Tales of Zestiria is probably the worst Tales of Game I have ever played.

[Play4leftovers]

[SPOILERS] [SPOILERS] [SPOILERS] [SPOILERS] DO NOT READ UNTIL YOU HAVE ACTUALLY COMPLETED THE GAME! Or if you don't actually give a ♥♥♥♥ and want to know why it is a terrible idea to buy this game.


I am honestly sorry to say this, but I can't in any good faith recommend this game to anyone, not even a die-hard fan of the Tales series.

There is multiple problems with this game on purely story and character level. But lets start with the story.
The problem with the story is that it suffers a lot from it simply terrible writing and relies heavily on plot conviniences. For instance, at a point in the game you face the Lord of Calamity and starts beating him and almost defeats him. Then the group just suddenly goes "No, its not time yet" and immidietly stomps away. There is no reason to it. They just decide that ending the game now is not how it should be, so they just leave the bad guy to walk away.

Then there is the whole trouble with that the fire spirit (I can never remember any of the characters name, because how bland they were, but that is another problem) always knows what you are supposed to do and where to go. Does she tell you? No, because that would forward the plot. So why does she know this? Because she worked with the old shepard. This is a prime example of terrible writing. You include a character with knowledge of events, but never actually have it matter. It is infuriating!

The second problem is the whole relying on convinience for most of the plot. Like they say at one point "Lets go check up on this random guy, because we got nothing better to do." Not because he might know something or has clues they suspect. No, they just feel like it.
Bam, you show up in time to meet random character that knows what you need to know and then you hurry off to the next location. Again. Lazy writing.
See the red thread through this entire post? The entire game is riddled with lazy and piss-poor writing that relies entirely on chance and coincidences to forward the plot.

Finally. The game can not for the life of itself keep its own lore straight. I might have misunderstood the entire thing, since it was poorly explained most of the time. But here is how it essentially went down.

You are the shepard, who is the latest of all the shepards that has ever been... Except your dad was the first shepard who fought the first lord of calamity, thousands of years ago... Or 20 years ago. No wait, he didn't fight the lord of calamity, there was no lord of calamity, he created him because that guy was a cruel general.
So, the issue here is that the game tries to push this "It is a cycle with shepards arriving whenever there is a lord of calamity" thing for the entire first half of the game and keeps on going with it, which is okay. But they more or less just completely forgets about it until the last boss-battle and drops the ball and says "I WILL RETURN!" as if that should repair it.
The problem is simply that it can't keep the narrative straight and seems to try to have many different plot-lines going at the same time, while ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ all of them up (Like the entire wind spirits backstory that ended in a flatulent noise with his death and a hand-waved "He paid for his randomly unexplained sins").

Which brings me to the last part. The characters. While not terrible in any afrontry way like most characters in Final Fantasy 13 for example, they were dull. They were one-dimensional with poorly explained reasoning as to why they are even hanging out with you. A few of them you can understand, but most of the time it just feels like they have not depth or backstory and only serves to push the already confused narrative forward instead of guiding the story the way their personality would.

A short summery all in all is that the game is simply boring. The combat is one of the better in the tales series and it accomplishes what it sets out to do (Using spirit fusions and all that) but what really drags the game down is the story. The story is terrible in the worst way. It is not a B-movie plot, but a confused dragging mess that simply peeters out to nothing.
If I had to ascribe this game to a bowel movement, it would be a noisome flatulence at first that simply ends up with mostly air and a bit of runny excrement at the end.


(I do not have the game on my account, I played it with a friend on his)

[Great Duck]

I would simply say that laying out the "Shephard passes trials and overcomes the Lord of Calamity" road map so early in the game keeps it from being anything else. If the "great battle of time" is settled in such black and white terms, why shouldn't every other conflict? The game illustrates that the seraphim/malevalence/hellion dynamic isn't that clear cut and that all kinds of people can be shepards, which all good, but not this time, the time that matters. The only character this really hurts, though, is Alishia- her burdens are tied to society, everyone else in the crew bar Rose has no direct stake in it. The story just doesn't ask anything of them, which lets them be enjoyably goofy, but a shame because Sorey knew he was a know-nothing from the mountains and took every poke at integrity with total humility.