Tales of Xillia (PS3): Familiar, yet Fantastic.

It's been a little over a year since I reviewed Tales of Graces f.  While it wasn't the glowing JRPG review I tend to give these games, in retrospect it was definitely one that I enjoyed. I recommended it to friends often and if I managed to get one person to convert, then I consider that a job well done. 

It was a slow year for JRPGs. Since that review, I played one old and one new Atelier game, two PS2 Persona games.. and.. ugh.... Mugen Souls. So after reading how this game was receive perfect scores in Japan, needless to say I was pretty eager to get my hands on it. Now after a little over a year, we sit down with....

TALES OF XILLIA:(PS3)

Our tale opens up with young Jude Mathis, a med student in the medical college of Fenmont, pursuing his medical degree. An accomplished doctor, he learns from his professor that he is already in line for a job. After covering for his professor's patients, he realizes the professor has gone missing after visiting a nearby military base. Jude is turned away at the base entrance, being told at the professor has already left. Jude is suspicious and starts to leave but as he does so, he spots a mysterious woman walking across the water trying to break into the facility.

The woman identifies herself as Milla Maxwell, and that she is here on mission. Jude follows her into the base and they discover that the military is running tortured experiments to drain the mana from people, including Jude's professor. After watching the professor die in a tube, Jude and Milla battle with a mysterious and psychopathic girl who seemingly is the cause of this. After dispatching her, Milla discovers a giant spyrix weapon called the Lance of Kresnik and tries to complete her mission to destroy it. She summons the 4 greater spirits which causes Jude to realize that she is none other than THE Maxwell, Lord of the Spirits.

However, things go sour as the psychopath returns and activates the weapon, which then beings to drain the mana from the room, and captures the 4 great spirits. Jude and Milla escape but then are pursued by the royal military. With the seemingly random help from a mercenary named Alivn, the three of them escape. With Milla now severely depowered without the four, she decided to return to her shrine to re-summon them so she can destroy the lance, and with Jude as a wanted fugitive he has no better course than to accompany her.

So, it might be a little difficult to give this game a lengthy review because many of the things I said about Tales of Graces f can easily be applied to Tales of Xillia. This franchise of games doesn't deviate much from the main formula but they do make a number of little tweaks to make it feel a bit different. So I will try to hit on changes more than the standards of the game which anyone who has played a Tales game should know by now.

For the first time that I can remember, Tales of Xillia features a dual hero system. Much like Star Ocean 2 back on the PS1, after the initial introduction sections you get to choose which of the two protagonists you wish to follow in Jude and Millia. My first thought was "Hey awesome, I get to see both perspectives." which was quickly followed by "Aww fuck. I'm gonna have to play this game twice in row now?!" RPGs never have short play times.

Although it was a bit of a premature assumption, since this rendition of Tales took me about 45+ hours to get through. Still a pretty meaty game length if you do the extra side quests or post game, but for JRPG and a Tales game specifically that is significantly shorter than I was expecting. perhaps to accommodate for the fact that it wants you to play it twice so you can do the missions with the opposing character's story path. Thanks to the return of the Tales of grade system, you get to customize your new game plus features in your second playthrough which drastically will cut down the playtime. Increased XP, damage, and level retention will make you fly through the game. 

There are two things I'd like to hit on with the story before we move on to the actual game. One? Its nice for once to have a Tales story that doesn't make me feel like a fucking idiot. Tales of games usually tend to have some pretty involving universes which force you to learn their lore and technology. With Vesperia's blastia cores and aer's, or Abyss's seventh phozons, or Legendia's merines, its enough to make you feel like you need an advanced degree in unintelligible rhetoric to follow along. 

Wouldn't be a Tales game without those weird animeish moments.

Thankfully, Xillia's tale is pretty cut and dry: Humans need spirits to cast artes to make life easier and spirits need mana from humans to survive, so they balance in harmony to suit mutual needs. But humans start making spyrix weapons that kill spirits for artes instead of giving them mana, so Millia is out to stop them before the balance is ruined and this influx of powerful weapons causes the nations to go to war. See that? Two sentences and I basically summarized the whole motivations. It is much easier to get immersed when I actually understand what the fuck is going on.

What I don't like however, is something I just noticed in this game. Almost every single Tales game I have played to this point, has had virtually the same story. Always a "Chosen one" and an "unlikely hero", Always two warring nations, always two worlds, always a younger character using a toy as weapon, always some horrible "power of friendship" moment, always some form of the world having its power drained. I might be glossing over these examples somewhat and they may not appear in all of them, but these are fairly common themes seen in nearly every Tales game to some degree. The locations and players change, but the story for the most part doesn't. This really sounds like a negative to be honest it never bothered me all that much. Same dressing on a different salad.

The Tales Of combat system is still one of the most engaging systems in JRPGS.

Now that I'm thinking about it, there are handful of very big jumps in the story that feel like it could have extended game play some. Without spoiling too much there is a part where your heroes split up again, and then in a cutscene it basically goes "hey all this shit happened and now you are here". It happens like 3 times in the game and I feel like it can be pretty jarring. Not enough to make me lost in the story, but enough to make me think "Wait what? When did that happen? Why didn't I play that?". Seems like you could have added a few more hours to the game to make that a bit more seamless. Playing both characters helps a bit, but not as much as I'd like. 

So, getting that out of the way lets get to the meat of the game. I am just gonna say it, the Tales of series has the hands down best core combat mechanic in a JRPG. It's a fast paced, multiplayer, action oriented, active battle system where your direct actions can sway the tide of battle. You can free run and linear move on locked on targets, where you swing your base attacks and use your artes to link up combos for big damage. At first glance it will feel like any of the 3d combat Tales of titles to come before it.

But how it's been altered I feel comes in the layout a bit. The huds are now laid out much like the D-pad instead of just along the bottom. This is intentional for its linking system where you can link up with another character, and they will run support and fight the same enemy with you, each character with their own unique ability such as punching through an enemy block, or recovering you as you deal damage to an enemy. While linked your dealt hits and artes fill a gauge which will allow you to perform a linked attack. Much like say in Chrono Trigger the right arte with the right character will cause them both to team into a big combination attack. Once this gauge maxes out, you can chain together all the linked artes you can execute for big damage.

Always a good idea to figure out who you like to link with, and pick your attacks accordingly
Or, find a partner who best matches up with the attacks you most often use. 

This layout also allows you to to easily switch from one character to another with a single button press. This is something some of the previous Tales games have had, but in this system it feels much simpler and more intuitive. Depending on enemy type or number of them, it was very easy to switch between Jude and Milla to unload the right combo moves to smash my enemies.

It also now includes what I call the "FFX factor." Much like in Final Fantasy X, your whole party moves as a group, so in the heat of battle your reserves are easily available. A quick click of R3 slows down time and allows you to pick who you want to swap out with your d-pad and then pick which of your reserves you want in. Seconds later the two trade places, this is handy if you need to bring in that extra healer, or switch up what magic user you have in the party. Tales games have had fairly similar combat systems in comparison to each other, but this is probably the one I liked the best. 

It's always marveled me how each of these games can have remarkably different sound tracks, yet all manage to sound exactly the same. This has always been a glaring weakness in this franchise in my opinion. Say what you will about some Final Fantasy games, they know how to produce an iconic and memorable soundtrack. I spend all day thinking about it and I probably couldn't hum more than one song from any of the Tales games. Two come to mind, one is a town theme from Tales of Legendia and the other was the theme to Tales of Abyss which isn't even really their song. It was a song called "Karma" by Bump of Chicken.

Graphically, and probably because it focuses a bit on the war between countries, this version of Tales seems to have that more realistic grainy style of graphic to it (as realistic as anime can look anyway), and I'm not entirely sure I care for it. I mean, its not the whole modern shooter pallet of grays and browns, as the game has plenty of colorful scenes and characters. But it feels like a bit of a departure from the cleaner looking and super saturated look that Tales of Graces f  had. Something about Milla's hair seemed off to me too. I don't wanna say the graphics seem dated.... but I don't know.. something just seems off about it.

Some of the characters Mystic Artes get a little out of hand. But so satisfying to land. 

This is also one of the first Tales of games that I can remember that had free camera angle on the world map. Like so many other games you can use the right analog to move the camera around the character, but most often it will be behind you. I didn't notice it at first, but now that I think about it, this is fairly unusual because most of the Tales series uses fixed camera angles that follow the player, usually to show off backgrounds of the locations you visit. Perhaps they went with this style of the costume collectibles you can find along the world map so they can hide them in various places, but I can't think of another Tales that's used it.

In my last Tales review, I made some complaints about the cast being one of the weaker ones in recent memory. This is not the case in Xillia. While there are a few anime sterotypes in this game, there aren't nearly as many as previous. Jude plays reluctant hero, but he's completely lacking in angst for the most part, so he's pretty likable from the word go. Milla plays the fish out of water character, so watching her try to learn how to be human is pretty funny in a lot of scenes. Really I think they only character I didn't like was one of the first villains you meet, Agria.  It's hard to play off the lunatic psychopath without having the voice acting sound hokey, but its usually in short bursts and are not often so its easy to forget.

In addition to the characters being likable, the majority of them are fun to play as well. All of the 4 melee types have lets of different moves that make it easy to pick up and start comboing away at enemies, and even the two magic users (there is technically 4, but two primary) have the right kind moves that make it fun to just hang back and start slinging spells around. This is good for if you are lucky enough to have a friend over, since technically the game can be broken up into 4 player multiplayer. So to have a friend running support with attack magic while you combo away can make fights a lot easier.

But more than anything, there really isn't a lot of angst to go around in this one. Unlike most Final Fantasy titles, the cast is enjoyable and easy to get along with. Aside from one major plot point where one of the leads starts beating people with the angsty stick (something that ends about as quick as it starts{and works in story context}) the majority of the cast is genuinely cheerful and upbeat about their involvement. They have fun little dialog skits like you've seen in previous tales games which flesh out the characters, and none of them come off as particularly grating (sans Teepo, the high pitched voice of the toy).

The traveling skits are back in full force, many of them entertaining.
Some of them, not so much... ugh. Elize's song...

Despite all the changes and additions to the game, it does somehow manage to feel like every other Tales of game that I've played. I suppose that can be seen as a negative, but from where I stand it's really not. I can't think of a Tales game I've played where I had any real negative feelings for. I might not have gotten into poorly translated rom hacks of the older ones, but any localized release I've pretty much fallen in love with.

I actually came up with a realization not to long ago. I grew up with the Final Fantasy franchise from #1 on. and while I found 6, 10, and then 4 to be the best of them, there were a lot more that were good to just ok. I keep faithfully waiting for Squenix to get it right and dish me out a new awesome Final Fantasy game. You know what series I'm not doing that with? Tales. Every one of these games has provided me a solid 60-80+ hours of play with minimal to no disappointment, a fairly frequent release schedule, and are consistently exceptional.

Which is why I've started to realize that I think the Tales of franchise has surpassed Final Fantasy. It feels weird to say because I've been such an avid follower of that series (and will continue to be), yet I see this series kind of get the brushoff because of is heavy anime influence, yet I can't think of another series that has provided me with such consistent satisfaction. If you are one of those people who feel that the Final Fantasy series has been letting you down for the past 12 years, then I invite you to give Tales of Xillia a try. It has been doing a fantastic job of scratching my JRPG itch and I think it will for you too.  Give it a shot, you'll be glad you did.

They still fucking rinse you on DLC costumes though...
5 bucks a head? Fuck you.