With shallow, unresponsive combat and bad enemy design that has you spending the whole game fighting walls of armor that rarely respond to being hit, from the onset it's already not a good Tales game, nor is it even good on the merits of the more typical 3D action RPG it abandoned the series' core to be. If you look outside the combat, however, there are things to like, or at least at first. The story is alright and the environment design is a step up from what Tales has been doing for years (the dungeon design, however, is not). Those things all get worse as the game goes on until you reach the irredeemable late game and struggle to continue giving a shit, between the story falling apart, the game's already heavy reliance on recolors of otherwise recycled enemies becoming even more prominent, and the asset recycling creeping into dungeon design with lots of copy/pasted rooms that maybe will be recolored. And don't even get me started on how they locked artes and their associated skill trees behind DLC costumes, or shit like the $16 Sword Art Online DLC

The worst JRPG I've ever played.

- The combat is absolutely trash, even the shittiest enemy is a damage sponge and takes 5 minutes of button mashing to kill (the bad kind of button mashing, not satisfying like a Musou).

- The story is garbage like the average anime, with characters that are so unbelievably boring that I just cringe thinking about their dialogues.

- Level design is stuck in 2008 and there's virtually no RPG aspect to the game: no dialogue choices, no armors and you just need to buy a new weapon every new city.

- EVEN THE MUSIC IS TRASH, how the fuck do you manage to miss the soundtrack in a JRPG? Even the bad or mediocre ones have great soundtracks.

I had to stop after getting all the party members, I wasted enough time on this crap. This kind of game is the proof that videogame journalism and critics have a huge bias towards certain genres like Indies and JRPGs. If you're older than 12 and you've played a game before in your life, this is not for you.

I'll just give up. This game is a sad situation, everything is kinda nice, the soundtrack is very good, gameplay fine, art cool

but I better leave early before I travel to japan to attempt murder the writer, bro just ruined the feast
next time hire me tales staff please I would write a better story
even the guy who reviewed above me and the guy who reviewed below would write a better story