The base game isn't too bad, the extra F content for the PS3 stands for F-ING TERRIBLE. That and disrespecting the player's time are the main reason the score is so low.
It's an extremely generic by the books anime story you'd find in a forgotten 12 episode TV anime nobody cared about before, during, or after it aired. It's so generic there isn't any point talking about it so I'll skip to the chase:
"The story's not good, but it's got the best Tales of gameplay"
Absolutely not. It's clunky and easily exploitable, and everything outside of the combat (where you can spam one B-Arte to infinitely stun them or spam A-Arte to infinitely juggle them) is hand-crafted to waste as much of the player's time as possible.
Backtracking? The worst out of any Tales I played.
Cutscenes forcing you to walk through an entire dungeon? You bet.
Countless fetch quests? Why the hell not?
No meaningful fast travel so you walk across the whole map? Yessir.
Grindy system for Gald? Absolutely.
EXTRA grindy system for Eleth mixer forcing you to walk back a dungeon 3-10 times? Oh yes baby.
A PS3-only epilogue arc that consists entirely of redoing dungeons and backtracking across the whole map for short cutscenes and weapons worse than base game? Why not? Fuck you for wanting to have fun.
Anything to hit "JRPG hours". Remove that and this game would've been a nice, clean 20h experience. Instead, it frequently wastes the player's time to pile on the gametime.
That's all you need to know. If you want more details in a longer "review", you can keep reading below.
The way to obtain Gald in this is miserable. You won't struggle with it if you're playing casually, but if you want to actually experiment with the systems, you will run out of money almost instantly. To get money, you need to farm items with 12% drop rate, craft an item, then farm 4% drop rate items, to fuse both, and THEN sell it for 1/3 of the upgrade cost needed.
You can simply ignore all of this until the end of the game because the weapons you get there are so much better than everything else that it makes upgrading redundant.
Leveling titles is surprisingly not bad, outside of F arc richard, or if you're going for completion. So that's nice, because I didn't care about either and spent most of the game having everybody near-maxed.
I played the whole thing on Hard, and it wasn't really hard, or frustrating. I did most of the extra content because might as well.
The F arc is something that could've been done as a short collection of dungeons, but I guess they REALLY wanted to convince people to double dip for the PS3 version, so they added loads of backtracking and a needlessly long (yet not hard, just boring) dungeon. That added an extra 20h to my file, despite only really having about 7h worth of content. 13 hours of nothing, with no payoff other than a Pinocchio ending that should've been in the base game.
And the skits suck.
That said, I surprisingly really liked everyone (not Asbel). I don't know why they were out of character in almost all the skits, but it didn't bother me much.
It's an extremely generic by the books anime story you'd find in a forgotten 12 episode TV anime nobody cared about before, during, or after it aired. It's so generic there isn't any point talking about it so I'll skip to the chase:
"The story's not good, but it's got the best Tales of gameplay"
Absolutely not. It's clunky and easily exploitable, and everything outside of the combat (where you can spam one B-Arte to infinitely stun them or spam A-Arte to infinitely juggle them) is hand-crafted to waste as much of the player's time as possible.
Backtracking? The worst out of any Tales I played.
Cutscenes forcing you to walk through an entire dungeon? You bet.
Countless fetch quests? Why the hell not?
No meaningful fast travel so you walk across the whole map? Yessir.
Grindy system for Gald? Absolutely.
EXTRA grindy system for Eleth mixer forcing you to walk back a dungeon 3-10 times? Oh yes baby.
A PS3-only epilogue arc that consists entirely of redoing dungeons and backtracking across the whole map for short cutscenes and weapons worse than base game? Why not? Fuck you for wanting to have fun.
Anything to hit "JRPG hours". Remove that and this game would've been a nice, clean 20h experience. Instead, it frequently wastes the player's time to pile on the gametime.
That's all you need to know. If you want more details in a longer "review", you can keep reading below.
The way to obtain Gald in this is miserable. You won't struggle with it if you're playing casually, but if you want to actually experiment with the systems, you will run out of money almost instantly. To get money, you need to farm items with 12% drop rate, craft an item, then farm 4% drop rate items, to fuse both, and THEN sell it for 1/3 of the upgrade cost needed.
You can simply ignore all of this until the end of the game because the weapons you get there are so much better than everything else that it makes upgrading redundant.
Leveling titles is surprisingly not bad, outside of F arc richard, or if you're going for completion. So that's nice, because I didn't care about either and spent most of the game having everybody near-maxed.
I played the whole thing on Hard, and it wasn't really hard, or frustrating. I did most of the extra content because might as well.
The F arc is something that could've been done as a short collection of dungeons, but I guess they REALLY wanted to convince people to double dip for the PS3 version, so they added loads of backtracking and a needlessly long (yet not hard, just boring) dungeon. That added an extra 20h to my file, despite only really having about 7h worth of content. 13 hours of nothing, with no payoff other than a Pinocchio ending that should've been in the base game.
And the skits suck.
That said, I surprisingly really liked everyone (not Asbel). I don't know why they were out of character in almost all the skits, but it didn't bother me much.