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.
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.