Tales of Zestiria final impressions:
+Graphics - Great visuals hidden under awful IQ and performance issues. Funny story: I never even realized the game had detailed ground textures until a cutscene where the camera was pointed down at the cast from the air and suddenly the ground was super sharp and detailed in design. Because without any AF, it just looks like PS2 ground textures of colored blur while running around. I think this is probably the worst I've ever seen lack of AF affect visuals and seriously I feel sorry for the texture artists who made all the varied and detailed grounds since no one actually sees them in the game! The cell-shading is actually VERY good. they use a style similar to Vesperia that almost looks like anime in motion at times. If you just squint a little to throw off lack of AA jaggies, it's quite impressive. I'm confident that at 1080p with AA that game will look better than Vesperia and be the best looking 3d Tales game to date. Game also has serious performance problems with streaming in enemies/attacks and so you get drops from 30fps all the time. It never really effects gameplay but it's a blemish overall. Plus 30fps battles is a step back for a series that's used to having 60fps. So for PS3 I'd give the graphics a C, but the underlying art is so good that I think on PC or PS4 at 1080p with AA, AF & locked 30fps or 60fps, this will be a gorgeous A quality graphics game.
Sound: I'm seperating this from music, because the sound mix is screwed up for some reason. It always feel like all the levels are off between battle/field/story and you can't really fix it through adjustment. Was pretty annoying! Apparently the team needs to hire a sound engineer! This gets a C ><
Music: 2nd best Tales score behind Legendia. It's a good ost, with some great tracks and a few amazing tracks. Takes after the FFXIII-2 school in some way with vocal tracks that don't really fit the scenes at all, but hey it's cool having vocal tracks. Overall though don't expect Legendia quality. This isn't a soundtrack you'll listen to for years outside of the game. It's just a fairly good soundtrack and that's especially rare for Tales. B here.
Battles: Good, not great. Takes Graces battle system and takes it in a new linked direction (I'm guessing because they liked that aspect of Xillia?) which makes it feel unique and not just a Graces copy. But for all the complexities, too many battles basically consisted of mashing O x 4 over and over. By making the non-ougi O attacks actually real damage attacks means sometimes there's not even as much incentive as the old O x 3, X combos to mix it up. The element system is too big of deal imo because it turns every battle into just doing the 1 elemental combo combined with some ougis to maximize damage. I do like the idea that you only have to start a combo with an elemental hit and then you're free to free-form your own combo, but sometimes with all the enemy blocking and stuff you don't know which hit will actually connect so you just stick to a full chain of elemental attacks in the weakpoint element. But overall, it's a good battle system, not a great one that is a bit boring in the endgame and Graces did it better. B here.
Gameplay outside battle: Fairly good throwback gameplay the PS2 days of Tales. You have lots and lots of skits, tons of optional content from sidequests to hidden ougis and even hidden villages. It's a small world but there's a lot of parts to it from dungeons to towns, fields, temples to destroyed villages. Optional bosses are everywhere. Dungeons are ok, a couple of good ones, one annoying one, and a bunch of ok ones. They're not a linear line and occasionally they do have puzzles, but they don't really require a brain. The fields have a few interesting things, but some traditional stuff is missing like a real Arena (instead split up into little mini-solo challenges around). Cooking is worse than usual, equipment system tries to be original but is pretty terrible; luckily can be completely ignored and new equipment simply gotten through new shops or enemy drops. Overall there's some hits, some misses, but it's a solid B.
Characters: Splitting this from narrative. This group is great, no question. No lame stereotype characters in your party. No emo/angst bullshit in your party. Main character is a good dude who even if he's not dripping with personality, is interesting enough and likeable. Support playable cast is excellent. I'm not going to talk about antagonists here, because I want to give the main cast an A.
Narrative: Yikes. The narrative is awful in Zestiria. And it's not that kind of usual Tales "We're marrying furries" awful concept. The first 20-25 hours are actually deceptively good because the story has a good concept to it and as I said above the cast is great. But when it falls apart, it falls hard. By the end of the story, the story has no idea what the heck it wanted to be. There's contradicting themes left and right, characters who the game doesn't know what to do with, a backstory which is really uninteresting and a group of antagonists that have no real development and are awful. The narrative also has pacing issues after the first half where suddenly the game loses focus and instead of going on an adventure you're forced to run around doing sidequests before getting to the pressing matter at hand. It starts subplots, they'll disappear for 25 hours, and come back for a rushed cutscene conclusion out of nowhere, or just will never go anywhere with them. Something just feels really really off about the narrative. Like as if a huge portion of the game fell onto the cutting room floor aka the 2nd half of FFXII. The game does feel rushed, so maybe the game needed another year or development but the publisher said "we need our bi-yearly Tales game", or maybe stuff was cut out to be repackaged as DLC or a director's cut, or maybe the team just put their bet on the wrong horse and went with a script that wasn't very good. But it's a shame, because the first half is great and engaging and so it's a huge letdown when the 2nd half not only doesn't live up to the potential, but is just flat out bad and confusing. Narrative gets a D.
Length: Good length, the main game is about 35 hours, but doing all the side content will easily make that go to 50 hours and that's not including the post-game dungeon or bonus episode DLCs. The problem is the pacing of the main story is great for 25 hours and then not great for about 10 hours. Pacing issues aside this would get an A, but pacing included it's a C.
Overall Zestiria is an alright game that misses its potential. There's a good B-tier game in there that's unfortunately dominated by the ever present D-tier narrative which undermines the overall experience in the 2nd half. It's sad because the cast is good, the concept is good and if they had a better script it'd be a quality rpg worth playing, especially with the good soundtrack, solid battle system, great cast and good cell-shading. While the game underneath is still a quality game and there's lots of good old-school content to be had, it's hard to recommend the game to anyone other than die-hard Tales fans because it sure as heck won't give a good impression of the series to anyone else.
