Tales of Graces F (PS3): JRPG 101.

I don't really understand the stigma that JRPGs seem to have attained over the years for being bad games. I grew up with JRPGs. Some of the best games in the NES, SNES, and Playstation era were JRPGs. Games like Final Fantasy 6, Dragon Warrior, Lufia I and II, Legend of Legaia, Parasite Eve, Star Ocean, Persona just to name a few of them. Many of these are still being heralded as the pinnacles of video game history. So it baffles me when someone rolls their eyes at a game when they find out its a JRPG. On the Gamecube I discovered a game called Tales of Symphonia and it basically became the only reason I owned the system and made me a fan of the franchise from this point forwards. After several releases over multiple systems, PS3 now gets a re-release of a overseas Wii game with additional content.

TALES OF GRACES:F (PS3)

The game opens up with two young brothers, Asbel and Hubert Lahnt, exploring outside of their town to find a flower field rumored to let flowers of all types bloom year round. Upon finding the field they find a girl with pink pigtails sleeping in the flowers. Asbel awakens her to find out that she doesn't know who she is, where she's from, how she got there or why she's there. The boys decide to take her to the town to see if anyone knows any better, where they receive a tongue lashing from their sickly friend Cheria. After a brief walk around town and not learning much more about the mystery girl, the boys speak with their father and learn that a very important guest from the kingdom will be visiting and not to bother him. Naturally, they ignore their father and find out that this boy is actually the prince of their country, Richard. After showing him around the village and the Lahnt hill flower garden, one of his guards tries to kill the young prince and Asbel befriends him by managing to fight off his would be dispatcher. After being grounded for disobeying his father, he breaks out of his room and takes off with Sophie (the name for the mystery girl) for the capital city to meet his new friend. Meeting up with Cheria and Hubert who were already at the city, they meet up with Richard and make plans to go into the castle through a secret passageway. But when the kids follow the path, they find Richard unconscious. Sophie senses danger and a large monster attacks, basically laying waste to the kids. Sophie emits a bright light and manages to fight the monster off but not before it takes one last fatal shot at her. The last thing Asbel sees is Sophie making one final assault on the beast before it goes black. Asbel reawakens at home, his father telling him that Hubert has been adopted, Richard was not involved in the accident, and that Sophie is dead and it was basically his fault for not being able to take care of her. Infuriated, Asbel swears off that he will not be the next Lord of Lahnt and storms off. Running into Cheria he tells her that he's is leaving to become a knight and become stronger, she begs him not to go but to no avail. He leaves at night and enrolls into the knight Academy before we regain control 7 years later.

With the Tales franchise the stories always seem to start off some what sluggish and unoriginal. But they always have a habit of taking several turns and twists that really have a tendency to keep you playing. Generally the game is filled with some pretty common anime archetypes and cliches. These can be a nothing issue for people like me as I've watched my share of anime, but to some people this can be downright nauseating. It does fall into some pitfalls though. Example, as most anime fans will be able to tell you, the person with the narrowest eyes will be the villain at some point. It is never a twist and it is never shocking, you can usually tell right from the onset. I wouldn't say that it was 100% clear in this one but it certainly wasn't shocking when it happened. Tales games have always have had some pretty complex stories that never seem to come to an end, but that being said it does a fairly good job of keeping your interested and playing along.  I  wouldn't say its the strongest story ever, but it was still pretty good. It has a bit of a sluggish and unoriginal starting point to it but they do a good job of weaving the characters side stories into the main plot to add a bit of complexity and depth to it. They also suckered me into thinking they pulled one of the game fuax-pa of switching the last boss of the game to somebody different. As it turned out I still had a whole other dungeon to do. Damn you Tales.

This seems weird enough as is, but she has a grabby hand gesture that is a little over the top.
That being said, the Sophie and Pascal post fight gestures are pretty damn funny.

One of the Tales series strongest points are the interesting and lovable characters that keep you playing though. Games like Tales of Symphonia and Tales of the Abyss have some fantastic ensemble casts that are easy to love. Even some of the less popular titles like Tales of Legendia give a few characters with a good back story to just make you want to keep playing through just to learn more about them. Tales of Graces cast sadly is not one of the strongest. Asbel in his adult life is somewhat of an angsty whiner, Hubert is a dislikeable bed wetter the whole time. Cheria while sweet in the childhood days, becomes a bit of a nagging bitch and never lets up for like the whole adventure. The only characters that I like are Pascal, who's so ridiculously cheerful and over the top in all her reactions its nearly impossible to not laugh when she speaks. The other character I like is Malik, who plays the kind of mentor figure but he has some pretty entertaining lines in his own right.

Ummm, I'd prefer you didn't give anything the "ol' chunk chunk", Pascal...

The most notable change to the combat system is the complete elimination of magic points, in its place you get a CC gauge that as long as you are not attacking, is continually rising. Usually set at a minimum value you can raise it during the course of the fight to go through longer attack and combo chains. This is kind of nice because it allows the flow of the combat to keep up, and even more so in long stretches of dungeons you don't need to worry about your healer running out of magic. Sadly you can't use your healing magic in the menu but they have brought back the cooking system for health and stat boosts during and after combat, you can also make stuff to use in the stores that affect the whole team as well. It will not be very often you find yourself needing for items.

Sound is hit or miss. The there are two complaints about the music: First is that the really good songs and notable tracks really come in until later in the game. The villages and towns music is pretty standard RPG fanfare, but they have don't have that "catch yourself humming it around the house" aspect to it like Radiata Stories has. And the other is for every good track the game has, it has one that is utterly horrible. Chief offender of this is in the Barona Catacombs which thankfully is a short dungeon, but its literally a 3 note loop of three organ notes. Maybe the devs knew you wouldn't be in there too long so they didn't need to write a masterpiece but for fucks sake its bad enough for people to notice its annoying. The voice acting is pretty anime stereotype as well. Many of the voices are well done enough to get you through the game, definitely better than some of the voices in the later Star Ocean games. But there will be some very anime cliche scenes that are bit hard to stomach. The game really does have a bit of an excessive obsession with the whole power of friendship nonsense which can be really rough at times. Granted, you can always skip the cut scenes if they become a bit too much.

Most of the Tales of games try to give an aspect of replayability to them, usually giving you grade during your first play through so you can play it again on a new game plus with additional experience or stat points, faster play speed, increased damage, keeping items and all that such. But Tales of Graces F also contains a "Legends and Legacies" chapter which allows you to pick up the game months after the completion of story, giving a bit a new side story. Most of the area's will be retreads with harder monsters but it does flesh out the ending a bit and gives you a little more to play. Usually I play Tales games only one time, but this one I managed to play both chapters which took almost 80 hours, but now am finding myself midway through a play through with new game plus, tearing through the game at 5x experience and damage making all the fights faster and shorter, so I am flying through the game now trying to complete the mind numbing amount of side quests the game has hidden along the way.

The last thing I want to bang on about again, is the DLC issues. the game offeres from free DLC right out the gate which seems to be a nice gesture, but as you play through the game you can unlock costumes that are different for each character or throwbacks to other Tales games. But then I started to find screen shots that showed various other Tales and novelty costumes that would be fun to use as well. But when I started looking in the playstation store, I started to find that most of the costumes were almost 4 bucks a pop. To make matters worse, all of the free DLC was only 100kb to download, which says to me that's a fucking unlock code and I am not downloading anything. This really bothers me that so many games are starting to gut content from a finished game to charge a few extra bucks for it. I know some companies plan DLC and I know some of them work independently on them from the main game. My big qualm is I think I would rather actually download the costume instead of unlocking it from the disc. It will at least give me some small comfort that the stuff isn't in my possession already and I'm just paying extra to get to use it.

The real shame is I like a lot of these costumes. but if i want just the ones
pictured here, that's like 52 more dollars. Eff, That.

Again, I don't know why so many people seem to have problems with JRPGs these days. I've always found them fun to play and ultimately you play these games for the story. Yeah they may not be as deep as some of the more modern western RPGs but take this review for what it is. It may not hold up against some of the classics in the franchise like Symphonia or Abyss, but if you want to get a good time sink with a decent story and fun combat system, Tales of Graces f  is a solid play.  I would recommend it.