Playing Tales of Symphonia again

Yeah, been playing old games over again.  Suikoden V is next up on the replay list, where I plan on deliberately getting the not-perfect ending.  I always thought abandoning your castle was a totally OOC move for the main character, but I went with it anyway to get the perfect ending.  For the record, perfect ending sucked to the point of being bizarre, and not-perfect ending totally gives more closure.

Anyhow, I've been playing ToS, and this time around I've actually decided to use more than one move in a fight.  First play-through basically involved me spamming Tempest until I won.  Didn't matter if it was a random battle, a boss fight, or the final boss fight, I'd just spam Tempest.  I've gotten a fair bit better this time around, or so I'd like to think.  That being said, the Tales RPGs are amongst the few with a battle system that doesn't bore me to tears.

I think I must've really not have paid attention on my first play-through because the total lack of subtlety in their foreshadowing is mind-boggling.  They're practically bashing me over the head with the I AM YOUR FATHER hammer.  Also, now that I've got the whole New Game+ thing wiht EXPx2 going on and haven't been running around spamming Tempest and healing items in the boss battles, I've noticed a few things.  Notably that Yuan's get-up-from-knockdown animation is the most badass thing in the whole game.  I actually kept using my knockdown moves on him just to see it.