prophecy, and somewhere, there's an inn with your name on it. Oh, and you landed on this island that's actually an ancient space craft and your sister's been abducted by some weirdo who sounds like he's from Texas. This is where I go, yee haw!

Now the narrative isn't terrible. In fact, it's actually somewhat enjoyable if you're new to such games, but that's the key. You have to have never played an RPG in your life. Things certainly pick up midway through the adventure, and I'm quite fond of this bizarre yet cool dance number that takes place in the first town that I visited, but for the most part I've read this book before and I've grown tired of it. It's like all Japanese developers design their games off the same exact template or something.

Thankfully, the rest of Tales rises above its bland but passable narrative. For starters, the soundtrack is amazing. Say what you want about the rest of the game's components, but when it comes to music, criticism will get you nowhere. Also, the visuals are fairly impressive. The bright water color style really sets this game apart from its competition. Finally, I really dig the battle system. Instead of reusing the same stupid turn based garbage that's been recycled for generations, Namco elected to merge hack-an-slash gameplay with traditional RPG mechanics, so you don't need to cycle through menus. You just run up to an enemy and button mash like crazy, but you still have to use items and keep an eye on your hit points, so it's not like Tales of Legendia's Streets of Rage or anything. But it's a cool system that's wonderful for non RPG players.

The game also features some really cool bosses, some of which are incredibly hard to defeat. Battles are sometimes these long drag out, knock down affairs and that helps to give Tales a somewhat old school feel.

As I previously mentioned, the music is excellent but the same doesn't hold true for the dialogue or the voice acting. Again, it's the failure of the developers and their inability to carve their own niche instead of adhering to the same old crappy formula. It seems like, by now, someone should stand up and go a different route. You know, maybe hire some decent writers and work to acquire the talents of people who can act, but none of this happened with Tales of Legendia. I'm not saying that everything's terrible because that's far from being the case, but everything does sound like RPG A, B, C, D, E, F, and G.

If you've plowed through the Final Fantasy games as well as the rest of the competition, you're not going to find Tales to be the magic fountain of originality. Namco's managed to make it unique in some respects, but every time that I begin to think differently about this game the actors will dispassionately deliver their lines, and that brings me back to reality.