izigame.me

Writing a quick review to just say the port works perfectly fine so far with zero issues, as well as my memory of why I liked this game in particular. note: do not buy the exp dlc, even if you want to skip the grind the game already gives you plenty of ways to do that on the offset. Bamco adding this dlc to each Tales game makes the game itself look worse than it is.
The game scaled up looks quite nice, generally a lot of wii era games do well with upscales because of the stylization but paired with the amount of per character animation I would say this actually looks better than most. The other remaster on ps3 they're pulling from probably helped. Everything is crisp and all the textures make sense, including the intro animation. It's completely possible they could have had a 1080p animation in their back pocket, but it doesn't look like a weird upscale or anything. The only thing I've seen that appear to have upscaling artifacts are some aspects of the UI which is fine by me.
It's news to me that a lot of people dislike this game in particular story-wise, I think the characters are quite good and they are much more the backbone of a Tales game than the lore or narrative, in my opinion. The framing of this going on over the course of a few years allows every character to have a significant growth to full changes in personality, and I think it adds something unique to the formula. I also like how the children act largely like children, and it's framed in such a way to keep you in that frame of mind. Nobody tells you about the politics of the region directly and things happen without your full understanding.
The combat is easy to learn but mechanically complex. I've seen a few reviews calling this the hardest tales game people have played but I find this one more intuitive than Vesperia and it's well tutorialized throughout. The beginning is slow because you don't have access to each characters unique gimmicks but I vividly remember how much combat grows as the game moves forward. As far as I know, this was the turning point in combat design for the Tales series from fairly simple inputs to mechanically complex. There were a lot of things in the symphonia-abyss-vesperia era that complicated combat but a lot of it was on the stat side rather than your reactive performance. If you didn't like Zesteria, Berseria or Arise you -may- not like this one.
The way progression designed is interesting, a lot of unlocks are tied to titles, which imbue permanent character buffs and have their own exp system. There is a menu on start to make these less grindy but honestly I love grinding out the individual titles and recall it being paced fine. Also a fair amount of outfits that are tied to titles and progression, finding and unlocking everything is very involved and fulfilling.
Another thing that changed with this one (probably as a result of platform) is that the way the map works is a series of connections between nodes, with each path being something like a standalone dungeon. I like this design and think makes it stand out from a lot of JRPGs. Interactive world maps are fun but I think there's a limit to how much detail you can put into a plain between towns without delving into full open world territory. Later games would improve this, particularly Arise, which has a fair amount of open space but it's all designed and well populated.
Overall I've yet to find any genuine fault with the port, and unless my memory is playing tricks on me this is one of my favourite Tales games for a reason.