Tales of Zestiria

This is the first time I played the Tales series. (+) Story is pretty good but some parts are a bit cliche. (+) Pretty interesting characters (The story of the characters are better than the game itself imo) [spoiler](It's kinda disappointing that Alisha only joins the party for a pretty short time)[/spoiler]. (+) Soundtracks are really good (Rising Up Tales and Katz Village are my favorite). (-) Some of the voice actors are pretty bad & bland (English) but Sorey & Rose's voice are the best. For the Japanese voice, they're all good. (-) Audio quality on the 2D cutscenes are bad for some reason. (-) Combat isn't the best, but I'm glad there's an Auto mode. (-) Weapons, skills & equipments are out of the place. My final score: 7.5/10 P.S.: [spoiler] For a fun & innocent looking game, I'm surprised there's a lot of dead children in this game. [/spoiler] 👀

I think this is one of the more underrated Tales games, maybe not for someone new to JRPGs, but I think this game is just way more fun than people give it credit for. I am slowly making my way through other games in the series, and I think this really does harken back to the series' roots with heroes and villains who are so heavily shaped by events of the past, while also not featuring any shoehorned-in romance that some other Tales games are guilty of. I can agree that the skill system is pretty wonky with tutorials that aren't very good, but I had fun with combat anyways. It's not spammable like a lot of other Tales games, relying a lot more on timed strikes than combo potential if you ask me. When you start getting to blast off mystic artes is especially when combat shines, as you can often get off a few in a row, which to me is always funny. My biggest complaint with combat is that your party members' AI is reaaaaallly not good. I personally don't believe it's to the degree they're entirely useless or you do better alone, but they certainly leave a TON to be desired. I should mention I actually beat this game on PS4 a couple times already, so that's where most of my feedback is coming from, and if getting this on steam, you may wanna look into the Tales game PC fixes that should be in the community pages. Either way, while a flawed game, I still think this game is great fun, and is kind of a comfort game to me now.