Starting to Loop Back - The Games I've Played

I've ranted about this game before, and I think we're getting to the point in my review of games that I'm starting to loop back onto games that I've played while writing stuff on this blog. Oh well, it's next on the list, so we're going to do it anyways.

Now, part of the weirdness that is Tales games, you start to expect certain things. Typically there are your summons including gnome and company, and there's typically two worlds. When I say typically, I mean you practically expect those things to show up when you pick up a Tales game, sort of like you expect to find a Chocobo, Shiva and Ifrit in a FF game. Shockingly, this Tales breaks that mold and doesn't stick you with two worlds, summons, and the same old bag of tricks.

This game starts out with some of your main characters as children.

and then goes to when they're all grown up and ready to save the world. The fun part about this, is that although some people see the childhood section as an annoyance, for story telling it's actually a really, REALLY cool move because you get to see why the characters are the way they are when they're grown up. You understand the weird relationship between the brothers when they're older, because you see how weird they are when they're younger. You understand just how awkward it would be when Sophie shows back up because you knew her from the childhood section. As a game, it was a bit annoying to know that whatever I did with my characters during the childhood section had no part in how they were going to be when they were older, it didn't mind how much I leveled or geared up, which was frustrating, but on the story side of things, it was a really, smart move because it gave you the background to the characters and introduced the world without throwing you into it head first expecting you to pick things up as you go. (You know who you are!)

Luckily there was one thing within Graces that was kept from the old template of Tales games, the active fighting. Where FF is turned based and you micro-manage (or at least you should be able to do this in your older FF games, don't get me started about the new bleh that they're doing with their combat system) Tales games allow you to take control of one character, the others are either AI or other players controlling their own character, and then allow you to run around, hit, fight, block, or do whatever else you want in real time. This is actually one of the biggest draws to this game for me, not only do you have a great story, but the combat system is MULTI PLAYER. It's an RPG that you can (and should) play with your friends because AI will never be as great as a person sitting next to you that you can communicate and plan things with.

With the pros out of the way, here come the warnings - if you're looking for super realistic graphics with top of the line character design and a traditional story that doesn't have it's weird quirky moments, then this game is not for you. You're going to run into characters that cast swords out of a gun/staff, that have little anime tear drops and storm clouds over their head when they're feeling certain things, and you're going to run into pink, blue, white, green, and purple hair. It's a very particular art style, and from that, I know that some people don't like it, just be warned of what style they're going, and know what you're getting yourself into when you start the game.

Then comes the fun part, just like all of the other Tales games, in good style, this one comes with a new game + option. I'm always a fan of new game +, always. It can never be a bad thing to do the game all over again, with everything that you ended the game with, just so you can unlock even more stuff and become even stronger so the next time you play, you can do new game ++ and rock the game even harder.

We'll just put it this way - I played the story line of this particular game enough times and became so over leveled that I could start and finish the entire story of this MASSIVE rpg in about six hours. I'm no speed runner, but being able to start to finish this game in a slightly longer gaming session (or two short ones) that's not too bad. I'm sure I could shorten it a bit if I really cared, but like I said, I watch speed running from a distance, there's no chance that I'd actually do it.