Video Game Tuesday: Tales of Xillia

This is the most recent Tales of game to come stateside, and it is definitely one of the better ones I’ve ever read.  Follow after the jump to learn why I think that!

While the US had gotten Tales of Graces F back in 2012, it was actually a port of a very gamebreaking  bug-laden Wii game, and while I enjoyed it, it wasn’t that great compared to other entries in the series like Vesperia or Symphonia. So when I heard Xillia was coming stateside I was very excited. This was the JRPG that had sold half a million copies in a week in Japan alone and had more pre-orders than any other Tales of game ever.

Summary: The game takes place in a fictional world called Rieze Maxia and follows Jude Mathis and Milla Maxwell. The two discover a military research that involves spirits and will endanger the world.

That’s all the summary I’ll give as anything else will spoil major plot points.

Gameplay: At the very beginning of the game, you are asked to choose which of the two main characters to follow the storyline through, I chose Jude. This isn’t a simple choice as it affects large portions of the story and what you see of it. To see all of the story you have to play through it two times. Now onto the real meat, I loved the combat system! I thought it was a great improvement over Vesperias and while it used the standard TP it also included something from Graces f that I enjoyed which was it’s Chain Capacity system for battles. I thought it would suck to have to watch TP and AC, Action Counter, but it didn’t and it worked really well.

Storyline: As is typical of Tales of games it features a pretty standard storyline up until the wham episode in which point it then deconstructs everything you thought the story was and makes you go holy crap at the end of it. That’s all I’ll say of it really. It was amazing in my opinion.

Art: Coming from Graces f, the art is much improved although that’s to be expected when you have a game ported from the worst last-gen console to the PS3. Everything is very pretty and if you are going to be doing sidequests you’ll get to look at the world a bunch since you’ll be running back and forth through the world.

Music: I love the Tales of series intro music, and progress by Ayumi Hamasaki is no disappointment! Finally a Tales of game that has the original Japanese music in it without a crappy english version as well.

Characters: I love all the characters, even the who I thought would be annoying Tipo.

Overall: A great game worth playing if you like JRPGs.

For those who like: Action battle system JRPGs, Plot that isn’t typical after the first 8 hours of story.

Not for those who don’t like: JRPG’s that don’t have turn based battle systems, a plot.