I only own two Tales games; Tales of Symphonia and Tales of Phantasia (GBA remake) I searched for others, but they are pretty expensive at this point. For the camera on the world map, I just manipulate with L and R as I see fit. Like I said, I haven't had any issues getting from point A to point B and I've been playing for over 15 hours. It is easier to use on the big console ones for sure though.
There's a English demo patch for Tales of Hearts that covers about 40min ~ 1 hour of the beginning. It's worth trying, personally I had a great time doing so. Or you could just try one of the old games, like Phantasia for the Snes. I don't really enjoy the 3D Tales games, but find the 2D ones to be a lot of fun. I think they're more charming, and while the battle system may look a bit more stiff, I feel like I have better control over it.
I enjoyed Tales of Phantasia to a certain degree. The main turn off was, since that was the first Tales game, it had very little direction. The main problem with 2D battling is that once you get a hulking monster on the screen, it's a really big chore to take care of it without getting bashed from one side of the screen to the other. Also, I considered trying the Demo, but that would just make me want to play the game so much that nothing else would be fun until I had the full game. xD