My main conclusion - Tales of Destiny is an unpolished gem, with mostly gorgeous graphics and addictive battle system.
Pros:
Fresh look at turn based battle system. You can fully control your character's actions, but there's a hidden cooldown after each move, so you can't just spam attacks at your enemies. Other party members are controlled by AI, but can also be controlled by second player if you have a special item equipped. It's up to you to choose battle strategy for each character, and at any time you can pause the battle to manually cast spells or use an item.
Beautiful world to explore. Pixel art is pleasant to the eye, sometimes extremely gorgeous, especially the cutscenes. Each biome has a unique look, and you can easily distinguish in which city you are. Every house has a story, you can hear a woman's story in one city and then meet her son on the other side of the world.
It's fun to explore various caves and dungeons for secrets, especially in the first half of the game. You can backtrack completed dungeons when you reach a certain level to interact with magical totems and unlock new abilities. Finding each treasure chest is also challenging, some of them containing rare power ups for your sword.
Idea of swords that can talk and have their own personality is quite neat, especially when whole plot revolves around it. But it also would be much cooler if we could get more interaction from swords when talking to random people, not only in main plot dialogues.
I like healing items in this game. There are no basic potions, mega potions, uber potions, etc. Each potion replenishes certain percentage of your health bar, so you don't have to keep upgrading your potions each time you level up.
The plot. It's fun to untangle. There are some betrayals and unexpected turns. Just like in a real world, not everything goes according to plan and you can't save everyone and win every battle. Each party member has his own motives and story arc, which is weaved perfectly into main plot.
There is quite a variety of enemies and monsters in this game. And they are often mixed up, so you must pick different tactics each time. You learn fast to distinguish those who can take out whole party in a few attacks, so attacking them first is a wise idea.
Cons
Graphics are a mixed bag, looking more like an improved SNES title, rather than a PS1 game. 3D world map looks dull in comparison to cities and dungeons rich with details. I would prefer if they would stick to 2d all the way.
In the second part of the game there's a huge segment where you travel across 4 reskinned mazes, and it get's pretty boring pretty fast.
Text box has only 2 colors and no character faces, so it is very hard sometimes to keep track of who said what. Especially with all the terminology and hard to pronounce\remember names.
I don't understood what's up with all the various food. Game doesn't explain this, and doesn't show me any status changes when your sack runs out of food. Weird.
Random encounters appear almost every 10 steps. This makes navigating mazes even more frustrating. You can use repel item to reduce encounters, but then you will not unlock high damage skills, because skipping encounters will not level up your characters.
There's not that much to do if you like side quests and mini games. And if there are, they're pretty hard to complete, so casual players wouldn't bother anyway.
Lack of interesting bosses. Usually bosses are regular sized people, so beating the crap out of them isn't as pleasing as kicking some kaiju's ass. And usually spamming the most powerful attacks beats them easily.
Comparing this game to it's rivals, no doubt it's less famous than most Sqare games. It didn't had a budget to become a legend, but for those who are looking for some good old retro jrpg, Tales of Destiny will provide fully.
