I've played the super famicon version of Tales of Phantasia and still play it frequently with my ps3 pad. I also played Tales of Destiny, which was enjoyable and my first Tales game. I wish Vesperia for the ps3 had come to the West, I have no desire to own a 360.
I would really love to play the PSX version of Tales, since it includes the cute little ninja girl as an extra character and Chester has actual skills! He didn't really need them in the original, he was such a power house just firing arrows from the other side of the screen . Tales of Eternia was kind of boring to me, it just never clicked. The farthest I got was to the cave with Shadow, I think a big problem was that I didn't like ANYONE at all in it and the music wasn't that stellar compared to its predecessors. Didn't have the "omph" of Motoi Sakuraba's previous works.
The games in the series that I do enjoy are very fun though. I hope we continue to get them released in the US. I once considered trying to learn Japanese just so I could play the PS2 Tales remake and Super Robot Wars (the ones with licensed robots). Maybe one day, for now I'd rather work on French or Russian.
My favorite Tales characters would have to be: Cless, Chester, Archie(! !), Dhaos, Stahn, Garr/Woodrow, Rutee, LEON(! !) and the one bard guy, I can't remember his name but he sounded funny to use in battle.