For me, Destiny Remake was just on the clear opposite end of the spectrum in terms of Normal Attack and Arte balance in comparison to most of the Team Symphonia games. Yeah, when it gets down to it, it does have more combo potentiality than something like Attack x9 -> Base Arte -> Etc, etc. But on that end, it completely unravels the difficulty in some places (especially towards the end of the game when you have quite a lot of CC on your characters with high damaging, multi-hitting moves to boot). When considering how useless normal attacks were in Destiny R, I usually wondered why they did not just nix it in the first place. Of course, it's not too bad to other Action RPGs that take a more skill oriented focus (Star Ocean 2 and 4, for instance, where normal attacks were useless right out of the gate, and it definitely was not like Destiny R enemies just allowed themselves to be caught in combos all the time either like the two example games here).
I would say that Rebirth had the best balance between them, as the artes were not that spammable but were quite invaluable in lots of situations. Normal attacks were good starters, but it was not like you could just do all normal attacks uninterrupted like in Abyss and Vesperia and then go for the same arte combination. In the end though, I would prefer if Graces took a Rebirth stand on things, but I prefer the CC system to most of the Team Symphonia TP battle systems.
I would say that Rebirth had the best balance between them, as the artes were not that spammable but were quite invaluable in lots of situations. Normal attacks were good starters, but it was not like you could just do all normal attacks uninterrupted like in Abyss and Vesperia and then go for the same arte combination. In the end though, I would prefer if Graces took a Rebirth stand on things, but I prefer the CC system to most of the Team Symphonia TP battle systems.