Tales of...

A lot of the cosmetics are fairly dumb looking but it's still a great idea.

One thing I dislike as I got further in the game is you unlock most of your linked skills early on and later on it doesn't seem you get many anymore. Like out of the shit on the 2nd sphere I think I got 2 new combos only, I wish there were more combos even if they had to reuse the same combined effects for some of them. Maybe it's because I play Milla so I end up doing elemental based combos all the time and there's mostly only one and at most 2 for each element so it gets a bit repetitive.

Also the AI is still retarded, trying to get Leiah to buff me with Elemental whatever is a fucking ordeal, I have to unlink her(otherwise she outrights cancels her own spell to come do a melee combo with me) then make sure she's in a safe spot(if she gets hit it interupts the spell but she doesn't try to recast it, it's gone) and she casts it. Obviously not directly ordering to cast it, she'll cast it once every 30fights. Last boss fight the char that linked with my healer just stood there doing nothing for 30+secs until I got tired of his shit and forced him to unlink so he'd actually do something. Linking overall seems to fuck with the AI, but at the same time it gives so many stats.

Meh, playing the Milla story, the fight against has to be a joke, I spent a couple of hours trying to beat it using various techniques on hard and eventually had to drop difficulty as I couldn't get her down under ~40%. She has almost instant attacks that hit me for 30 to 80% of my life(the big combo one was about 80% +poison+TP poison, the pbaoe one was about 30% and the throw was about 30%), if you block she throws you, if you backstep you still get hit by some of the attacks due to the stupid reach, best technique I've found was pressuring her spamming normal attacks, using special attacks means you're open to counters(the blue exclamation mark), using a knockdown attack means you get fucked when she gets up since she'll randomly do one of her moves instantly but if you're blocking she'll just throw you half the time. She has 50k hp but the combos I could land before she countered were only about 1k dmg worth(600ish when spamming normal attacks), and starting at 50% life she goes crazy and start throwing quad elements, pull zones and random shit like that and some of them are uninteruptable since she enters charge mode. I was the right lvl(51 when she was 50) and I had lvl 80 shop gear so it was just complete bullshit balancing. Turned it down a notch and one shot her. I think they might not have thought this one through.

Well on Hard I can actually die on a boss fight, I think any less than that and even if you eat a Mystic Arte without blocking you still won't die so that kind cheapens the experience. It's just that fight is retarded cause it's a solo fight and the game really doesn't work very well solo, duo is decent because you can still do combos but solo is boring, plus Milla is a terrible solo char too, the solo fight with Jude against Ivar for example I found to be pretty fun because of his Pivot Step and self healing. Milla's main strength is she can do elemental short attacks to weave in combos and get linked artes of every elemental type, but that's worthless when you're fighting solo a boss that isn't even weak to any element.

Anyway other than that the game is really nice, I like the story a lot and the combat is pretty cool even though it's been pretty repetitive the last 6-8hours of gameplay since I unlocked every spell already so now I'm working mostly on passives, some of which are pretty cool. Almost got the one to cast Spirit Artes while jumping, not sure exactly how it's gonna work but sounds pretty nice.

I only hope next gen they won't do that shit with exclusives and alternating consoles and shit, I don't want to have to own 2 consoles to be able to play all the games of the series

Finished the game, was around lvl 70 or something even though I was skipping most of the trash fight, mostly just using xp food before every boss and I grinded for 15mins around lvl 30. I wish I could have unlocked Milla's last tier of passives earlier in the game, the one to cast while jumping is amazing, you do a triple jump then start spamming spells from up there away from all interupts, cool stuff. Really liked the story, ending was kinda meh but still alright, characters and shit were very well done I think, Milla was an amazing lead(other than the english VA, ugh), don't know if Jude is as good maybe I'll replay it on Jude side later on. Also have to do the special dungeon maybe, but can't really be bothered atm.

Now I guess I wait for xillia 2, and in a few years an emulation of Vesperia since I'm not gonna buy a xbox360 just to play that.

Saban_sl said:

Is there something more to the devil beast weapons or are they kinda subpar?

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You get all 6, finish the game then you can do a special post game dungeon and when you finish that, it unlocks their true power which is scaling damage based on the amount of mobs you killed, at least from what I read. They end up the best weapons in the game(at least for characters you've been using in fights) but yeah they're pointless before that and I'm not sure it's very useful to get the best weapons once you have completed everything.

For the stories there's a few differences, whenever the group split and you don't have jude and milla together is different stuff pretty much. Mostly the big difference is near the end, the Milla side was awful and probably one of the worst part of the game while the Jude side sounded to be pretty fucking awesome from what you get told happened. I think mostly the point is playing a different type of character, Jude has a lot faster combos and Pivot Step dodges make for interesting gameplay where you can rely on dodging stuff instead of blocking, while Milla can cast spells which isn't particularily useful unless you build your group so she stands in the back and do only that or until lategame when you can cast while jumping or moving, but at that point might as well play Rowen who looks like he has some seriously cool casting mechanics(every spell has a unique mechanic via Tuning). Sadly playing other chars than the 2 mains is annoying since you can't do that all game. Rowen and Alvin looked pretty nice otherwise, I don't think I'd bother playing Elize and Leiah is very much the same as Jude but with less skills and support stuff instead.

Saban_sl said:

First one i got was Millas near the end. Today i guess i'll track down the rest. Also wish i had known you can fail side quests for not doing them before moving on with the main story.

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As far as I know, there's only one major event that fails a large number of side quests. There's a few others that fail on specific events but mostly it's that one big event you want to be careful of, and they actually tell you something about how you need to make sure you're ready. Story spoilers ahead
Unless you're going for 100% it doesn't really matter too much though if you fail some events, and even if you are going for 100% you need to play both as Milla and Jude so you'll have time to fix it next playthrough, at least to an extent, if you have done all the char specific ones.