2011-01-26, 11:55 PM
Sarah Wrote:I hope this doesn't come out February 8th now because I think I want to buy it. I think we have expressed similar feelings regarding the Tales of franchise before; what are your thoughts regarding this one?
I personally loved it since the characters were so playable, minus the part where the AI is stupid with its melee attacks or dodging, which leans you to play Asbel on the harder fights since he's easiest to control. Most of the artes were thoroughly usable too. I'm mostly comparing this to Tales of Symphonia, where you have like four artes you use because everything else is slower and weaker. i.e. spam Rising Falcon because it did like 10 times the damage of every other arte and had a huge range.
From what I can tell, I believe they actually slowed down some artes' attack speeds from the Wii version to the PS3 to make them less broken, which I think is great, but at the same time I rage thinking that this used to be faster and I wouldn't be dying otherwise.
Of all the characters, I actually played them quite a bit minus Cheria and Malik in fights, because Cheria is a healer and if I play the healer, no one gets healed and everyone dies, and Malik is a caster, and that bores me because his physical attack style is difficult. Otherwise, the characters are all extremely player friendly in my opinion, unlike past Tales games where the main character is by far and away the best and there's almost no merit in playing as the others. I would imagine you could get a great experience fighting a tough boss with a friend controlling another character too.
The Chain Capacity system is much better than the TP system, since it prevents mindless spamming of an "I win button". A lot of fights you may have to consider if you want to spend that last CC to get another hit in, or use it to around-step away from the monster as opposed to doing both with the TP system. Makes it more challenging and engaging in the fights.
The Alias system is actually really engaging in my opinion, and gives a lot to do in the game rather than just plain grinding up levels. They're much more readily available goals and there's a lot of them, and the benefits are easily noticeable unlike the small marginal increase in stats from a level.
The Dualise system at end-game can keep you really busy trying to make godly gear. I've barely been able to grasp its concept, and I enjoy the idea of what it brings. It's basically tempering your equipment with anything from attack, to life steal, to +healing effect, to +status effects, etc.