"Tales of" help?

[Cetasaurus]

I suck at battling, and doing that weird thing when you set magic attacks and then like magic combinations or something, and can we block in these games? I mean, I'm so awful at this. I just hit A on physical targets and B on ghost-looking targets and eventually die. I don't even game very much, so maybe I just need to try more, but I don't get this battle system. x.x Can someone explain, even just really briefly?

[Golden Emblem]

Which Tales are you playing? Some are different than the others.

[Cetasaurus]

Oh haha... Well Symphonia and Phantasia are what I'm playing now. If you could answer for either of those I could probably just fit it for both of them, since they seem practically the same to me.