1. INTRODUCTION

Get a comprehensive overview of Phantom Abyss, including its core mechanics, objectives, and what this guide covers. Start your journey through the abyss effectively.

This is a Walkthrough and FAQ for the PS2 RPG, Tales of the Abyss. TotA is the latest game in Namco's popular "Tales of" series. Created by Team Symphonia, the makers of Tales of Symphonia, TotA could perhaps be called the spiritual sequel to ToS (unlike Tales of Rebirth and Tales of Legendia, which were both created by other teams within Tales Studio). TotA has the distinction of being the '10th Anniversary Tales' game, being released ten years to the day (December 15th) after the first Tales of game, Tales of Phantasia for the Super Famicon.

This Walkthrough also summarizes the plot of the game as it goes along, so that those of you who are playing who do not understand Japanese fluently can get a rough idea of what is going on. With that said, that also means that this Walkthrough WILL contain plot spoilers. Do not read ahead of where you are in the game in this FAQ if you are not willing to risk being spoiled.

This FAQ makes use of SJIS encoding in order to display Japanese characters. I included this feature so that if you do not know Japanese, you can easily match up the characters on your TV screen to the characters in this guide. You will need to have support for viewing Japanese characters on your computer, however. Newer versions of Windows should have it built in, though you may have to install some new files from your Windows Install CD; otherwise, you'll either need to get a program like NJStar Communicator, or you'll need to get Japanese character support for Internet Explorer and open this file in IE instead of Notepad/Wordpad.

The only website authorized to post this FAQ is www.gamefaqs.com. If you see this document elsewhere, not only are they posting without my permission, but they likely do not have the most current version of this FAQ. Emails to me asking questions already answered in the FAQ, even if the answers are not in the version you are reading, will be deleted without response.