Haku's Tales of Xillia Review

[Hakudamashi]

Tales of Xillia, a very lengthy Action RPG that sticks to Tales of traditions, but with big improvements... imo anyway.

What I Liked

The Combat
It's fast frantic fun. You're free to go gunho ballsy with your approach, or be slow and cautious if you wish to be so. The linking system allows you to partner up with one other character to cause specialy abilities that are specific to each link partner. You can swap out party members at any point during battle, but even those who do not participate will gain EXP.

The Difficulty
You can make it as hard, or as easy as you want it to be. At any point, you can go to the options and choose for the difficulty to be Easy, Normal, Moderate, Hard or Extreme. Higher difficulties get you better loot, lower difficulties allow you to get a move on, you're free to tweak it however, whenever.

New Game +
The game comes with In-Game Achievements called "Titles", each Title earned gets you Grade Points. The grade points are for your new game +, when you import data from a previous completed file, you get to spend your Grade Points to tweak the new game however you like, provided you have the points to pay for the perk. The perks range from starting the game with the money and gear you had before, to having everything, your party and your enemies, with raised Crit chances. So it'd be wise to do all the side activities if you ever plan on doing a second playthrough.

Side Questing
I like the convenience of it. Everything gets organized in your Event List with what to do and where to do it, with a bright green objective marker to highlight where to continue it. Makes them easy to get out of the way, but there's no way to get rid of the objective markers if you dislike that sort of thing.

The Shops
All the shops all over the world sell the same shit, in order to get them to sell more stuff, you gotta expand them. To expand a shop, you either buy their shit, donate materials you've found to them, or just literally give them money. Doing this not only gets the shops to update their inventory, but it also gets some items on ridiculous discounts.

Fast Travel
You can instantly wapr to any place you've already been to(unless plot says you can't) with just the push of a button at no cost. You can even warp to different sections of a big place if you're looking for something specific.

The Character Cast
The chracter designs, the voicework, the personalities, I did really enjoy the cast(except for one certain annoying little shit that you'll know as soon as you see her), and had no problem playing through the 80+hr adventure to see what they do next.

What I Didn't Like

Presentation
The environments, the art style, the locations, they were all very bland and forgettable to me. They're ok to look at while you're in them, but I always had that feeling of "meh" throughout the whole journey, except the anime cutscenes, those were neat.
And I didn't like the choreography of the action cutscenes... they were janky as all hell.

Soundtrack
The music in this game is very underwhelming. The only track I can recall off the top of my head is the result screen music after a battle, only cause you hear it soo often.

The Verdict

I enjoyed this game a whole lot, I mean, I stayed with it for a whole month, and even after I finished it I immediatley wanted to play it again, I say that counts for alot. The game is fun and I'm sure everyone can find enjoyment with it.

B⁺
8/10
4/5
Buy It

[Hakudamashi]

Not that the game's ending looked like it needed a sequel, but I am interested to see where things go on from that ending.
Like FFX-2 to FFX.