Tales of (In-Jokes from) the Abyss, Part 1

I’ve never finished Tales of the Abyss, despite having attempted to play it three times prior and being intrigued by the story; something just happens to come up and get in the way of me finishing the game, somehow.

Now, I’m starting a fourth game of Abyss with a pair of friends – namely, mDuo13 and Tsubasa – with the full intention of finishing it before taking on anything else. We’ve already gone through a playthrough of Tales of Graces (that was before Tales of Graces F for the PS3 was announced with that after-story segment — we’re probably gonna play it again!) and it went well, so we figured we’d keep this up with other games.

So, while Tsubasa’s searching for that one not-used copy of the PS3 version of Eternal Sonata (née Trusty Bell), we decided we’d attempt to play Tales of the Abyss, with our inaugural session last Wednesday. As with Graces before it, we joke around quite a bit while playing, and thus this gives rise to a handful of (often pretty stupid) jokes, of which some of them recur. After the break is a list of what we came up with after our first session; and, of course, spoiler alert for stuff up until the Kaitzur checkpoint.

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Italicized items indicate recurring jokes.

• Fonists: Fon sounds like “phone”⁽¹⁾. This has affected several plot points:
  • Everyone has a cellphone (hidden from view), from which they invoke artes. (Think Properly Learned Modern Magic.)
  • Phoneons are little particles in the air that, as the name implies, work to keep one’s phone active.
  • Likewise, a Field of Phoneons is a denser field of said particles, allowing your phone to work twice as hard.
  • Phone Master Ion can phone-a-friend in order to summon a giant laser from the sky, immediately obliterating mobs within a certain radius. Of course, he takes all the credit.
  • Capacity Cores are now accessories that you can equip onto your phone in order to make it more powerful.
  • Having your phone slots sealed involes the use of a virus that removes any traces of a usable signal within a given radius. So, it’s sorta like Largo forced Jade onto AT&T⁽²⁾ in that one scene. It’s already bad enough that they’re in rural areas for 99% of the game…
• Van, at least in the dub, sounds almost like the narrator from the English dub of the Pokémon TV series.
• Speaking of Pokémon, we’ve made several jokes about what it means 2 B A (Phone) Master.
• United States of Whatever: Due to Luke’s bratty nature, it became appropriate to summarize plot points in a nod to Liam Lynch’s (in)famous song:
  • “So I went to Engeve and ate an apple…they were like “hnnngh” and I was like, ‘WHATEVER.'”
  • “So I was in the woods, and this liger comes up to me and goes “RAWR”, and I was like, ‘WHATEVER.'”
  • “So I was on the Tartarus, and this chick comes up to me and goes “MMMM♥” and I was all like, ‘WHATEVER.'”
  • “So I’m here getting my pants wet crossin’ this river…this chick comes up to me, starts going ‘You killed my mommy, I’ll never forgive you’ and I went ‘WHATEVER.'”
    …and so on and so forth.
• Star Wars: Aside from the hero’s name being Luke, and several things regarding Luke and his destiny, a joke was cracked in reference to a parody of the aforementioned song: “So I was on the Tartarus, and I accidentally stabbed a dude, and he goes “GUH” and I’m, like, “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!”
• Engeve sounds like the Japanese term 園芸部 (engeibu), which means “gardening club” (makes sense, right?)…I’m taking that literally. They’re not a town. They’re a club, meeting in the middle of nowhere to get their Harvest Moon on.
• Sayonara Memories, supercell’s song about graduation, conveniently became a referential pun (and a song about amnesia, instead) when Luke told Jade about losing his memories to the Malkuth guys.
• Guy isn’t scared of women…he’s just scared of Tear. (Mostly because Ion’s around and he’s been known to fool people. And by ‘people’ I mean ‘me’, at the very least.)
• Anise was localized as a valley girl…and isn’t voiced by Halko Momoi, so we’re getting an undub for our next session, dammit.
• Tear is tsundere. There are a handful of instances in which this happens, such as Tear looking at the sleeping Luke in Engeve and smiling (her dere side), but the best (and most messed-up) instance of this session?
  I..it’s n-n-n-not like s-s-she’s killing people because she wants to, or anything…!
• Dist the Rose? More like Dist the Fabulous. I’m sure everyone’s made that joke, though, but I figured I’d make a note of it anyway.
• Luke x Guy capped off our session — all we wanted to do was stay at an inn to restore our health and Luke and Guy are swordfighting in the night: “I need help with something…it’s embarrassing, but I’m asking you because you’re the only other person around here who uses a sword…” Keep in mind, all three of us normally don’t do that ‘pairing’ thing, but man, NamBan. (Coincidentally, Tsubasa and I attended Yaoi-Con⁽³⁾ that weekend…)

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1. Yes, I know it’s a play off of the other kind of ‘phone’ and/or the suffix phon-. For the purposes of this playthrough, we make jokes based off of the use of “phone” as in “cellphone”.
2. AT&T is an American telephony/internet/television company here in the United States, slightly notorious for dropping calls all over the place and/or having slow over-the-air data due to customers’ ubiquitous adoption of the iPhone.
3. Just so you know: we didn’t attend it for the yaoi. But that’s another story.