What the hell is up with these reviews here
Now, it's my first Tales game, so I don't know how this game stands against the rest of the series. On its own, the best way I can define this game is calling it comfort food for enjoyers of both JRPGs and shonen anime.
As someone who grew up with shonen, this game tickles the right spots in my brain. The story is divided into arcs, and each arc has very little interaction with the next. You go to an area, learn about it, kill the lord, liberate it, on to the next area. This ocasionally means some character actions that don't feel properly setup (Rinwell vs. Almeidrea), or characters acting non-sensically just to... tick a box in the list of tropes I guess? (Law vs. Almeidrea)
It also means that there is no conductor line connecting everything together for a huge chunk of the game, which might make it feel unfocused, which I guess it is, but the characters and their interactions really carried the narrative on their back to me. Every conversation they had with each other felt so charming and full of personality to me, and the design of the entire party is extremely appealing to me, for some reason.
This also means that the final stretch of the game is a huge info dump, where the whole party effectively becomes little more than exposition machines, and they become very verbose, but in a redundant manner, repeating the same stuff over and over, there is a lot of fluff in the final stretch, and it kinda reminded me of the worst parts of FFXIV.
It's extremely clunky, and I wouldn't be surprised to hear that there were development issues towards the end, as even the cutscenes lose quality. Climatic cutscenes throughout the game are bombastic, with some pretty incredible fight choreography, until they just... aren't. It makes for a fairly exhausting last 5-ish hours or so. The final dungeon is also filled with giant enemies, with big HP bars - I almost dropped the difficulty to easy, just so things would move faster.
Almost. Parenthesis to talk about the combat: it's not deep or involved in the slightest, but goddammit it's flashy as hell, and the flashyness is so well done, that it alone kept me entertained throughout the whole game, all 60 hours of it. The AI doesn't feel very good though, but I think this is my personal preferences talking. It's one thing to play an ARPG like Kingdom Hearts, where Donald and Goofy are dead all the fucking time but Sora can do everything, so whatever. Here though, someone dying is bad for you, and it's highly questionable when party members die because they were too stupid to dodge. I never feel entirely in control, which always annoys me on some level.
But fuck they are flashy, and I endured those HP sponges enemies on the normal difficulty, because at the end of the day, I was being entertained by it, those finishing moves never got old, I legit don't know how they managed that. I also don't agree with the common criticism against the CP system, as I felt it gave a management resource aspect to the game, that always kept me on my toes, rather than frustrate me. I did do plenty of sidequests though, so there is that. Maybe it really is frustrating if you just follow the main story, I couldn't say.
There was also one story beat at the very very end that... look, it's painfully obvious that they really wanted to finish the game with a particular fight, and then just wrote in reverse to get there, logic and consistency be damned. That, plus the clunky as hell pacing of the final stretch, meant I was ready to give this a 7/10.
But man... that final fight and the ending that followed were some fairly extraordinary shonenshit nonsense - the right spots of the brain were being tickled yet again, and I suddenly forgot that I was exhausted with the game, like a mere 10 minutes before.
This is also a good moment to bring up the excellent English voiceover direction, and point out that plenty of scenes have some impressive gravitas, and occasionally offer some slight subversions of anime trope. The soundtrack does a great job enhancing every moment, from combat to cutscenes, even if it's nothing I'll listen casually - it's similar to Vagrant Story in that aspect.
The production values are also great, it's a gorgeous-looking game blablabla, that much is obvious. Any RPG that makes me spend a good deal of time doing sidequests (there's fishing!) is a great time to me. I am excited to try out other Tales games in the future, but this is apparently somewhat of a departure from previous entries so I actually don't know if me enjoying this means anything for the rest of the series. But if nothing else, I got at least one pretty good JRPG out of it.
Now, it's my first Tales game, so I don't know how this game stands against the rest of the series. On its own, the best way I can define this game is calling it comfort food for enjoyers of both JRPGs and shonen anime.
As someone who grew up with shonen, this game tickles the right spots in my brain. The story is divided into arcs, and each arc has very little interaction with the next. You go to an area, learn about it, kill the lord, liberate it, on to the next area. This ocasionally means some character actions that don't feel properly setup (Rinwell vs. Almeidrea), or characters acting non-sensically just to... tick a box in the list of tropes I guess? (Law vs. Almeidrea)
It also means that there is no conductor line connecting everything together for a huge chunk of the game, which might make it feel unfocused, which I guess it is, but the characters and their interactions really carried the narrative on their back to me. Every conversation they had with each other felt so charming and full of personality to me, and the design of the entire party is extremely appealing to me, for some reason.
This also means that the final stretch of the game is a huge info dump, where the whole party effectively becomes little more than exposition machines, and they become very verbose, but in a redundant manner, repeating the same stuff over and over, there is a lot of fluff in the final stretch, and it kinda reminded me of the worst parts of FFXIV.
It's extremely clunky, and I wouldn't be surprised to hear that there were development issues towards the end, as even the cutscenes lose quality. Climatic cutscenes throughout the game are bombastic, with some pretty incredible fight choreography, until they just... aren't. It makes for a fairly exhausting last 5-ish hours or so. The final dungeon is also filled with giant enemies, with big HP bars - I almost dropped the difficulty to easy, just so things would move faster.
Almost. Parenthesis to talk about the combat: it's not deep or involved in the slightest, but goddammit it's flashy as hell, and the flashyness is so well done, that it alone kept me entertained throughout the whole game, all 60 hours of it. The AI doesn't feel very good though, but I think this is my personal preferences talking. It's one thing to play an ARPG like Kingdom Hearts, where Donald and Goofy are dead all the fucking time but Sora can do everything, so whatever. Here though, someone dying is bad for you, and it's highly questionable when party members die because they were too stupid to dodge. I never feel entirely in control, which always annoys me on some level.
But fuck they are flashy, and I endured those HP sponges enemies on the normal difficulty, because at the end of the day, I was being entertained by it, those finishing moves never got old, I legit don't know how they managed that. I also don't agree with the common criticism against the CP system, as I felt it gave a management resource aspect to the game, that always kept me on my toes, rather than frustrate me. I did do plenty of sidequests though, so there is that. Maybe it really is frustrating if you just follow the main story, I couldn't say.
There was also one story beat at the very very end that... look, it's painfully obvious that they really wanted to finish the game with a particular fight, and then just wrote in reverse to get there, logic and consistency be damned. That, plus the clunky as hell pacing of the final stretch, meant I was ready to give this a 7/10.
But man... that final fight and the ending that followed were some fairly extraordinary shonenshit nonsense - the right spots of the brain were being tickled yet again, and I suddenly forgot that I was exhausted with the game, like a mere 10 minutes before.
This is also a good moment to bring up the excellent English voiceover direction, and point out that plenty of scenes have some impressive gravitas, and occasionally offer some slight subversions of anime trope. The soundtrack does a great job enhancing every moment, from combat to cutscenes, even if it's nothing I'll listen casually - it's similar to Vagrant Story in that aspect.
The production values are also great, it's a gorgeous-looking game blablabla, that much is obvious. Any RPG that makes me spend a good deal of time doing sidequests (there's fishing!) is a great time to me. I am excited to try out other Tales games in the future, but this is apparently somewhat of a departure from previous entries so I actually don't know if me enjoying this means anything for the rest of the series. But if nothing else, I got at least one pretty good JRPG out of it.