Recent reviews by ¥3tr4el

Now that I have played through the game, I feel comfortable to write my final review:

This game is wonderful, it feels fast and fluent. I miss the little skits at the end of the battles, they are still there, don’t get me wrong, but the get lost in the game mechanics. The battle chaining made me start a new battle before the skit was done.

The battle itself is faster and looks good if the combos work. The amount of team finisher adds a little bit randomness to the visuals therefore it does not get boring that fast.

Even the story feels faster. It is divided into smaller parts and feels like you accomplish thinks faster, that drives the story forward.

Furthermore, the game is almost bug free. I encountered one single bug that was annoying but fixed itself: there is a way to battle old boss enemies again. At one point, you do battle more than one boss. A boss has certain breakpoints you need to do a team finisher on to get the health lower. Team finishers do area damage. I killed one of the bosses with my finisher while hitting another with the area damage into his breakpoint. The button prompt of his team finisher did not appear, and I was unable to harm him further. After a couple of minutes, the boss killed all except the healer, the healer resurrected my player char, the prompt appears, the battle continued as expected.

The amount of grind, even for a 100% playthrough, is reduced and there is no grade shop. Both are changes I don’t like but makes the game available for a broader audience. That’s why I recommend this game even for beginners of the jrpg genre.

Visually it looks very pleasing with a lot of different atmospheres to take in. But I it felt like the amount of drawn cutscenes is reduced. I did not count and compared, but I liked this scene in the past games, and it felt like they are less.

In regard to the last games: like already mentioned I would recommend this game to jrpg newcomers, fans of jrpgs and fans of the tales series, but I would not recommend older tales games based on this one. If this is your first and you liked it, but you are not sure if you would like the older ones just as much, pick one and give it a try but don’t expect them to feel the same. The changes to the series with this game are not groundbreaking but enough to make it feel fresh for long time players of the series and make it more approachable than older entries. But it does change enough to make it hard to compare.

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