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TLDR, I generally enjoyed watching this series but overall it was just, fine.

Now on to the review. I did not play the game so I essentially went in blind/fresh.

Is an anime series considered a success if it successfully triggers contextually accurate emotions in the viewer? Some would say it is and I would generally agree, but in the case of this anime, I'd say it was a little overdone and it ends up working against itself.

Premise/Story

On the surface, Tales of the Abyss ticks all the boxes for my kind of anime. It has elements of action, fantasy, adventure, magic and a touch ... of romance. It certainly is an interesting take on the age old premise of "young spoiled brat goes through stuff, grows up and tries to save the world", but beyond the interesting approach, the story is quite predictable like most anime these days.

The primary let down of the series, and quite common with "just fine" anime in general, is how the entire plot is based on events that could have been avoided by simple communication. X knows something Y doesn't, has no real reason to not tell Y what it is, yet has many opportunities to do so but chooses not to, and by the time Y finds out it's too late. This formula is repeated multiple times throughout virtually the entire series and at times I was left wondering what the point of the whole preceding act was.

Nonetheless, the story development is decent. It evolves into a story of the struggles between ends vs means and how 2 sides may want the same end but their means differ so much that they are willing to kill one another or die because of it.

Characters

Most of the character development is fed to you in "Oh dang! Plot twist!" style moments which gets old when used too much. I have also never watched an anime where practically all the good guys are so hypocritical. The MC is heavily chastised for not thinking for himself and when he did eventually try to think for himself he was either silenced, brushed off or chastised once again by the very same characters. This is where the question at the start of my review stems from. I did really come to dislike the characters that I was meant to dislike, abit too much. So much so that when redemption came knocking, going along with it felt too forced, but I went along with it anyway.

Now we run into the next problem: The supporting characters did such a good job at fanning the flames of dislike that by the time said redeemed characters become likable again, it almost felt like the rest of the cast didnt deserve to be associated with them. This made it hard to genuinely like some of the characters which the story eventually intended for the viewer to like.

That being said, it wasn't all bad. The series does dive pretty deep into the history and motivations for some of its characters and there are a few that I did end up liking, ironically one of them being the MC. Taking a step back and looking at the cards he was dealt and what he needed to do, I ended up really sympathizing with his situation and rooting for him. There were also some plot twists that, while predictable, were well executed and justified.

Conclusion

This may sound like a bad review but as I mentioned at the start, I did enjoy watching it general, it ticked the right genre boxes for me and had just enough to make it enjoyable. So I give it a 6/10, i.e. Ok to watch if you have time to kill and like the genres and themes.