“Hypothesizing about never being born is meaningless. You’re living your own life. Experiences that only you know, feelings that only you feel, don’t deny them. You’re you.”
This is our list of the top 25 female characters of all-time. Today, we begin counting one by one until we reach the best of the best on Sept. 30.
24) Tear Grants (Tales of the Abyss) – 2 votes/87 points
Chris: Five minutes into Tales of the Abyss, Tear is trying to assassinate her own brother for reasons we don’t discover until much later. So right away, we can put a mark in the “resolve” and “determination” boxes on the character checklist.
Tear’s life has been pretty miserable. Her family lived on an island that was essentially destroyed in a war, and sank below the outer crust into a poison-filled ocean of death below. Her older brother raises her, because her mother dies. Not a good look.
Ultimately, though, she still decides to stop her brother from destroying the outer crust part of the world, realizing that revenge isn’t worth creating suffering for other people. So she battles her one remaining family member, as well as her mentor, Legretta, to keep people safe.
Along the way, she also manages to guide Luke through an extreme amount of character growth. Luke starts off as a sniveling, entitled brat, but he eventually turns it around, and Tear has a lot to do with that. She develops feelings for him as time goes on, but doesn’t become dependant on him or lose her will in the process. As a result, the two end up becoming one of the most endearing couples in the series.
Beyond that, Tear possesses capable fighting abilities and a cool design. Until this point, healers had very few options for physical combat, but Tear is nearly as deadly with her daggers as she is her spells.
Add it all up, and you have an easy pick for a top 25 character.
Joseph: As far as Tales characters go, Tear isn’t exactly the strongest physically or mentally. Her shining attribute is her strength of spirit. You need only play through the first hour of Tales of the Abyss to know that. Tear’s counterpart, Luke fon Fabre, was a gigantic pain in the neck. If he wasn’t spending the game being an entitled, selfish narcissist, he was whining about not being good enough or how he had to make amends. So on top of all of the hand holding she has to do, it turns out the main villain is her brother, she’s particularly sensitive to the miasma and she has to fight her former mentor. The only reason she wasn’t the main character was because there would have been no reason to have Luke in the party.
Jason: Having not played Tales of the Abyss, I really can’t contribute much here. I can say, however, that I love Tear’s flowing hair and general character character design. The same could be said of many Tales of characters though, so I’m not how much that’s worth.
TOP 25 FEMALE CHARACTERS
Introduction/Honorable Mention
Objection Network 
Maybe Abyss could have used the Xillia treatment and had you choose if you wanted to play as the character who gets things going, or the one that gets embroiled in all of it.
That would have been an interesting twist, considering how it played out for Jude and Milla’s stories. I feel like you kinda have to do Luke’s story first to avoid spoiling too much, but being able to have Tear’s story in New Game +? That might’ve been pretty cool.