Good
- the visuals look pretty
- voice acting is good
- main theme song is good
Bad
- every time you enter area, there's a crap ton of dialogue, mostly repetitive and pointless. Yuri says he must continue the mission, someone says they can't go on, they get convinced to go, they go, and everyone else joins, everyone is together again.
- battles are boring and repetitive button mash. The movement is also very clunky. I feel like I have like 2 seconds of delay every time I finish an attack. Despite the animation being over, if i try to move, I end up jumping or doing a directional arte. This discouraged me from doing random battles, so by the time I got to a boss about 35 hrs in, I realized i was about 10 lvls under compared to most other players. There was no way I was grinding that, so I turned it to easy to finish the game. This made the entire experience more mundane than it already was.
- there's no character I really liked. All their personalities were kind of meh. Nothing interesting like Luke from abyss. Felt like the writers kept forcing the same kind of interactions between the characters to shove their personalities in my face when I already understand what they character's tendencies are. Makes player feel dumb, and potentially hate the characters more.
- the square avatar banters were mostly pointless filler. Not funny, most of it didn't add too much to the story. Worst part was I couldn't even skip it with a button if i decided to just read it. This added to the whole mundane and already slow progression
- the story itself was not very interesting at all. When estelles wanted to sacrifice herself to prevent harming the others, but Yuri being against it, it was supposed to make the player sad. But I found myself not caring about her at all, nor Yuri's reaction. None of it made me sad at all. I was very indifferent because I was just so sick of their dialogue. I had no reason to care about any of the factions, not the guilds, not the knights, not anyone. The game gave me no incentive to care.
- special artes getting interrupted was very annoying.
- having no way to hit an enemy that fell on the ground is annoying, because this means I have to stop attacking. And because that is very laggy as I mentioned earlier, it made the whole battle feel sluggish and disjointed
- jumping was utterly pointless, as it's super high and again, laggy on landing
- not having a way to properly parry to block unblockable attacks made the combat shallow. The forward block is pretty useless.
- the ending is very lackluster. Having gone through all that boring crap and the annoying battles, only to be rewarded with such a quick and anti climatic ending is a punch in the face
- navigation was a chore. The progression is already repetitive. Go to one place, talk a lot, go to dungeon, repetitive battles, talk more, fight boss, repeat. Now the game isn't even clear on where to go next most of the time, which forced me to check the synopsis constantly. THEN I have to go into the world book to check where this place was located on the map. There's no search function, so I have to slowly scroll through a bunch of text. Sometimes if it's an undiscovered place, there's almost no way to pin point it other than wander around and look for suspicious spots. This broke the pace of the game.
- there are basically no action cutscenes. Even Tales of Abyss had some, despite looking robotic. We just get the same robotic character animations that are down right terrible. This being a classic Tales thing is no excuse for having poor cutscenes.
- dungeon puzzles were not fun at all. Just wanted to get it over with, as with most Tales dungeons.