Tales Of The Abyss 3DS

After 40 long hours I've finally managed to complete this game.....and I have no strong feelings either way.....so yeah not a good start. Now I LOVE the Tales series but this remake from the original 2006 game had me a little confused. What the hell is a Fonon? I still have no idea. Apart from not understanding most of the conversations about Fonons the story can be followed. So there's a big bad man and he wants to end the world and then there's the classic group of heroes. If you read all the optional skits you can really get quite involved in the story. The thing lacking is character development. You start with an arrogant twat named Luke who apparently is supposed to mature throughout the game. Lets just say he didn't mature gracefully, he went from arrogant twat to whingy negatron, so even after all his sacrificial talk I had no real connection with this character. I much preferred the bad guys team (known as the Six God generals) and was actually a little sad when they departed. Now a game that makes me want to save the bad guys and not the good guys is doing something a little wrong if you ask me. Two of my team were awesome though and by far the best characters in the game. We have Jade whose witty sarcasm and brutal honesty was hilarious in every conversation. He is not afraid to go slapping some whiny princess teenager for being a nuisance. Got to love that! The second being Guy who has a fear of women, hes not gay or anything I don't think but he does not like huggles!
The Menu, battle system and cooking are all that of classic tales of games. There was some option for capacity core equips that I completely ignored because it never got explained and I still finished the game fine. Between the 25-35 hour mark of this 40 hour game things got a little tedious and stretched. You have just got to power through. It has you going back and forth between cities about a billion times to talk to so and so who then sends you to talk to so and so who then sends you back to talk to the original guy who then decided we didn't need that first guy, go talk to this other guy. I'm pretty sure I put about ten hours into commuting.
Still don't know what a Fonon is.
Still not quite sure what actually happened in the end.
Still not sure if the Malkuth empire is paying my miles for all the commuting.