I'm liking it alot so far, reached the first town so not that far into it since i'm not sure what the "cooking" menu is for, heh.

Does anyone else have problems with the audio? where sound effects are fucking loud and the voice are soft and barely audible?

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I don't know what you can do, but I just changed the volume of my surround sound speakers 'til it was good. Voices were coming out of the center one.

As for game play and story, I really liked it a lot. I only played one other Tales game, and I've heard some people say it never changes, but I like it the way it is anyways. I thought the story was pretty good too, and the voice acting also.

Cooking is used to boost your party's stats temporarily, or restore hp/tp. The more you cook, the better the person you cooked with gets better at a recipe, from 1 star to mastered. Different characters sometimes make up new recipes.