Tales of Graces F

It's finally out, and I know a few people here showed interest in the demo thread. My copy is apparently arriving on Monday, and after I finish exams I'll be grinding through this, possibly twice.

[video=youtube;u4ZV7N_DARk]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4ZV7N_DARk[/video]

Hi-Ougi Exhibition.

震天裂空斬光旋風滅砕神罰割殺撃 is pineappleing amazing. Loving the changes for Level 3 Blast Caliburs, ever so slight as some may be. The Level 4 Blast Caliburs are pretty sweet except Asbel's in my opinon. 斬空刃無塵衝 (Zankuujin Mujinshou) and 白夜殲滅剣 (Byakuya Senmetsuken) are both better. 百花繚乱 (Hyakka Ryouran) is as sexy as ever <3 Cheria <3 SHE FINALLY GETS INDIGNATION! Which sounds pineappleing amazing and everything, but then when I think about it, it's an 7CC Spell. Virtuous Ray was the 6CC Spell, and took me a lot after completing the main story to unlock... T__T Requirement was either: Level 100 (main boss is basically over at 60~70 range I think, but mini-dungeon, extra run through, Mania Mode definitely gives you reason to level), use all her CC4 Artes 1500 times (you have to main Cheria for an entire playthrough basically), or finish three one-hundred hit combos as Cheria... Hate to think what I have in store to unlock the glory that is the most amazing spell in all Tales games...

Pascal's Dream Striker is just fantastic <3

If you watch the video to the end, you'll pineappleing hnnnnnnnnnggggggggggg and maybe lose a nutbladder or ten. <3 Hanazawa Kana <3

Malik apparently has another Level 1 BC called Malik Beam, which just sounds awesome.

Not too particularly impressed with Richard. Really considering buying a bunch of costumes to boot, because they're just sooooo damn good. Miku Sophie + Idol Master girls hnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg

As I'm watching this i'll say it unfront... is it just me or is the framerate kinda bad? 0.o

Looks fine to me.

Really? 0.o

For some reason it doesn't look as smooth as the wii's hi ougi videos i've seen. That aside, I'm interested <3

This and Resident Evil 5 are the only things pushing me to buying myself a PS3.

The ending of this video. Really? Sorta expected, but still. Really?

Hoping F lives up to it's hype. As far as I know, more recent Tales games tends to have more than a single version because there's either glitches, or they wanted to make a better version of the original on a different console. Not sure how I feel about that. I do like Graces' battle system though, it looks a lot more interesting than Vesperia at a glance. Post more updates when you play, I'm curious.

Code Geass costumes <3

Too bad I'll have to wait for a translation.

So I finally got to playing this. Since I'm using my 1080p Monitor, I can actually read the text involved in everything instead of seeing scrunched blocks for complex kanji.

I'm so happy they lowered the requirements for a lot of the Aliases. As per Tales tradition, skill use count leads towards something, and in this it's Aliases (and maybe extra damage, not too sure). In the Wii version, basically every skill had an Alias at 100 uses, and the next at 1000 uses. As you can see, this would be problematic for characters like Cheria, where her Artes Style isn't particularly useful, or someone who you have on dedicated Artes or Burst (Cheria as an example again, in my Wii play through had like 4000 uses on Divine Saber, a Burst style, but less than 200 on most of her Artes styles because she was a dedicated caster). In Graces F, everyone who isn't Asbel had most of their requirements for these Aliases lowered to 40 or 80 uses or something not inconceivable. <3

So far, I've gotten the two new Artes style skills for Asbel. I was hoping that everyone who had their left/right combined would get more Artes styles, but sadly they didn't, probably because it'd be too demanding to create three whole new animations for most characters. I'm amazed they have the uniqueness they already do with these, but more would be nice too. The new Artes styles all require you to hold down X during a certain CC range. For example, Shouryuuhoumuu (昇竜氷舞, which is a really badass attack (RISING ICE DRAGON DANCE), requires you to hold down X after performing a CC3 Artes style attack. A problem I saw on the Wii version was that at really late-game events, you ended up having a lot of expendable CC. You only need 10 to reach CC4, and you didn't always want or need to interweave Burst Style, especially for Asbel since his sword drawing and sheathing can be slow in situations like that, so this solves that issue by allowing you to spend up to 15 CC to attack, get a higher combo, and spread more element, instead of spending only 10 and having 5+ left over with nothing useful to do.

I want to say that Cheria's cast speed was increased, because of the rate she can spam Religious, which is stupidly fast, but my Japanese sources say it's the same as the Wii version. Playing around with Richard at the beginning, his CC3 Seppa (説破 and Dankuuken (断空剣 annoy the hell out of me because he jumps up into the air, and ends his attack there. I also never quite liked Dankuuken ever since I saw it in Destiny, but I will admit it has amazing crowd control. Akisazame (秋沙雨 one of my favourite Artes of all time (I generally love all the Phantasia Artes) is still sweet though, and I really like his speed, though his CC2 Up and Left/Right, Raijinken (雷神剣 and Fuujinken (風神剣 could be more unique, they get the job done quite stylishly in my opinion.

 RAGE SPOILERS

I WAS LIKE ONE BATTLE AWAY FROM LEARNING HOUOUTENKUU (鳳凰天駆 AND THEN I HAD TO GO TO THE STORY POINT WHERE HE LEAVES. Not that I was progressed enough to have enough CC to use CC4 Artes on demand =[ but fuuuuuuuuuuu Hououtenkuu is awesome.

The PS3 version also added a Battle Mode thing at the title screen. You can choose it and fight some monsters to win a prize that will be added to your save file. So far, I can only access like six fights, and they just gave me low level items, but I presume the last fight, labeled with Level 175 will be good.

I'm quite enjoying this more than the Wii version because my understanding of Japanese has improved, as well as my understanding of the entire game overall, since there are a few intricacies to the Alias system, as well as that damn Dualize system, that I was completely unaware of at the start of my Wii playthrough obviously.

Anyways, I accidentally stumbled into an area with monsters that had 30k HP, when the norm is 2k for my level, and I was doing single digits to them T____T

The person made a MUCH better quality version of it. No more random frame skips. Coulda used better ordering of the hi ougis though.
[video=youtube;67BD_zdeRgw]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67BD_zdeRgw&feature=related[/video]

double posts D:

Final thoughts on Future Arc more or less

Appears to be about ~10 more hours of exclusive game play available. I have mixed feelings about it.

A good portion of the Future Arc is actually cut scenes and dialogue. Though it was rather interesting story that fleshed out the characters more, I felt it heavily detracted from the more action-packed game-play. Since it's post-end game, you have your air ship available so you're not required to walk anywhere. There's four dungeons in the story arc, but they appear to be somewhat sparsely populated with monsters. I just felt the number of encounters overall was lower compared to other parts of the game. Last two dungeons are rather interesting, but the first two are pretty linear. Last dungeon is rather quite long so that was enjoyable.

However, a large impact on my experience that occurred was I grinded through the bonus dungeon quite a bit since I read it became inaccessible in the Future Arc, which is partially true. You still have access to it for the first 1/3rd of the Future Arc. Due to this grinding, I was grossly overleveled so I played through on Chaos difficulty. I feel that the way the bonus dungeon becomes inaccessible is actually a bug. It's significantly more difficult than the Future Arc content, and the equipment you get is ridiculously better than the Future Arc equipment. It doesn't appear to be acknowledged as such though from what I can tell. I particularly feel this way because the moment it becomes unavailable is before you get access to Pascal's 4th Blast Caliber, and the second set of Future Arc weapons. This leaves there to be very little left to do if you go past this point other than finishing the game and starting your second playthrough. All I have left to do now before beating the boss is finishing up a few aliases so I can inherit them for my second playthrough in the future. Other changes include the arena monsters and rewards changing, and you no longer being able to enter a character to solo the entire thing. You're required to play it in Masters Mode which means you choose one character per round out of six rounds. i.e. you have to play as each character minus one once. Also, the final boss of the original story is obviously inaccessible as well.

Otherwise, Richard is an okay character, but given how I had leveled up ridiculous amounts on my other characters and then acquired him, he had much fewer aliases learned, and thusly significantly less stats overall and sucked as such. Otherwise, his Artes style seems a bit too slow some times, but is quite good for crowd control, and his Burst Style has some ridiculously powerful spells. Avenger Bite does absurd amounts of damage and is the fastest spell in the game. Holy Lance and Shooting Star cause seizures.

You can also earn aliases for every character to get costumes of each other, so you can have a party of 4 Cherias <3 and they'll all actually be Cheria and only be able to use her artes. Pretty funny, and the screen looks amazing when you spam Shooting Star with four Richards.

Hopefully, I'll be able to play Vesperia PS3 this week and be able to compare them.