Tales of Symphonia was the first I played and the one I love the most. Granted, I've only played ToS 2 and Abyss after that ^^ I always look at the playstation with envy cuz they get all the tales games now..

Abyss does a lot of good stuff with the story and ToS is just such a massive, wonderful world. Engaging and likeable characters, great battle system and so much stuff to do. Again, can't say much about the newer ones since I haven't played them. If they really have declined then I guess I got out while it was still good :)

Of course it's going downhill. They release a new title, like, every 8 months.

So, I know hyperbole is a thing and all, but if we're talking about mainline releases done by the main team:

- Graces = December 2009

- Xillia = September 2011 (1 year 9 months)

- Xillia 2 = November 2012 (1 year 2 months)

- Zestiria = January 2015  (2 years 2 months)

- Berseria = ??? 2016 (1 year and counting)

Getting the titles localized in quick succession in the west doesn't really have anything to do with the quality or speed at which they're developed at.  Nor does getting spinoffs done by other teams.

That really does put things into perspective then. 

For me I guess, they've just gotten incredible lazy. With the writing, story, characters, graphical fidelity, etc. With that amnount of time in between releases, we should expect them to look better, and to me, have new and intriguing plot devices. 

Just my opinion though, as I'm burned out from them for now. 

While I don't agree with you on the second paragraph, one thing I will say is that maybe Zestiria should've had a bit more to it than it did given the longer development.

(I do think it overhauled a lot of things - dungeons were better than the Xillias; maps which were bigger etc., just that they should've tightened up things like the story in the time they had).

Good! Now maybe the writers and game designers will have enough time to come up with more compelling and unique ideas to push the series forward.

Yeah tales of vesperia was amazing, I am playing Tales of Zesteria right now and find it so boring, I agree with the downhillstatement. 

You don't know how much I agree about the graphics. Zestiria looked like a PS3 game from about a quarter of the way through the console cycle, when games were starting to look a lot better, but still had a long way to go until what we started seeing near the end of last gen. The character models were really unimpressive, and there was clearly very low effort put into the bulk of the game. I don't know if it was the team almost kind of protesting that they were tired of developing on old hardware or what, but there just wasn't much more than the minimum effort.

To make things worse, the game really didn't look all that much better on the PS4 or PC.