formative rpg for me, hit at the right time. i don't think the "twist" is that egregious . we were post matrix, post mmo rpgs, its no surprise this type of story made its way into fantasy jrpgs. it doesn't cheapen the moody planet stuff at all in my opinion . the combat is engaging for a jrpg, sure by end game you're just spamming the strongest moves, but its still fun, if you decide to grind its not even that bad. besides the weird end game stuff it feels similar to second story, similar plot points. mid 2000s anime va so prepare for that, i don't mind, i have nostalgia for that era. music is awesome, that synthy-prog rockish instrumental rock. always wish the space travel bits were a bit more fleshed out and more integral but otherwise this is a personal canon fav.

I wanted to like this a lot more than I did. It's so unique and interesting, but it really did drag on despite the fact that it is structured in such a bite sized way.

The worst part of most JRPGs is the beginning... and this game starts over and over and over again. The battle system is very uninteresting, and the structure restricts you from really getting attached to a character.

The music is great, and the visuals are nice (though not as good as other HD-2D games, and the way it culminates is very cool. I just can't deny that I was ready for it to end quite quickly.

The underlying game systems continue to be satisfying, but christ do these games get more drab and lifeless with every annual release. It doesn't do for a game franchise this driven by charm and whimsy above most other concerns to continually shed what's left of its personality in pursuit of constant Content churn.

What really soured me on this entry is its appalling live service elements, though. Spending the entire single-player portion of the game showing off your generation's main gimmick and then gating actual player access to it behind stringently time-limited online raids is complete garbage.

A flagrantly contrived and unlikeable adventure game that starts out bad and gets progressively worse. Somehow manages to be tediously predictable and obvious at every turn despite also being built entirely out of bullshit cheap tricks. Recommended for fans of Ace Attorney who wish it was dramatically worse and arbitrarily difficult to interact with.

The extra half a star is for voice actress par excellence Megumi Ogata putting her whole ass into the game's most colourful role and coming away almost single-handedly responsible for any semblance of life it possesses.

God, what a wasteland. Every ounce of personality and recognisable identity has been drained from the Tales series in service of a game that doesn't succeed on a single front.

The visuals are a bland and uninspired Unreal Engine soup. The combat is characteristically undernourished with the added wrinkle of being more dependent than ever on party members in a title that removed co-op and features the dumbest AI yet seen in the series.

The characters, meanwhile, usually the saving grace and defining quality of these games, are absolute dogshit. These are sub-Bioware cutouts who, between the six of them, have a single personality trait: they are monomaniacally obsessed with discussing Fantasy Racism, the idiotic allegory that has been allowed to replace every single other aspect of the writing.

The most comprehensively awful JRPG I've had the misfortune to play since FFXV.

It has a mature and frank attitude towards sex that is rare in any medium and downright miraculous in a videogame, paired with a set of thoughtful game mechanics that do a beautiful job expressing theme through play.

Unfortunately, it jams the brakes on all of that every hour or so to indulge in some of the most trite, YA-novel theatrics imaginable, throwing up contrived and sometimes tasteless stumbling blocks for its central couple that fail to add stakes or urgency to a game that only seems to want to be laid-back in the first place. It's juvenile in a way that almost undoes all of the delicate character work elsewhere in the game, and all the more frustrating for how easily it could have been snipped out entirely.

The game is never anything but gorgeous, though.