Unless my eyes decieve me, not one person has mentioned his greatest contribution to society...he voiced Leonardo in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon.

Anyways, I played and enjoyed the hell out of ToS and was 25 at the time. So sue me. It's pathetic that some people will create an entire thread just to piss people off. An honest critique is fine, but if the motive is rotten, the whole deal is rotten. Get a hobby. 

The only people getting pissed off are the people who are immature and unable to stomach criticism.  If you want to get "pissed off" then go for it, but do it somewhere else.  The rest of us can continue our discussion about the game's many flaws.

Maybe that's the larger problem.  Ex-Spheres, Technical versus Strike, Cooking...etc, none of it ever really mattered because the game was easy regardless.   I never had to reset Tales of Symphonia.  I just won.  The game never drove me to care about the rest of its mechanical side by continuing to reward me for not doing so.

By contrary, a game likes Skies of Arcadia Legends kicked my butt a couple of times.  There were a few battles that were far more difficult than I'd expected and even after preparation were still pretty tough.  In Tales of Symphonia, I'm walking through the game crushing boss after boss.  Even the final boss was kind of a push over.  I was literally just wondering "How long until you're dead?" during that fight because it wasn't a matter of "Will I beat it?" rather than "How long until I beat it?"

did you collect all the devil arms and fight Abyssion the first play threw ? I went down there expecting an easy win he kicked my ass rather quick >.>

Oh, are we pointing out Tales of Symphonia's flaws now? I'd join in, but I only do things that are at least moderately challenging. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some baby seals to club...

In all seriousness though, it was a fun enough game to play, but it wasn't perfect either. Still, I'll probably buy the sequel if I can find it discounted somewhere.

Nope.  I actually put the game down for like a month towards the end of it because I got so bored.  I discovered when I started it up again that I was practically right in front of the final boss so I spent 30 minutes or whatever time it took and beat it just for the sake of beating it.

I really have no interest in doing the side-quests or any of that.  What would my reward be?  More meaningless collectibles?  More powerful weapons to kill enemies that are already pathetically easy to kill?

I want to play through ToS again (my favorite Tales game between itself, Destiny, Abyss and Legendia), but I'll wait to see if ToS2 has any unlockables related to savegames first. :)

Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn did that.  It would be pretty cool if Tales of Symphonia 2 did something similar.

The fact that you say the game is too easy is actually a really good thing. It means that people who have no experience in RPG could make through the game without too much problem. However, if you want to complete all the side-quests or play at a higher difficulty level, the game gets much more challenging.