izigame.me

This is hard to write, because I couldn't tell you for certain if I recommend this game or not. It mostly depends on your tastes. Spoilers are at the very tail end, and will have another warning before then.
tl;dr: If you like tales games, you'll like this. Maybe not love it, but like is adequate.
Story and characters are far from the best, and aren't compelling in the end. If you want a challenge, look anywhere else. If you are new to JRPGs, there are worse ones to get into than this one.
Let's go in this:
Pros:
-world looks is awesome
-voice acting is good
-The history/lore is interesting
That's about it for solid pros from me. Most of my review is mixed.
Mixed:
-Character models look great upon first look, but the use in skits are terrible. Their eyes and flapping jaws look lifeless, like dolls, and it takes away a lot of charm that the old portraits had. If you played it, you'll know Berseria did this best.
-The area design can be wonderfully solid, or outright a straight shot to the end goal with minor deviance. This is one of the most linear 3D tales games. I was not impressed by the multiple small offshoots of areas that only ever go out for one map. Yet at the same time, the terrain and cities look great!
-Characters are great for 5 minutes, then they all sort of become less interesting, falling into stereotypes of a hero team and becoming far less emotionally invested as time wears on. Dohalim I think was the best written character, but for reasons later discussed, that doesn't say much.
Cons:
-There is absolutely NO subtly here. You won't need to find hidden plots. Those are at the forefront. The small moments where they try to redirect you are only that; small. This game does not have enough character, story, or even lore to make anything seem like there are cogs moving around you. It's only you, and what you happen upon.
-Puzzles are sort of here, sort of not. They're not hard, but they are mostly just to make things less of a straight line. Rarely do I feel like I've achieved something when finishing a puzzle.
-Side NPCs are there and rarely feel important for long if at all, and in the final areas, there's a slapped on 'this person is important' but has nothing for us to go off of, and then the final area has such a drop in NPC and world building interaction, it feels lifeless.
-Pacing is so bad. So, so bad. The first 2 areas are solid enough, but from there everything falls apart. I'll go into details after the spoiler tag, but just know that the best written part of the game is Cysloden.
-Battle, a HUGE part of the game, is easy. Laughably easy. Normal feels like easy mode, and harder difficulties don't even feel that challenging. Great for going on autopilot, but not for much else. I took on most bosses way more underleveled than I should have, and rarely ever used a life bottle. I'm talking like 10-15 levels underneath, including the 'end game' content.
-Stardew Valley fishing but not as intuitive.
-Only 66 hours in, with me idling and looking at the scenery, I have 80% of the game's achievements. I'm missing a few friendships maxed out, which because I don't find the characters too compelling, I'm not the most invested in, the max level, and a few other small things like fishing. Including starting a new game plus.
-Don't buy the DLC to level you up, you will NEVER need it. Max level is only 100, you will get there far easier than you think.
-Ads in the campfires for DLC you don't have.
-Skills locked behind titles FROM said DLC.
-items feel useless in this game, I hardly ever used a life bottle or gels beyond CP gels.
-Honestly, I think the story fell flat at the end. Pacing being off, the story becoming bland.. Eh?
-Characters are shoehorned together into clear cut relationships, with a very clear bias on who they're being 'shipped' with. Normally that's fine, but no other tales game has done it with Literally all of the characters, and so aggressively so that this barely feels like a team vs a triple date.
-Story tries to be dark, but it doesn't feel like it earns the gravitas of the situation it creates, and almost makes it a joke with how things evolve so fast at the very end of the game.
Spoiler Central:
-The final boss kicked ass, for a moment, before I realized it was basically all scripted. I love Shionne until she completely 180'd as a character, and became the damsel in distress. I loved how she advocated for herself and fought hard for what she wanted, before essentially giving it all to Alphen.
-I love the wedding credits, but the credits had nothing on Berseria's emotional roller coaster.
-The end game sucked. So bad. I loved the references to older tales games, but it just... Wasn't enough to make the journey there worth it. The references to the older games only really matter if you've played most of the 3-D games. Especially Berseria and Zestiria.
-the final scenes just felt like a generic anime ending, with little catharsis. I had no desire to fight the hydro-punk, seeing as he too was a victim of the system and not the greatest 'evil'. It didn't feel like I was overcoming someone who had messed up. He was doing it all out of spite, which for a final boss felt like a weak conviction.
-Dohalim was a great character concept, but because they showed his flashback in the first few minutes of meeting him, instead of saving for after he went berserk made the impact FAR weaker. We already knew why, and it just made the scene overly dramatic.
-The boys are written so much better than the girls for the majority of the story but with Rinwell and Law swapping places at the end of the game. They let him kind of fade into the background, and made Rinwell more of a plot tool.
Kisara is a typical Mom Friend, with little done to make her stand out. Her arc was all at once, all at the beginning of her introduction, and then her character feels like a background character.
Shionne was amazing at the beginning, but becomes the damsel in distress. The part when Alphen feels pain again was heart wrenching to see her give up. But... Then she loses all agency, trusting it all to Alphen. Sure, that's romantic, but it doesn't feel like she has enough depth to give that to him. She needed it to stand on her own two legs.
Rinwell is a plot device that has her arcs hinge on someone else's action or inaction. Even her highlight of going after the comical villain that killed her family was deeply flawed in that she was talked out of it versus coming to that herself based on what she had seen from her friends.
Similarly:
Alphen's 'plot twist' didn't feel emotional for me. Not because of the plot twist itself, but how he handled it didn't feel real at all. He was still acting in his time of "grief", and basically didn't change at all. Just, now he knows his past, none of his faults were highlighted or conquered.
Law was REALLY strong at first. Angry at his dad, then went through the grieving process and relied on Alphen. However, toward the end, he kind of became a bandaid for Rinwell, being centered around her.
Dohalim had his arc immediately upon entry, and he shows the most changes as a character alongside Rinwell. His character's secret is literally shown to you in a cut scene when you first get to meet him. It's so, so poorly written, and unclear as to what exactly happened.
And the worst part is that these characters are very clearly written to be the romantic partners of their counterpart.
This could work. But it doesn't. It only serves to focus on the 'partners' instead of team building, and makes them feel even less like characters.
Don't get me started on the alien twist. It feels so out of place that it makes everything feel trivialized.
I really wanted to like this game, but I cannot in good faith say you should get it.
If you want an easy tales game with a decent-ish story, go for it.
If you value quality in your characters and world, this will leave you hungry for more.
I wanted more from this.