For some reason I always felt intrigued by this series, and for some even more obscure reason this game in particular caught my attention. This says a lot about how I choose what game to play.
On a technical standpoint this game looks and feels like a lazy hd remaster of a ps2 game, and the fact that the artstyle is often very uninspired and so "anime" that it's also uninteresting doesn't help. There's a lot of pop-ups, a lot of the environments are really big but also almost completely empty, the same assets are reutilised many times and the character animations outside of battle are really clunky. The cities are sometimes big sometimes not, but they are always empty, and completely useless outside of the shop and inn, and the sporadic story event or subquest. Almost all the dungeons look and play the same, just with different skins. Even the music feels really generic (not bad per se but not that good also).
Even after finishing the game i still don't know if i liked the combat system; at least it feels different from all the others jrpgs. At the beginning of the game it's very limited and you'll have to use always the same couple of combos, but at least you can play with 6 (technically 7) different characters, that all feel different from one another. As you advance in the game though, you'll have a lot more choices, but it always feels like you're limited to using the same ones over and over. A lot of the battles after the first half of the game get really messy, and this is not helped by the fact that a lot of enemies (mostly bosses but not exclusively) have moves or combos that can oneshot you and/or your whole team. These difficulty spikes feel really artificial in a game that is not really that hard (i played in Second difficulty), but it gives you this illusion by throwing at you a lot of spongy enemies that take forever to kill (some encounters even took me tens of minutes!), and this gets worse towards the end of the game. There are also a lot of mechanics that can get really deep and can be fun (like fusions) or just boring or even annoying (the dominus and the fast travel; whose idea was to have to pay it each time a percentage of all your money??).
The story of Tales of Zestiria feels very generic when you look at it as a whole (chosen one has to save te world with friends), but there are a lot of things about the lore i really enjoyed: the eternal conflict between the shepard and the lord of calamity, the concept of hellions and serphs, the lords, and the conflict between the two big nations. On the other hand all of this is told in such a boring way that it is painful to endure. 90% of the cutscenes really suck, and this is a problem since this game has around a billion of them. It will also often happen something like [end of cutscene - walk 3 meters - start of new cutscene], expecially in the beginning of the game, so it takes a while to gain a decent rhythm. At least there is a good chemistry between the main cast, and i really liked some of the main characters. Also, my enjoyment of the game increased a lot when i turned on the english dub. Unfortunately there's still some anime bullshit in the character interactions, and expecially in some characters, which were the ones i liked the least. One thing I didn't understand is that the stories of some of the main characters wasn''t completed with the end of the main quest. I completed most of the subquest but they aren't managed really well, with the game not telling you almost anything about them (where to go, what to do, who gave you the quest...).
Even after talking this bad about this game, i can't say this is an inherently bad game and there are some things i actually liked: it has some good ideas, and some interesting story points, that are not well executed imo, and the cast works well togheter. Half a star less because the last boss was completely bullshit on the gameplay side.
So, in the end you may ask, why did you play 50 hours of a game you don't really enjoy? Because I'm fucking stupid, that's why.
On a technical standpoint this game looks and feels like a lazy hd remaster of a ps2 game, and the fact that the artstyle is often very uninspired and so "anime" that it's also uninteresting doesn't help. There's a lot of pop-ups, a lot of the environments are really big but also almost completely empty, the same assets are reutilised many times and the character animations outside of battle are really clunky. The cities are sometimes big sometimes not, but they are always empty, and completely useless outside of the shop and inn, and the sporadic story event or subquest. Almost all the dungeons look and play the same, just with different skins. Even the music feels really generic (not bad per se but not that good also).
Even after finishing the game i still don't know if i liked the combat system; at least it feels different from all the others jrpgs. At the beginning of the game it's very limited and you'll have to use always the same couple of combos, but at least you can play with 6 (technically 7) different characters, that all feel different from one another. As you advance in the game though, you'll have a lot more choices, but it always feels like you're limited to using the same ones over and over. A lot of the battles after the first half of the game get really messy, and this is not helped by the fact that a lot of enemies (mostly bosses but not exclusively) have moves or combos that can oneshot you and/or your whole team. These difficulty spikes feel really artificial in a game that is not really that hard (i played in Second difficulty), but it gives you this illusion by throwing at you a lot of spongy enemies that take forever to kill (some encounters even took me tens of minutes!), and this gets worse towards the end of the game. There are also a lot of mechanics that can get really deep and can be fun (like fusions) or just boring or even annoying (the dominus and the fast travel; whose idea was to have to pay it each time a percentage of all your money??).
The story of Tales of Zestiria feels very generic when you look at it as a whole (chosen one has to save te world with friends), but there are a lot of things about the lore i really enjoyed: the eternal conflict between the shepard and the lord of calamity, the concept of hellions and serphs, the lords, and the conflict between the two big nations. On the other hand all of this is told in such a boring way that it is painful to endure. 90% of the cutscenes really suck, and this is a problem since this game has around a billion of them. It will also often happen something like [end of cutscene - walk 3 meters - start of new cutscene], expecially in the beginning of the game, so it takes a while to gain a decent rhythm. At least there is a good chemistry between the main cast, and i really liked some of the main characters. Also, my enjoyment of the game increased a lot when i turned on the english dub. Unfortunately there's still some anime bullshit in the character interactions, and expecially in some characters, which were the ones i liked the least. One thing I didn't understand is that the stories of some of the main characters wasn''t completed with the end of the main quest. I completed most of the subquest but they aren't managed really well, with the game not telling you almost anything about them (where to go, what to do, who gave you the quest...).
Even after talking this bad about this game, i can't say this is an inherently bad game and there are some things i actually liked: it has some good ideas, and some interesting story points, that are not well executed imo, and the cast works well togheter. Half a star less because the last boss was completely bullshit on the gameplay side.
So, in the end you may ask, why did you play 50 hours of a game you don't really enjoy? Because I'm fucking stupid, that's why.
freak_4517
8 months ago