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9 people found this review helpful
4.5 hrs on record
Infested with a third-party launcher that collects telemetry and if hearsay is correct; which registers a global keystroke capture hook, i.e. a key-logger.
Posted January 25, 2020.
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56 people found this review helpful
23.8 hrs on record
An extremely middle of the road title as far as entries in the Tales series go.

Story and presentation
Bland environments; bland non-evolving charicatures rather than interesting characters; and a plot that for the most part is bland, predictible and so cliché it actually does the 'visit all four elemental temples'-trope. Even the musical score, which otherwise is top-notch in Tales games, is bland with only one or two memorable tracks.

Combat
Gameplay-wise, most of your time will be spent battling enemies in real-time, with 3 AI controlled partners. The AI partners can be tuned to give precedence to certain type of combat actions; to maintain HP at certain levels; to attack from a particular preferred range; etc. and in addition can be given direct commands to prioritize attack or defense and to spread out and engage all opponents or to focus on whomever the human-controlled character is engaging.

Sounds good in theory, but in practice it results in the AI having two modus operandi:
  1. face-tanking everything, even on characters with paper-thin armor and measly hit-points; or
  2. playing keep-away and mis-timing the casting of buffs or healing spells so that they're left open to be stomped over.

The AI dies. A lot.
The hard part of boss battles is not beating the actual boss. It's keeping your AI partners alive so you don't end up with an atrocious battle grade.

Oh right; all battles are graded. And each KO subtracts from the grade number you earn. Finishing a battle with a status ailment halves it as well. (And there's no easily castable cure-all-ailments spell like in previous Tales series.)

Grade mostly does two things:
Firstly, it ties into the quality of equipment drops, which you need for decent skills, which we'll get to in a moment.
Secondly, it is fed to the governing guardian; the Lord of the Land, of whatever area of the world you were fighting in, to level them up and unlock bonuses. Getting the useful high-level bonuses takes a loooooo-----ng time that way. Luckily, you can offer item bribes to level them as well. And it's actually faster to flat out ignore everything until the end-game and then abuse the massive amounts of money you can get dropped from battles to buy high-grade healing items and force-feed your Lords to the highest level.

Skills and equipment

Equipment drops are randomized and dictated by grade. Each piece of equipment can have up to four skills attached to it, which are used to buff up your character. (Raw stat bonuses; elemental resistances or attack bonuses; better aptitude at fighting certain types of opponents; etc.)

Making any kind of meaningful use out of this system requires aligning activated skills in rows, columns or stacks to unlock the much more substantial bonus skills. (Awesome stuff like +80% to inflict a status ailment; +20% max HP; +20 to all base stats; etc.)

Getting the proper gear means you need to spend a loooooo-----ng time (seeing a pattern there?) farming for the right drops and 'fusing' them to mutate skills together in such a way that you end up with the set you want. Ofcourse, the game doesn't give you any easy means to look up "if I have gear with skill X, which skill Y do I need to fuse with it to get skill Z that I actually want?" You're expected to figure out the system behind it and do the math yourself.

When you finally have your skills arranged, you can start the entire process over when you get gear with better base stats, or you can continue on fusing the older gear together: each fusion ever so slightly improves an item's base stats.
Ofcourse; the type of gear that drops from enemies and is sold from shops is partially bound to your experience level, so eventually that gear will stop appearing.

Thankfully all that lunacy can be largely avoided when playing at lower difficulty levels, which are almost laughably easy, save for the frustration of bosses knocking out your party members. (But then again; at that point a good grade for a decent equipment drop with good skills stops mattering as well.)

However, if you want to get the most out of the game and want to try your hands at the higher difficulty levels on a second playthrough, the equipment/skill system will frustrate you to no end.

Quality of the PC port

The PC port is locked to 30 FPS, though it can be modded to 60 FPS via the TZFix runtime-patcher/injector graciously supplied by community-member Kaldaien. It's not perfect, but gets a very decent 90% passing mark and can be disabled in troublesome scenes. (Next to that it automatically disables in a few scenes which completely break when run in 60 FPS.)

TZFix is also needed to fix audio-related issues that you may experience. In particular when you use 7.1 USB headsets or have your audio quality configured for anything above 44.1KHz in Windows. (The game crashes without.)

Without TZFix the game has no mip maps for textures. This degrades performance and when looking at materials that have equilaterally spaced lines far in the distance, you get some downright atrocious stair-stepping effects. (Most visible when looking at the Pendrago castle walls from a distance. A central location you'll be visiting quite a few times during the game.)

Controls can be freely switched between keyboard+mouse and game controller and everything can be rebound. However, when rebinding certain actions, there are menus which may break down. So it's best to stay with the defaults.

The game can be run windowed, borderless and fullscreen. Fullscreen comes recommended because it is the best way to avoid problems with the extremely flaky frame-limiter / frame-pacer that can cause the game to feel quite jerky. TZFix also injects a different solution for this, which works a heck of a lot better.

Next to all the things TZFix can fix, there are some it cannot. Some players experience a nasty visual bug where the polygons that make up the hair and/or face of a character can glitch and fly outward in large; jagged; completely screen-obscuring 'starbursts'. This may happen semi-randomly anywhere in the game, though there are a few key locations (looking up the stairs from the corner staircase in Ladylake; the T-junction leading to the Great Tree in Marlind; looking along the main street of Lastonbell) where it triggers fairly consistently.

These are very obvious, very immersion-breaking and in many cases ruin key story cutscenes.
Neither developer nor publisher has commented on this bug; there is no patch available that fixes the problem; and there is no demo available to verify whether you'll get this bug or not. You will need to purchase the game, blast through the introductory zones to make it to Ladylake in under two hours and then attempt to trigger the bug at the first location where it triggers somewhat reliably. You'll need to try a few times to have any kind of confidence whether you're affected by the issue or not.

Is the game recommended?

Only at bargain prices.

The actual gameplay is frustrating and the plot and characters are truly one-dimensional.
The game's sole worth is in having more backstory knowledge for the soon-to-be-released prequel Tales of Berseria, which is shaping up to be a much better game.

The fact that a community-mod is necessary to fix a lot of issues with the game is inexcusable and certainly should not result in you paying the publisher a full triple-A free. On top of that, there's a fair risk of running into the previously mentioned 'starburst' graphics glitch when you're already well passed the 2 hours refund mark for Steam, leaving you with a rather expensive turd to stare at.

Also; if you live in the EU and have a PS4 available, get the PS4 version of the game instead.
It's virtually the same, but where the Steam/PC version continues to be sold at a 49,99 EUR price, the PlayStation Store has the PSN/PS4 version at 29,99 EUR, saving you 40%.
Posted January 12, 2017. Last edited January 12, 2017.
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