Anyone who can pick a single RPG as "the best of all time" has not played enough RPGs.

ItsaMii said:
Points 2, 3 and 6 are good ones. The rest is rubbish.

1) Lloyd is not overpowered, he is just like any other game main character. What I mean, is that he will be the most used one, so his combos are easier to pull and he is pretty simple to master. Just compare the protagonist of any big name RPG and you will see that the difference between Lloyd and the rest is not so impressive. Also, the arena can be even easier with Genis, Colette and Zelos (assuming you are on the first playthrough).

The entire Lufia series.  Lunar. 

4) You are not playing the game right. Ex spheres can make the game much easier. Among useful Ex skills we have:
stun proof, guard break, status immunity, instant cast, increased item find percentage, xp plus, auto revive, 90% TP cost reduction
Now tell me that frog, deathblow and elemental materias are more useful than that. And do not ignore some usefull field abilities like healing for 1 tp, talking to women for free items and buying items cheaper.

But why?  There was never a moment in game where I said "Ex-Spheres have really made this game easier" or "Wow, I wish I'd had some better Ex-Spheres equipped."  The base problem was that I didn't need them. 

5) Cooking is very useful. Again, I think you are not doing it right. Just set everyone to go all out and after the battle recover 30-40% of your TP. That way you can save your items for boss battles and waste less money on bottles and jellies (food is much cheaper). To be fair, there are a lot of useless status curing recipes. I do not understand your point about Raine. You recover at most 10% TP after battle. Lloyd can waste up to 200 TP without the TP reduction items and some Genis spells cost more than 100 TP. 10% TP recovery after battles is not enough, unless you just mash attack button with Lloyd and set everyone to save 50-75% TP.

Cooking is not useful.  At all.  I don't set anyone to go all out.  I usually set them to Moderate or Conserve (whichever one does the 25% TP use).   With Lloyd I didn't use TP unless the enemy warranted it as Lloyd's own attacks were usually sufficient.  Saying that if you go all out every match, the TP recovery will be useful is like saying that if all you do is stand still and get hit that the HP recovery will be useful.  Sure it might be true, but you're a pretty foolish player to do that.

1) Lloyd is overpowered. The only thing that comes close to Lloyd power-wise in this game is Genis/Raine's Prism Stars attack. Lloyd is fast, combos hard, and deals crazy amounts of damage. Sure main characters are supposed to be good but he's ridiculous.

I partially agree. Lloyd is a swordsman, which is arguably the best melee class. Second best in speed and strength with lots of combos and devastating artes. At higher levels though Genis starts to show off his devastating power and becomes an invaluable asset at dealing with bosses and resistant foes. Not forgetting Kratos who´s very good in both magic and melee. He´s a libero you want to have in your party. I think the big problem is that Sheena, Presea, Regal and Colette are underpowered each with its own big downsides in speed, strength, defense.

In no place does this shine more so than the arena. He quite possibly had the easiest time in the arena by himself as there was a two step plan to almost every victory. Step 1, jump over the enemy. Step 2, use Raining Tiger Blade. Then you win. You see, the enemy can't turn around before you recover from this move so you can continue to mash the special move button doing this over and over until the enemy is dead or you run out of juice (if you have regen-type items you're set).

You can easily beat the arena with Kratos, Zelos and even Genis as well.

Solve the problem of healing and Lloyd could probably solo the game easily. The ultimate party in this game would be Raine (for healing), Genis (for Prism Stars with Raine), and two Lloyds because there is no other party member who's pure unfettered power compares to Lloyd. In fact, if you could ditch the entire rest of the cast for another Lloyd... you'd probably be doing yourself a favor.

My party has always been Lloyd, Genis, Raine, Kratos (Zelos). It´s better to have a magic knight and a swordsman instead of two swordsmen. Magic Knights are faster and have elemental strike artes which can be extremely useful. I think they have better defense as well and can more easily dodge attacks and not have their combos interupted.

2) Lloyd is an idiot. I hate stupid main characters almost as much as I hate emo main characters. They both suck the fun out of the story and make me wonder why that person is the main character in the first place. In the old days, you had characters that didn't talk at all, they just kicked ass. The ones that did talk, like Maxim of Lufia 2, also kicked ass and when they talked people listened because intelligent things appeared in their text boxes.

The problem with Lloyd is not so much that you learn that he's not the brightest of the bunch really quickly. The problem with Lloyd is that the game never lets you forget that. Pretty much every side conversation between Lloyd, Genis, Raine, or Kratos serves to remind us that Lloyd is not too bright. It's almost as if Genis in particular has a buzzer that alerts him when Lloyd says or does something intelligent so that he can quickly make Lloyd feel stupid again which is pretty much what usually happens. If Lloyd amazingly says something smart, Genis (or sometimes Raine) is always quick to point out how good it is in such a way as though Lloyd were a dog that unexpectedly just did a trick.

I kind of see this whole struggle like a tug of war. On the one end is the plot which is desperately trying to portray Lloyd growing as a character and learning from his experiences. On the other end is the rest of the cast which immediately tugs back every time the plot has a chance of doing this. Needless to say that for someone who'd really like some character growth and development as part of the story, it gets frustrating.

Yes, Lloyd is stupid and acts as an idiot. So what? Where´s the big problem with that? I think that this more of a bold opinion than something to critisize the game for. It´s also part of the comedy that he gets reminded he´s stupid.

3) Colette has the brains of a shrubbery. Colette is dense, really dense. Lloyd isn't smart, but you can practically hear the wind whistling from ear to ear through Colette's empty head. When Colette tries thinking, bad things happen. If there's a good conclusion and a bad conclusion you can draw from something, Colette will pick the bad one and then Lloyd needs to comfort her when she becomes angsty (stupid and emo, woo hoo!).

It's almost as if the game is telling us that Colette needs Lloyd to practically do her thinking for her. Sadly, being that this is Lloyd we're talking about... that doesn't quite work either. The result is that Colette needs to be babied by everyone. Things need to be explained simply to her and putting big ideas into her head can become disastrous fairly quickly (as the plot shows).

Why is this bad for me? I don't like babysitting RPG characters. It's not fun. It's frustrating to watch the characters make stunningly bad decisions that anyone with a bit of common sense could see through. Colette seems to be a master of that... if nothing else.

I HATE Colette. Just like you said the gamer is made to feel responsible for all the bad decisions she makes and you have to reluctantly follow her and protect her. She´s pretty useless in battle as well and the worst part is that she joins you from the beginning. Her naivety is just too unreal and for that simple reason I lost all my interest on the first half of the game. Her voice-over is also terrible.

4) Ex-Spheres are practically useless. I don't understand why developers put worthless things into games. They waste my time, make me excited over nothing, and possibly waste my in-game money. Ex-Spheres are kind of like this. Yeah, they give you some neat abilities, but really... why bother? You don't need them to win any fights. There was never a time where I said, "Gee, that fight was so much easier thanks to my Ex-Spheres!" You know why? Because they never mattered.

In other games like Final Fantasy VII, we got Materia. You could summon a freaking dragon from the sky to blow up enemies. It was great. It let you do things that were awesome and using it correctly increased your characters' power levels exponentially. In Tales of Symphonia, the most useful Ex-Sphere ability I had was the one that let me run twice as fast in areas (thanks for no run button jerks). Yay. I'm sure Cloud would be so jealous of that one.

I actually found these added stuff neat and they are also in TotA which I liked. The useless thing was that you could choose between either Technical or Physical for each character, which in the end didn´t have much of an impact.

5) Cooking is useless. Now, there's a slim chance that cooking could be useful. However that slim chance involves not having Raine in your party which you will for most of the game. You see, since your special ability points recover after each battle and with each weapon hit... you essentially have infinite healing. So why go through the trouble of learning recipes, finding ingredients, and building your cooking skills when you could just have Raine use Nurse and restore everyone's HP to full instantly?

The answer is you don't. It's another set of worthless collectibles... like Ex-Spheres.

I pretty much never use cooking as well. I also always lack the appropriate ingredients and never have enough gald to spare for them. I prefer stacking up gels and using healing artes instead. Cooking really shines and is extremely useful in the Tales of the World games. 

Anyone who can pick a single RPG as "the best of all time" has not played enough RPGs.