I have played or at least tried every game in "tales of" series that's been released in 10 years. While there were some that were better than others and some I found "bad", this one deserves the name of the worst in the series, because it managed to ruin the combat.
I was excited when I heard of the "no loading" transition to combat on the field encounters. I played the game for about 12 hours and realized that is one of only a few good things about this game.
Story
The lore of the game was somewhat promising until I actually played it: Fighting along side something like spirits, fusing with them and the good old "saving the world from [completely generic evil]". I prioritize gameplay over story, and generic/boring story doesn't really bother me, but I liked the concept at the beginning.
Gameplay (and combat)
I've been a fan of Tales of [X] games for combat alone since I first played Tales of Abyss. Real time, somewhat fast paced combat, where positioning and timing matters was simply revolutionary at the time. With enough patience and skill you could beat enemies and bosses way ahead of your own level.
I've tried every other Tales of X game, because most of them have similar combat system and skills, but each one had elements that made combat feel unique to that game.
In most of those games each character had his/her own fighting style and special abilities (such as multiple stances, martial arte charging, spell cast time canceling, spell empowering, etc) that has given the each game replayability and/or ability expand the experience by switching to a different character and adapting a completely different playstye.
Anyways, the point I'm trying to make is: Most Tales of X games felt unique and most of their characters felt like unique characters, even though, from game to game each class (such as swordsman) had an almost identical skill set the corresponding class had in another game.
Sadly, Tales of Zestiria took all the generic skills, the generic combat, but forgot to add the "unique" to their characters and to top that off - restricted characters you can use. Now to elaborate on the statement.....
Characters and Combat
To understand why I think this game is awful you need to understand 2 things. One of them if the fact that you have 8 characters: 4 real people (which is closer to 3 characters in reality, who mostly use martial artes) and 4 seraphim (1 for each element) spirits and you can only have 2 of each in battle. The other thing is the way elements work, but I'll get to that later.
When I said the characters aren't unique, I meant they really feel like every other characters from tales of games WITHOUT a unique talent to go along with them. For instance:
Sorey, the main character, has the following "special" talent in battle: "Has quick attacks and attacks during which he cannot be staggered by martial artes" he also "Wields a wide variety of elements..." . Just for reference: "Quick attacks" are nothing special and "No staggering" was a generic trait in most Tales of games and could be equipped as a SECONDARY TALENT by most characters! "Elements...." is almost an insult because almost every "Tales of" playable character wielded multiple elements and I'll elaborate on secondary reason why I consider this insulting later.
Another character (to avoid spoilers i'll skip the name), can "Dual wield weapons".... that's it..... It offers double equippable bonuses, but.... really? It's not the first game with dual wielding characters, but it's the first one to name this a unique trait.....
There are 2 more "real" characters that are as boring as the first 2 and the 4 "Seraphim". The 4 elemental seraphim who fight alongside you in battle and if you chose, you can fuse with them (armatize) to play with completely different set of skills (which, by the way, all use generic skills from previous games), equipment bonuses of both player and seraphim. Sadly, you fusing with 1 of them means you can only use only that element. By the way, seraphim have even worse "Unique" talents than human characters... Most of them can be summarized as "Has high [stat]".
Generic talents aside, sounds good so far, right? Well this is where elemental mechanics come to play and throw the combat into the gutter. Remember how I mentioned the team consists of 2 humans and 2 (elemental) seraphim? So it's like this:
- If an enemy has resistance to your attack element it will not stagger and take halved damage.
- If an enemy is weak to an element it will get power hit, with higher chance to stagger and and increased damage.
- If you land a power hit any following until combo ends will be power hits.
- At some point almost every enemy you encounter will be resistant to 2-4 of the attack types and weak to 1 or none. That and the resistance rule usually leaves at least 2-3 (in rare cases all 4) of your elemental seraphim useless unless you can land a power hit before the useless character's combo starts.
- Human characters have multiple elements at their disposal, however, only few can be used in the beginning of a combo attack, which means they cannot use any reliable power combos on their own.
"Why is it bad?", you ask? It's quite simple really. The way your team is composed and the way monster strengths/weaknesses are set up lock you into a very specific cycle of combinations for each elemental weakness. It's insanely hard to deviate from that at higher difficulties, because unless you stagger your enemy you have close to 0 chance of victory. This was also true in previous games, however, previous games didn't limit who can be in your team. They also did not have such strength/weakness set up on each monster that would force you to specific characters.
So, to summarize my reasons for thinking the combat is bad:
- Sorey(main character) is not an optional character for most battles - he has to be in your team because he's the only one who can use all elements in the start of the combo and most characters will not make it to the end of the combo if the enemy is not staggered. By the way, Sorey is boring to play...
- You will usually have to use the right seraphim (not the ones you want).
- You will usually have to use the right combinations (again, not the ones you want) against bosses or for each battle on higher difficulties.
To me personally, this presents 2 major problems:
- I feel like I'm playing a cheap adventure game, where I get a skill and am forced to use it in every corner to finish a stage (because others skills simply don't work). Only in this game it lasts throughout the game. You pretty much have to use 1 of 5 elements for particular enemies. You fight different enemies, but most of them feel like 1 of the 5 types you fought before, because you HAVE to use the right elements and with right elements come close to identical to 1 of the 5 combos you used before.
- I want to play a caster for a main chacter, but I can't.... because only seraphim (that can only use 1 element, sometimes with a secondary element on 1 spell) are casters and 4/5 enemies are resistant to that element.
Summary of reason that (IMO) make this game bad:
- Monster and team design forcing a specific play style, making combat boring. With the main aspect of the game being boring there's not much left to play for.
- Generic characters with no trully unique talents or play styles.
- Restrictions on team structure (2 humans, 2 seraphim).
- Armatization (Fusion with seraphim) switched to ANOTHER generic character skill set with nothing unique to offer. You could call it evolved seraphim, because the human characters makes NO DIFFERENCE. Sorey and Alisha will result in exact same character (in skills and such) when fused with fire seraphim. Not that them being different would save this game.....
- Elemental strengths of monsters render casters (and them only using 1 element) unplayable as a main class.
- (the usual) Generic story, which in this game FEELS boring, because you fight boring battles to get to boring pieces of story. Somehow, as predictable and boring as previous game stories were, I never felt bored because of fun battles.