Update Eighty-Seven: 5 December 2017

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

I didn’t have a high opinion of newer games in the Tales series - I played maybe the first two hours of Tales of Xilia with a friend a few years ago, and it looked ugly and was boring.

On a whim, though, I bought Tales of Zestiria literally two years ago, and then sat on it all this time. Two close friends of mine loved Tales of Berseria and really wanted me to play it, but they warned me that Tales of Zestiria was much weaker, and that if I play Berseria before Zestiria, it’ll be torture to go back and play. So, what the hell, I’ll take the plunge and, at least, get it out of my backlog.

And I ended up really liking it!

I don’t know if it’s me going into it with very low expectations, if this was just the right game at the right time, or if it’s just me being a little shitty contrarian, but this game really worked with me, and I greatly enjoyed my time with it.

One of my friends’ complaints was that this game didn’t have any strong plot twists and turns that’s become a staple of Tales games. This game is pretty straight up just a ‘you’re the chosen one and must defeat Big Evil’ story. Normally, I dislike those, but what I liked about this game was that they had that story play out in a realistic way. The main character, Sorey, as the Shepard, can see a race of people called seraphim that normal humans can’t see. So if he talks to them in public… people notice, and think he’s talking to himself. If he uses his immense powers on the battlefield, for example, it unnerves and scares people. Different people react to him in different ways - some are ardent believers of his, and others distrust him.

The Big Evil character is treated this way, too - he’s the Lord of Calamity that needs to be stopped, but he’s humanized and Sorey and the gang express sympathy for the position he had been put in. The deuteragonist, the Shepard’s Squire, is literally the head of an assassin’s guild who kills people for a living, but she has her reasons and methods and is still an expressly Good character. Through different side plots and plot points of the game, the theme that’s empathized over and over is that the world is not black or white, but shades of grey. The writing doesn’t ALWAYS support this, and can get janky in some places, but it overwhelmingly works and is refreshing in an otherwise black-and-white type of story.

One thing that helped is that I really enjoyed all the characters in the party. In particular, I love Rose. I love her I love her. She is literally every original character I wrote from ages 5 to 15, she’s funny and peppy and strong and irreverent and I love her. (for the record, she’s also the Shepard’s Squire I mentioned above). The game doesn’t take itself too seriously, and that lets the characters (primarily Rose, but everyone joins in) be really, really funny and goofy. Sorey as the main character was the most tolerable male protag in a Tales game yet, and his relationship with Mikleo (his best friend/boyfriend) is great.

It’s not all sunshine and roses, though. The series reached its graphical peak with Vesperia, where literally every frame looked like an anime. Now they’re stylizing to more realistic proportions, but with a still very general anime-face style. So you have characters with more realistic-looking stylized faces (think any adult male character in the game) standing next to a character like Lailah, whom I love but who looks like an uncanny valley robot with huge, dead, unexpressive eyes (I put the sunglasses on her as soon as I could and it helped.)

The real big thing, though, is this battle system is fucking bonkers. I’m not a big fan of battle systems to begin with, but this system is so huge, sprawling, and complicated that not only did they scatter monoliths through the world for you to find that tell you how to play the game and use all their systems (There were about 70 or so) but they took the popular skits mechanic and added a subsection where the characters themselves explained parts of the battle system to you. If you need that much explaining for your core mechanics, then that’s too much, man!

I didn’t complete this, not yet. There’s a DLC I want to get and a few more achievements past that to round up, so I’m putting this aside to finish another time.

Next up: I want to do the monthly theme, but all of my old games are long ones. I’m stuck right now between Jade Empire and Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. Which one should I play? Until then, I want to play a few shorter games!

See you soon!