I agree with all your points save for the money. I always had extra cash with me even without grinding. There were only 2 characters to equip and cooking was not that useful unless you wanted uber monsters.
Overall I was very disappointed. It is the best Tales spin off, but a mediocre sequel. Sadly it is better than some Tales main games like Abyss. Vesperia isn`t much better either. Tales series is not what it used to be.

wait.. wait.. how was Abyss bad?

It's pure awesome.

it was good but clearly emo fanfare. no where near as good as the first one.

pros: lots of regal
cons: emile and marta

I bought 20 of all the food items I could... My monsters carried my team.  At the end my bear was dealing 10 times more damage than Emil per hit.

As a side note, what did the Tales series "used to be?"

That explain why I am getting raped in boss battles. I ignore the monsters because they lack "personality" (I know it is a idiotic reason). Some of them have ATT values higher than Emil at half his level. I use the dumbed down ToS cast as much as I can.

For me they used to be a fresh approach to the RPG genre. The action RPG battles were very challenging. The puzzles were complex and made me remember Lufia 2. The plot offered some interesting moral issues, but my favorite feature were the characters and their interactions. There are several things that bother me in recent Tales titles. The battle system takes a step forward and 2 back in every new game. The fre run feature introduced in Abyss make the battles more annoying than ever. The attacks miss a lot, the enemies move out of the way, your friends get in the way when you are attacking, sometimes 4+ enemies surrond you making it impossible to dodge, counter or run. There is nothing more annoying than the enemy moving in the middle of your combo leaving you slashing the air (even in semi auto mode). It solved the ToS line system, where you could get trapped in the corner or lose sight of your team, but added several others.

Another issue is how they change features that worked in other games and never keep the best options. In Eternia you had 2 mages and several "summons", each mage had a container for summons you could exchange, summons leveled up and learned new spells, to learn exclusive spells you had to keep summons together or in separate cages, so you never had all black or white magic for the characters. I am glad they never used it again. Symphonia had that technical, strike thing that was interesting, but complicated. Nothing worse than trying to change your kind of character late in the game, equip rings, change exphere, forget useful spells. Vesperia has the worst ability system ever. To equip abilities you need SP/Ap points that you earn levelling up. The problem is that you must learn and equip even basic abilities that came with the package on other games, like sidestep, use item on allies. Also your learn them by fighting with specific weapons (insane grinding) and most of them come from synthesys shop (selling some weapons will make skills inacessible to you in your current playthrough). Abyss and Vesperia get credit for making the titles useless again.

What I hate the most about recent Tales games is the plot/characters. The plot can get so convoluted at times it can rival Final Fantasy. Why must they change the name they use to refer to magic in every game (craymel, eres, fonon, blastia)? Why add plot twists that make no sense like one of your party members betraying you for a very crappy reason or the last boss motive being something as lame as I want to destroy this crazy world and make a new one? The characters annoy me because they were already used in previous Tales games and much better. In almost every Tales game we have variations of: timid healer destined to be the main character lover, dumb kind hearted protagonist, tough I-don`t-give-a-shit-about-the-world-protagonist, dumb cheerful easygoing character, older guy to babysit the young characters, perverted casanova wannabe character. Even the skits are recycled or variaqtions of older skits. It gets old.

Even a good formula can get old if used too many in a short time. I loved the original Disgaea and would proudly put it in my top 10 RPG list. Even so, after buying Disgaea 3 I can`t shake of the feeling  that I am playing the same old shit all over.

Thank you for the thought-out response.

I tried ignoring the monsters about midway through the game but the regular ToS characters sucked just that badly.  Originally I was planning to have the final fight party compared of Emil, Marta, Lloyd, and Colette for sentimental reasons.  Yeah... Lloyd and Colette quickly got the boot in favor of my Fenrir/Were Bear.  They just couldn't do enough to warrant a position.

I remember when I was playing Tales of Phantasia that the puzzles were okay.  I wouldn't put them on par with Lufia 2 (which is probably my favorite SNES RPG), but they weren't bad.

The ability system in ToS2 was... so-so.  I kind of miss Strike/Technical as I felt I had some control over how the character developed.  In ToS2 I really didn't.  Plus since I played Marta pretty much exclusively (the final battle sucked...) I didn't really play much with Emil's moveset.  I just got frustrated early on because he swings so high while Marta hits low and all around her.  Basically toward the end, the whole point of Emil and Marta was to use items and keep the enemy combo'd while the monsters killed it.  The C button effectively destroyed any attempt on bosses to spellcast.  

As for characters, I've pretty much seen a good portion of the cliche'd characters at this point.  I don't mind them as long as they're likeable.  Tales characters manage to find new ways to annoy me in every game I play though.  It doesn't matter how grandiose the plot is or what they do with it if the characters annoy me.  Meanwhile, franchises like Disgaea can spin the same "We're off to beat the overlord" plot a hundred times but because their characters are so immediately likeable/amusing, I won't mind at all.  I think Mr. Champloo of Disgaea 3 is the most entertaining RPG character I've seen this generation.   That is to say, I don't mind reusing a character-type or a cliche if you can keep it fresh and entertaining.

Alice and Decus were insanely hard for me. anytime there's multiple bosses things can get really hard in these games.

Emil needs a glory skill.

I didn't use monsters unless I didn't have enough human characters at the time. No matter how bad the characters are, I always prefer humans over monsters.  think the party I ended up using was - Emil, Lloyd, Sheena and Marta. I would have used Zelos if he wasn't so damn annoying.

The review has pretty much all I wanted to know about the game, in a single post. Thanks to WoW for that. :p

Considering I didn't really like the first ToS in the first place, and this one sounds awfully similar (especially in the dialog and dungeon design department) except the monster training thing, I'm really skeptical about taking a look at this one. Then again, more Regal is always good.

@ itsamii and WoW, is this game worth $19.99?

I know you're not asking me, but I would say yeah. The game is not bad, for 20 bucks you can't really go wrong with it.