I think Tales of the Abyss was the last straw for me, rather than a sudden drop off a cliff. I was intently following the Tales series (I started with Symphonia and worked backwards) for the action-RPG elements, but was getting progressively less and less able to tolerate the trite and obnoxious anime cliche-laden stories that took upwards of 100 hours to unfold.
Symphonia was already stupid, starring a sanctimonious, bloviating hypocrite of an "absolute pacifist" that cuts through nameless footsoldiers like butter, and I could overlook it the first time because the gameplay was fun and some of the side characters were likable. Going back to the SNES and PS1 games, I was given hope that Symphonia's cringe writing was just a fluke, because the old games were just cool, driven, focused and unapologetic about things like the violence necessary to oppose evil. But it just kept getting worse with the new games. Every game that came after had the same type of protagonist, going on about the same shit, plots and themes being shallow, contradictory, contrived, amateurish, honestly. I got halfway through Abyss when I realized "wait a minute... this series sucks! Fuck these games!"
I hear Arise isn't so bad, but says who, huh? TALES fans? Can't trust them on matters of taste.