At the time writing this, I am currently the only review of this game giving it such a high score and I wanna defend that stance.

This game most definitely has its issues, the animations are dreadful and the game overall has pretty mediocre graphics (mayonaise water), the game remains undubbed, a lot of the anime cutscenes are just taken straight from the DS version or are drawn over, and it has random encounters in the year 2013. I will also say that this game starts off pretty slowly and takes a bit for it to pick up, but it sure does and in the 2nd half I couldn't take my eyes off of the screen.

That being said, I think this game is one of the most underrated games in the series. The cast isn't the best or most memorable but they have some good development, really good chemistry with eachother, and there are some big stars of the cast. Shoutout to Hisui, a character I was really indifferent to at the start but ended up loving come the ending. The story also went from really episodic and whatever to being one of the most interesting in the series for me, with some extremely good scenes and a fast pace in the second half with a memorable set of final hours. So many twists and turns too, a lot of stuff in this game I just didn't expect and it was really fun to see.

The gameplay though? Easily the highlight. This is up as one of my favorite combat systems in the series, if not my favorite. It's fast, fluid, has an emphasis on air combat, an dit just has so many fun mechanics. It's a bit of a middleground between Xillia and Vesperia, instead of having a number of attacks you can do, you have a set number of basic attacks and then a set number of artes you can use. You can use them in any order you like which can make for some creative combos, especially with how almost every character can allow you to go flying. Top that off with perfect timing counter attacks that continue your combo or the ability to enter chase links so you can use link artes and freaking teleport behind your enemies in midair and launch them across the screen and this is some of the most fun I've had in the series. Every character has their appeal too, I couldn't get into all of them but with eight party members I still enjoyed playing as more than half of them, Chalcedony being my favorite.

Overall, this game is an absolute steal. This is one of my longer reviews on this site but I just really wanted to defend this game since I feel most Tales fans just pass it off as an average 7/10 game, but there's so much to appreciate here. The only major issue with this game (aside from stupid random encounters) is that it it's trapped on the Vita.