Tales of Zestiria is a JRPG, with a very mediocre story, but plenty of voice acting. I would recommend this only if you are starved for a JRPG and out of titles for the moment. The combat will take place in a 3D environment in real time, though during targeting the game will be paused (a nice feature), and even the enemy detailed description window can be brought up during that. Since the relevant informations will be showed anyway in a small window during targeting, that detailed window is mostly for the content devouring types. The same is true of the several lexicons which can be viewed from the party menu.
The graphics of the game is a mixed bag. The characters are reasonably detailed, but the environment is very barebone practically everywhere. It is as if the game was targeted for handheld systems, though it wasn’t released for those. There is only so much artistic direction can do when detail and clutter is reduced so much. In the combat instances, a lot of flashy actions were animated, both for the players party and for the enemies.
The music of the game is good. The intro of the game is actually the instrumental version of Superfly’s “White light”, a catchy song which turns out to originate specifically for this game. As usual with JRPGs, I opted for the Japanese voice acting, with English subtitles. The voice acting is excellent, and there will be plenty of that. All the main characters are fully voice acted, but the NPCs with a smiley face above them will be text only. Once you talked to them, the smiley face will change to a pressed lips face. One slight problem with the subtitles is that the protagonist is called Surey by the voice actors, but it is written as Sorey.
The game is played in 3D, and the combat is spawned in the exact environment you are in. Unfortunately this means that when there are open doors, the camera will have limited visibility a lot of the times. Or when you fight huge enemies, like the mammoth ones, most of the action will be hidden under them. Once the combat is commenced, a radius is set up, which you cannot leave until the end of the fight – or until the flee timer fills up if that option is available and you opt for it.
The game has a lot of cutscenes. Some of those are in the games 3D environment. But a lot of them play out as a skitt : large animated sprites of the characters will be shown in 2D, the speaking one being highlighted. Also after the battles a small scene is chosen from a large pool of those. Sometimes it is just one line, but most of the times it is a small interaction between characters, often with a mocking undertone.
The game has a mini-map, a map of the zone, and an overworld map. The main quests have a golden star icon on the map, the side quests a violet one. However these are only shown when you are on the target map containing them. Pressing the RB will show the current main quest, but no info as to where to go for that. As it turns out, talking to your companion offers the quest list. Then the quick travel menu will show a star icon next to a destination, but seemingly only for some purple side quests. Talking to NPCs might give a hint as to where to go. I missed quite a few dungeons early on as I followed the story. The first problem with that is that you will have less XP than expected, but a little grind can solve that. The main problem is returning to them later will offer very little XP, as the enemies have fixed level, and the loot will be irrelevant at that stage too. Unexplored transfer points are marked with a ???, so if you see it on the map just go into them. They might be way higher level than you are. In that case a dire environment is shown, suggesting to go back, but otherwise you should explore them for a level relevant interaction before moving on.
The combat is a hit or miss, depending on your skill and will to understand the subtleties. The game offers a lot of little rules to make the combat more engaging, but I just failed to learn, or most of the times to even comprehend them. In the end I just ended up mashing B, sometimes A to try to finish of enemies. Moving the left stick will select a corresponding attack for B and perhaps for A too. Late game I just randomly played with the stick to carry out different attacks. Those could have been used strategically to carry out the attacks tailored for the situation, but I just didn’t bother to learn what each skill did. The only strategical thing for me was checking for enemy weaknesses (RB is the target selection, it will pause the game while pressed and readily shows the weaknesses and resistances of the target), and armatize with the correct seraphim to deal with them. A lot of flashy things and clever combinations can be done – I didn’t learn / figured out how to use them. Carrying out flashier techniques requires a high level of “rage”, here noted as BG. Since I failed to comprehend how to reliably build that, I never had enough to unleash the flashier attacks. Armatizing uses up 1 BG out of the default max 3, and that was what I dumped my BG for. There is a sidestep system, but I really failed to use that – probably because for a long part of the game I set up the “Free and free” battle action, which I guess interfered with my sidestep efforts. But even after disabling it, I just mostly used simple defense instead of it.
Eventually you can select any character to control, the rest being handled by the game. I think all characters could be left to the game to handle, but watching through such fully automated fights would have been very boring for me, so I didn’t try that out. For normal field encounters I used moderate difficulty, as that gave a bit higher drop rate, and even mere button mashing was enough against regular enemies. Even if you are bad, your companions can carry you. This approach didn’t work at all for bosses. Instead of “gitting gud” with them, I just chose the easy way out – changing the battle difficulty to simple (the easiest available). They become much stupider this way, with a lot less heavy damaging attacks, and mere button mashing was generally enough to wither them down on the first retry on simple.
The game can be played with a controller, or keyboard and mouse. I tried out both, then decided to stick to the controller. Strangely, you cannot switch them mid game.
The save system is quite generous. You can quicksave whenever you are free to walk around on the map. There are savepoints scattered through the maps, there you can save to a slot of your choice. I just used 3 slots, and overwrite the oldest one. Those save points eventually will also act as quick travel points too, though whether you can travel to a specific town / location seemed to be allowed haphazardly.
I played with the tzfix, specifically the 1.8.x test version of it. That increased the frame rate to 60FPS, and removed the microstutter. Also improved the shadows. But I payed a heavy price for that – the game become quite crash prone, which forced me to quick save frequently. Especially early on it crashed a lot. There is a known error with the fix when an achievement is triggered. To prevent that in d3d9.ini, under [SpecialK.System] set EnableCEGUI=false – or crash any time an achievement shows up. Also, due to the crash frequency I set with TZT.exe the framerate timing method to adaptive – which might have helped or not. For wathever reason, in the final third of the game it crashed rarely, mainly at the beginning minutes of a session.
The game had a few DLCs, but I didn’t buy any of those, probably for the best. This game was my chosen entry point into the Tales series, and I intend to play the so far 2 games released after this too.
The game crashed quite a lot, but that was probably because of the fix that I used. Early on it crashed frequently, but after the two changes I described above it become much more stable.
