Characters Absorbing Elements

I recently discovered that in Symphonia, if a character has enough of a resistance to an element, the character can actually start absorbing the element. For instance, I have some equipment on Lloyd that has fire resistance. I believe his armor, his head equipment, and maybe even his hand equipment have fire resistance. This alone gives him enough resistance to fire that fire attacks are invalid. When I equip him with Garnet, then he actually absorbs fire attacks as health. I have several questions about this.

1) Am I the only one who didn't know about this? I have played Symphonia since it came out on the Gamecube 10 years ago. I've beaten the game like 8 times and I just now found this out.

2) Am I the only one obsessed with this? Once I found out this was possible, I have spent most of my playing time trying to get other characters to absorb elements. I even had a dream where I was trying to get this to work. The moral here is don't play video games right before bed.

3) Is this possible in other Tales games? If so, I must know which ones so I can abandon my family and go experiment.

All joking aside, is having your characters absorb elements something you go for when equipping your character, or is it a nice perk if your equipment happens to do that?

I have never been able to get it to work to begin with.

Gamefaqs nerds says it possible if you have enough resistance.

Arn wrote:

Gamefaqs nerds says it possible if you have enough resistance.

Is this just for Symphonia or does it work in other Tales games?

At endgame/postgame levels, making your characters resist/nullify/absorb elemental damage is the main course of action for defense; much better than tacking on a few defense points. Presea and Raine in particular can absorb Fire, Water, Wind, Earth, Ice and be immune to the others (Presea won't be immune to Darkness) with Penguinist Gloves and their respective elemental-resist armors. Colette can absorb most of those too, but only be immune to Ice and resist the rest. Lloyd can absorb Earth and Lightning if you give him Mumbane and Rare armor, and pretty much everyone can absorb Fire if they have Star armor. All of these assume Reflect Ring and Persian Boots, but since Reflect Ring is +1 all elements rather than +2, you can use Capes or gems instead to push one specific element to +7 for absorb.

I wouldn't say this is commonly known, but on the old forums pretty much anyone active in the Symphonia section knew, and anyone who went on Majestic Phantasian when it was still a thing probably knows.

this was improved with the Ultimate Red and Ultimate Blue Capes.

If you're talking about Vesperia, there are a bunch of items that give you elemental resistance too, but as far as I can remember they don't stack.

Bo Staff Katana wrote:

Arn wrote:

Gamefaqs nerds says it possible if you have enough resistance.

Is this just for Symphonia or does it work in other Tales games?

Xillia does, and it feels damn good healing from a Mystic Arte. Can't remember any other game at the moment.

I knew about it, yeah. I've always had Raine/Presea fitted for elemental immunity by the end-game.

A surprising number of people never realized that you can scroll down on the Status screen to see the elemental attributes of each character, it seems.

This game has a LOT in it that people only pick up on years later though. For instance, I only just discovered that you can go north of the Iselia item shop into this mini-farm area and get free Grapes at the start of the game. It's 2014.  

Emil12345 wrote:

this was improved with the Ultimate Red and Ultimate Blue Capes.

Was this in Symphonia? I don't recall the ultimate capes.

King Cat the Sixth wrote:

Xillia does, and it feels damn good healing from a Mystic Arte. Can't remember any other game at the moment.

I will need to keep that in mind next time I play the game. I had played through all of Xillia on hard without any problems until I got to the final boss, who just out right murdered me. Maybe that was my problem.

I didn't find any absorbing of elements in Abyss. It seems like element resistance in armor wasn't that big of a thing in Abyss. Drake mentioned Vesperia, but I will check it out when I have the chance. I have things to research on Vesperia anyway. Might as well check this out too.