I liked the Xillia cast much better here than in their own game, but this still felt underbaked. It's a shame, because there are some genuinely stellar moments in this one, bits where I really felt it could've been something special, but it just didn't quite deliver. The medical debt satire, Fractured Milla, the duel with Julius, the entirety of Chapter 12--all of this was great. But again, it felt very rushed, like they wanted it to be a branching game and had to settle for almost total linearity. The ending is abrupt, to say the least, and brings to mind Mass Effect 3.

The premise, which is interestingly dark, is that the PC Ludger is an agent sent to destroy timelines that diverge from the main one. As it turns out, some of these timelines are arguably better than our own: ones in which a character from the first Xillia got to live, or have alternate versions of familiar characters we come to care about. Tales as a series loves twists where there is secretly another world, the monsters are human, your enemy is the hero of another story, and so on and so forth. So I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop--but it never did. The idea that there is an objective alpha timeline--yours--is never challenged, even though there are definitely alternate Ludgers in alternate timelines who are also being sent to destroy divergence catalysts.