Another beautiful Tales JRPG with a heartfelt story.
Tales of Graces follows this path but it has certain things that make it stand out to me as well as that make it my second favorite game in the Tales series after Tales of the Abyss and I've also played Tales of Vesperia and Tales of Symphonia are they're great games too.
Firstly,even though it's story is set in another medieval style world it's story has quite a lot of Sci Fi in it and it can lead to some big story surprises/plot twists and once again it's story focuses a lot on political/aristocrat stuff,it's character development is quite good(you'll see the lives of certain characters when they're kids as well as when they're teenagers)and it has a way of making you care about the characters such as how even though Asbel(the main character)is the son of a lord and lives in a mansion with servants he wants to prove himself and wants to be a knight but has to deal with an overly-protective father and responsibilities that will cause him to be seperated from his friends(including a female character named Cheria whom he has a close relationship with)for 7 years and he later has to deal with great tragedy.
Cheria is a cute,pink-haired girl whom has had feelings for Asbel ever since they were kids but she had to deal with not seeing him for 7 years and the fact he doesn't seem to share the same feelings she has for him(at first anyways).
Sophie is a purple-haired girl whom is very mysterious,has no memories of anything and has other secrets I'll let you discover.
I found Malik to be a likable character because even though he has the typical generic charming male personality for JRPGs,his past is quite inspiring.
There's other characters that I found likable due to their personality or because of their past or occupation or because of where they come from(I'm not just talking about the party members/good guys but also the villains too).
Secondly,the story has a bit of romance(I like romance in JRPGs)and even though Tales of Graces isn't the only Tales game to have a love story and to have a good one,I like how the romance in Tales of Graces has a good and realistic build up which gives the romance more feeling.The story can be very emotional at times,I don't want to spoil it for you,but it will relate to extremes of human corruption and it can be heartbreaking to see certain things such as children living in poverty.The story has some clever and big surprises.
The battle system has a style that's typical of the Tales series,fast and allows you to perform long combos.Performing combo attacks is beneficial not only because it means more total damage but the longer a combo gets the more damage attacks will do compared with the attacks in shorter combos.Also,the character you're controlling and your party members(who are AI controlled)can combine their attacks to create one big combo attack and it makes the battle system fun because it creates a risk verse reward system because if your party members are helping you attack to create longer combos with more powerful attacks it means they're not healing and even on the easy difficulty some enemies/bosses can drain your HP very fast even if you've done lots of level grinding and it's beneficial to have party members healing constantly so they keep your party member's HP high but if you want you can change battle strategy any time and order specific party members to attack or to use a balanced approach or to go defensive(heal).You can even order specific party members to target allies of a boss or to be defensive/heal rarely and focus mainly on offense and the battle strategy commands give the player a good amount of control over their party members and at times you'll need to strategize well,especially against tougher bosses.
You can use what are called artes which are special attacks and I like how you can perform different artes by pressing a single button plus certain directions on the left thumbstick.You can perform normal attacks which are not artes and you can chain normal attacks and artes into a combo for more damage but as you guessed there is a gauge to limit the amount of artes you can do in a certain time frame.There is special types of artes attacks which are called eleth bursts which can be used when the eleth gauge is full and eleth bursts do a lot of damage and can be done more than once for a short period of time after the eleth burst gauge reaches full but you need to chain a eleth burst with a combo in order to perform an eleth burst and doing it once after the eleth gauge is full is easy enough but doing it twice is harder because you'll need to chain it to a combo and hold L1 and the time for when you can do an eleth burst lasts for a very short time.
The combination of the fast,flashy combat system and the way the battle system makes you utilize strategy through the orders you can give to party members if you want to win the tough boss fights and the way you can chain long combos together with party members makes the battle system lots of fun with enough tactical depth so it doesn't feel too hack n slashy.
However the gameplay has certain things which are annoying and hold it back.One of them is some enemies in certain areas are far too strong for your party to beat,even if you've been level grinding a lot and use the right tactics against them,you'll need to avoid them(even the guides say so)and even though you won't bump into these enemies very much it's annoying when you do because they don't look that tough but will annihilate your party and make you lose lots of progress if you didn't save beforehand.
The game also has some annoying puzzles which use a lot of trial by error and which can be difficult to solve without a guide.
The game has traditional JRPG things that many JRPG fans will love such as towns to explore,NPCs to interact with and a world map.
The game's visuals are colorful and are influenced by cel-shaded style but I'm not sure if they're cel-shaded.The graphics could be a bit better and sharper but this game was originally released on Wii so that's probably why.The visuals are beautiful nonetheless mainly due to the artstyle and use of colors but not so much on a technical level(the graphics look ugly compared to Tales of Vesperia).The world has some nice diversity,such as snowy locations,desert,lush countryside,tropical etc.
The eleth bursts create colorful screens with spectacular looking attacks and artes attacks also give a colorful effect which helps add to the flashiness of the combo(along with the fact the battle system is quite fast which makes it exciting to watch).
Some of the anime cutscenes look lovely and have breath-taking visuals and a beautiful use/combination of colors while other anime scenes look a bit rough but not bad.
The music is typical and charming without standing out too much but I liked the music for some of the emotional story moments it made them more heatfelt.
Overall,ToG is one of the better JRPGs from this gen and is a wonderful,heartfelt and enjoyable JRPG experience.