Tales Of Xilia
meh
Plot!
at the start of the game you get to pick between the two protagonist,jude or millia... jude is a medicine student and basicaly your stereotypical jrpg hero (idealistic,somewhat whiny) who gets sweeped into something bigger than him,and millia is a stern no shit given character a-la lightining,she's also god so a lot of "HUMAN,HUMAN,HUMAN" conversation get out of her mouth... the two ends up breaking into a secret lab together (actualy i'm not sure why they let me pick one of them if it takes less than an hour for them to end up together) and become fugitives from the military,in the meanwhile they get joined by a third character called alvin,which plays the role of the older and cooler mentor... it's not as offensive as graces but it's so boring and flat and sounds like something i would read on the jrpg trope chart or if i tried jrpg mad lib
Combat!
it's tales! the gimmick in this one is that you link with another character and that character's follow you around in battle,combo enemies you are attacking and protect your behind from other attacks,each character has different link attack which are suited for different kind of enemies,millia gets a paralyze ability that works on "speed" enemy and alvin get a guard break ability that works on "guard" enemy... as you execute attack in pair you fill a bar which let you do a single super attack each time part of the bar is filled,when the bar gets filled full,you get to do infinite super for around 30 seconds and you also get to use new linked special moves where the two character attack together (jude spins millia around for example) it works pretty well but it kinda feels like it's there only because otherwise it would play like every other tales games
SubSystem!
everytime you level up you get growth points,you put these point into a grid system that looks like a spider web,stat up are on the actual lines of the web while skills are inside the web,when you get all of the stat up around a skill,you get that skill... so basicaly it's a more customizable sphere board
the other gimmick is with shops,shops don't get better by simply progressing the game,instead you level them up with materials you find around the world map and dropped by monsters... each material has a point value and giving them to a shop give them points and when they get enough point that shops level up and they stock new items or discount some of their older stuff... but wait! each shops like a kind of item at random and giving them items of that kind gives them double (sometimes triple!) the point,for example the accessory shop suddenly decided it liked plants and since i had a bunch of seeds around,i used them all and it gained like 8 levels in a row and it's now stocking stuff like attack symbols and the like even so early in the game... it's quite dumb and since there is no actual synthesis system a little bit suspicious too... there is also no cooking at all,you simply level up a cooking shop
oh and they added an option to quick save your game for when you can't find a save point fast enough
Other Stuff!
what else... i understand that they decided to drop cell-shaded character for graces since it was a wii game but this was done ground up on ps3 so why it doesn't look half as good as vesperia did? the enviroment are pretty dull too and i don't really like the music...
get dragon's crown instead
