shelving this because it is honestly the most unbearable tales game i've played yet, and i even sat through the entirety of xillia 2. not only is the combat extremely linear and straightforward, the story is about as simple as you can get with the emotional beats and "sad" parts being super predictable........granted, there is probably some more towards the end that i haven't seen yet, but i'm not going to collect 11 remnants of something scattered all over the map in previous dungeons i've been in and new dungeons i haven't been in just to progress the story. that is both lazy storytelling and bad game design, and should have killed the series on the spot

the ONLY redeemable thing about this game is that i do enjoy some characters quite a bit, and i do really want to complete this at some point to get the full picture of how the game shakes out. i've played games with bad gameplay, story, combat, character design, progression, etc. but hard walling progression behind backtracking for items behind sidequests (therefore, not making them SIDEquests anymore) field bosses, and dungeons is where i draw the line. if the game wants to inhibit my progress that badly - i will do what it wants and stop playing

i'm sure others CAN have a positive experience with this game, but being ~85% of the way through the main story and hungry for more and not being able to progress it is horrible.

UPDATE: put my head down and got to work. made it all the way to the final phase of final boss, turned on cheat engine, saw the ending, yup ! upset no characters got closure. convoluted ending, like they were lost

really good game, one of the strongest of the series for sure. story and character development are great, and the tone is pretty good absent a couple things that feel out of place towards the ending. narrative is one of the stronger points, combat is also pretty good. don't like the stun/soul mechanic sometimes combats feel too polarizing, either dominating or just dying. map feels incredibly linear and dungeons are repetitive, they made open world tales games over 10 years before this came out but this just feels a bit claustrophobic. overall a great game with way more strong points than weak points, would recommend as a first tales game if you're not into going back to the older, jankier stuff

the game was pretty solid and i think the story had a degree of depth, but nothing too crazy. it definitely shows its age in quality of life areas and dungeon design (especially encounter rate) but plays pretty well considering it came out 30 years ago.

it's pretty cool to see a game take place in the same universe as symphonia, even though that game out a while after. the time travel thing was pretty cool, and though characters lack a degree of depth, i think that's partly because they are actually like 3x3 pixels with mostly combat focus