Recent reviews by FrostyGear

Almost 90 hours into the game and I think I safely say that it's bland RPG at best and at worst you remove the R & P. Seriously what has happened to this series? (I never played Zesteria or Berseria more than a couple hours either)

The TL:DR is - the game is paper thin substance and one of the worst Tales games easily. That said for me the series has been slipping into this hack/slash mediocrity since Xillia 2. Wouldn't even recommend it if it was free cause you'd still be spending time on it.

Graphics - UE engine... pretty ... vibrant ... does not excuse the rest of this nonsense sorry.

Story - Main characters are about as one dimensional as they come even the supporting cast overs very little to the depth of the story aside being the almost mandatory extra character slots. The over all story has next to NO pacing and in the last couple hours of the game it basically is a snooze fest of exposition.

Combat - is like KH series and DS series combined which in theory sounds alright but falls on it's face right out of the gate being more button mashing then anything else ( I've never really cared for combat in any tales game that said because the combat has never been the selling point of these games and never should be... seriously it could be turn based for all I care )

Skits - are in this obnoxious art style that had me skipping them and with the inclusion of the quest markers and hand holding in these games since the days of Xillia 1-2 there isn't a reason to even watch them for information purposes. I will always hate the addition of markers in these kinds of games ( Yes I know you can turn them off that's not the point )

Exploration and Side events - are pretty much non-existent once again the game uses the term RPG loosely and a personally I prefer the over world to the sectioned off areas ( This even extends to my thoughts on FF14 vs WoW so it's not just this series )

Puzzles - are none existent as well removing another chunk of what makes an RPG good and have some alternative game-play depth I'm not saying the ones in past games have been hard but they are welcome additions to it ( it feels like they just released a shell of a game here, even the Xbox 360 ToV with lots of cut content was more fleshed out than this game over all )

Remember this moments - are the worst dropped ball and none worse than the ending area and if you've made it there you probably know what I am talking about. WHY name areas after other games and have those kinds of references if you're not going to do anything with them ( Sorry but Edna and what's his face cameos aren't gonna cut it here, though the addition of Cronos from Xillia could've led to a much more compelling end game story )

Holy **** is this a boring DLC (if it can even be called that) I was geared up for something the size of "The Following" however was extremely disappointed with it in comparison, especially with the $14.00 price tag attached to it. Honestly it just seems very lazily put together and like not very much thought was put into it. The time and man hours put into developing this really is a waste I would've rather had that put towards Dying Light 2 that has seemed to be on TBA for almost a year now.

Uninstalled due to political message unnecessarily being pushed in a video game.

My odds of recommending this game to someone are 2/5 and here is why (currently):

Right out of the gate the game (Microsoft) insist that you have to have Hotmail in order to make an account which is I think is very unnecessary given that the game is on Steam. Which took a fair amount of starting/stopping the game to get passed the various error messages.

My second issue with the game became the audio or rather the noise the audio made during in game moments of silence that gave off this crackling sound effect constantly and would only break during sections with character dialogue (or other various scripted sound effects).

And lastly (though a small point of contention) the graphics look identical to the Xbox 360 version and I would have liked to see them give a little bit more polish to the game(s) during the porting process.

I got the game around release time and while it was entertaining as a Dynasty Warriors-ish hack and smash your face on the keyboard type game, I found that there was little plot to keep me invested in the story line. Honestly wish that the game had just followed the events of the show while giving opportunity to add smaller plot lines along the way from both developers of the game and of the show itself. Also the DLC paywall while cheap in most regards for the content your receiving is still off putting, costumes sure go ahead charge away for an alternative look but charging for main characters in JNPR is a poor choice.