Tales of Zestiria

Tales of Bait & Switch more like. We've had this happen before but it was abundantly obvious from the less than 1 hour of time you get the other party members from other Tales of games. This one just very suddenly and weirdly just stomps on the player's throat and then forces a new character on you and they're already able to combine with your angel buddies with no prior questing or learning curve, which your main character had to go do. They're stronger, faster, and better equipped when you're forced into taking them into your party. The worst part about all of this? It happens around the 12-17 hour mark (depending on your difficulty and skill). So there's no way to refund the game, if you didn't just watch a full playthrough (which is fucking stupid? Why are you even playing the game then?).

This is right up there with Mystic Quest levels of stanky nonsense. I'm sure the forced character is probably decent had I had 12-17 hours to get to know them in the early game.

Honestly I have tried to play this game like 5 times but everytime i come to the same conclusion...its just...meh.
The game play loop is uninteresting, the overland travel is sluggish, and the story isn't really exciting.

I just don't like the battle system, you have no option to auto lock on to the closest enemy, and have to hold a button to run around in battle where you want, end up getting hit from the side when trying to take out enemies, it's just an awfully stiff battle system, where other games much older had much nicer flow in their action battle systems

Tales of Zestiria" is a game that left me with mixed feelings. On one hand, the combat system, while somewhat innovative with its fusion of physical and magical attacks, felt clunky and overly complicated at times. The story, steeped in environmental themes and moral dilemmas, seemed to have potential but was bogged down by a convoluted plot and underdeveloped characters. However, despite these criticisms, there were elements I found enjoyable. The world of Glenwood is visually appealing, with vibrant landscapes that make exploration somewhat rewarding. Additionally, the game's soundtrack is a standout, providing an atmospheric backdrop that elevates the overall experience. While it didn't meet the high expectations set by previous entries in the "Tales" series, "Tales of Zestiria" managed to entertain me just enough to not regret the time spent on it.

Tales games are generally pretty goodf, this one had all of it's innerworkings more or less completed, but didn't apear to bother in polishing it's systems/UIs for gameplay - like at all.

eg: 3D battlefield that forces 2D engagement (despite actually having the ability to move in the plane), the essential UI systems (gear, skills, purchasing) are all interwoven and overlap, but player must go into completely seperate menu screens to assess what they are doing with each decision.
Other systems are minimally if at all explained in any way, and seem arbitrary convoluted.

The story is pretty bland and leans uncomfortably into religious philosophies, with characters that are overly cliche and uninteresting.

The biggest rub is this offline solo game seems to be designed to incorporate a disgusting level of grinding by default.

overall, All the hard parts seemed done, but was probably both rushed out the door without polish, as well as evidence of publishers not allowing creatives to have control of their content.

Buy it if you like tales games and just want to waste time. If you are looking for quality, just pass.

This game is way too convoluted for a JRPG. There are way too many systems for you to understand to the point that you felt like you cant even keep up. Its like asking someone who just got their very first driver license to pilot a submarine on their first trip to their destination.

This game has been an mixed bag of mediocre, terrible, and amazing aspects for me.

WOULD I RECOMMEND OTHERS TO PLAY IT? YES IF:
1. The game is on sale
2. The person is willing to spend a lot of time to play it, especially the extremely slow first to second act.

WHAT I HATE
- Character appeal. The main party stick a bit too much to a certain stereotype, without the story letting them having a moment to develop themselves (especially Edna and Zaveid for me)
- NPC, really rare to find an npc that is actually interesting
- Overall narrative

WHAT I'M OKAY WITH, BUT DEFINITELY NEED A LOT OF IMPROVEMENT
- Dialogue was a rollercoaster of cringe and downright funny. I felt like though, most of the dialogue even for party is extremely monotone and very "NPC-Like"
- Loot and Equipments is very straight forward. Not a lot of stuff to customize besides fusion between equipments. But I felt like it does a good job, just rather bland and boring after doing it for a thousand times over without the customization option

WHAT I LOVE
- Gameplay though, was spot on. Love the battle system that combines strategic planning a some actions by controlling Sorey first.
- Lailah My Love <3

Rose best girl

This is my first Tales game and I really like the ideas they're trying to pull off with the story here. Emphasis on "ideas" because the execution is nnnnot the best. Another sore point is the equipment and upgrade system they got going on. I still have NO idea what they were trying to pull off and thankfully it's entirely optional on normal difficulty.

Progression-wise I like the semi-open world approach. Soundtrack's good. Combat is pretty cool with Armatizing but I dislike the one human-one seraph party system. 7/10.

My only advice for those haven't bought this game is not to buy it, cause you gonna be frustrated by it. I'd only played it for about half an hour then I was totally upset. The biggest problem of this game is the controlling system, even worse than that of Resident Evil 0, sorry if I offended those fans of Resident Evil, but it's the truth. Other nuisances like dull storytelling, not even a fair scenes, system bugs and so on. I mean, there are so many else better rpgs out there, why not play them? What's worse, this garbage even asks for such a high full price.

Nice artwork, a pretty engaging story and a stupidly complex combat system. If that's your thing, this is great. It goes on quite a bit too long for my taste, but if you're into sinking tons of hours into a game to beat the hell out of it, this is a dream. The complex combat does keep it interesting, to an extent, and there are a lot of optional bosses and whatnot. A completionist's dream if you like the setting.

not bad

Alright Tales Game just wish the Remastered Game or something But if your playing this game because your a Tales Series fan that yeah go for it

As a newcomer to the Tales games, this has been only the 3rd game I've played. I do think it was the weakest out of the 3 (it was the oldest), but I still think it was a good game. You story and lore was pretty good. I enjoyed the characters. The combat left something to be desired, but everything else I enjoyed.

I had heard all the negative comments about this game, but after finishing Tales of Berseria and loving it, I decided to give it a try. Since Tales of Berseria is a prequel to this game, despite being developed afterward, I thought, How bad could it be? Well, long story short—it was a letdown.

The characters feel half-baked, and the story wasn’t very engaging. I played through to the end, but I ultimately felt like I had wasted my time. While it was nice to see some characters from Berseria appear in the story, it wasn’t enough to redeem the game for me.

I don’t recommend this game. Just play Tales of Berseria instead

There are significantly better rpgs to spend your money on, including other tales games. Tales of Zestiria has a few interesting ideas, but they're all drowned out by a sludge of "meh." A painfully generic and half-baked story, very questionable character writing, and a baffling equipment system, are just a few of the things you'll find in this seemingly rushed game.

Despite how harsh I sound, it's not as if ToZ is the worst game I've ever played. The game is just a very mid experience. It doesn't reach any great heights, nor is it an explosion of garbage. It just kind of exists, sitting quietly in the corner, and doesn't achieve anything noteworthy. If you are still interested in playing it, I would definitely recommend waiting for a sale. It is simply not worth the full asking price, especially with so many other great rpgs on the market.

good game

Not exactly BAD, but just doesn't hold up to any of the other 'Tails of' games, really. Story felt weak, characters were decent but not up to the standard of other Tails games, and the gameplay really kinda dropped the ball.

It wasn't a disaster, agonizing to play or anything, I did finish it, but I'd recommend basically ANY other Tails game over this one. So unless you've played ALL the others and are are STILL hungry for more, I can't really recommend.

I did not enjoy the battle system.

I really enjoy Zestiria. I think the combat is fun and smooth (barring the sometimes awful camera angles) and the skill systems are unique to this entry, making it more interesting to experiment with and keep you involved. The characters are fun, though often typical archetype tropes, and the story is compelling enough. Music and art direction is also top notch.

7/10

Pretty good story, pretty good world building, somewhat good character dynamics, but all and all it's pretty mediocre.
If you like an adventure game with deep theme about friendship, good vanquishing evil, and funny banter along the way . . . . then I'd say there are better games than this.
The camera was a bit funky at times, the combat system is a bit boring, you really can't do much to customize it, some enemies are a bit too gimmicky for my taste, and the equipment system was a bit too.. much, this system in particular overcomplicate things that are actually simple, in short this game was having issue explaining stuff.

However, its main strength lies in its ties with the next Tales game, Tales of Berseria. I also have to give props to how well they tell the concept of "hard truth" in the theme of heroism, I adore that, and some character skits are pretty funny. Thus, I recommend this game for that reason since that took a huge chunk of this game.

Now, MINOR SPOILER review/rant:

I love Edna, Zaveid, and Dezel, they're entertaining, in fact they're the reason I can even finish this game, otherwise I'd drop this game due to my sheer hatred towards one character.
Yes, I hate Rose with a burning passion.
She's just a poorly written character that was forced down our throat to replace an actual good character, Alisha.
She doesn't have any character arc whatsoever, they portray her as a pure-hearted wise character who already found all the answer to her problems, so she's basically in the game to rudely boss around and bully other characters acting like she knows everything while maintaining the outgoing personality, and literally EVERYONE in the game bows down to her and thanking her and stuff.
If I could list out my complaints about her, this would be a 10 pages essay.
The point is, had they stick with Alisha till the very end, I'd give this game an 8.5/10.

I am sorry but the combat is too much for me

I got this game because I loved the previous games in the Tales series, namely Phantasia, Symphonia, and Vesperia, and I went into this one wanting to love this one too, and I tried, but after so many hours an trying to make it through a playthrough to be objective, I just couldn't anymore. Maybe it was from playing Visions of Mana and the 2019 Trials of Mana remake right before this that gave me too high expectations, becauser they were amazing, but Zestiria was not those things. Even compared to older Tales games it was just bad. I felt like I was just punishing myself trying to force myself through a whole playthrough after making it through two of the Elemental trials, and it was mostly thanks to the Spirit Chain system.

Having a system that short of using Blast Gauges to refill requires idling or forcefully guarding to wait and recharge, and on top of that making that system affect ALL attacks, because there are no regular attacks anymore because anything you do is considered an arte now sucks the fun out of combat, not to mention the Martial Artes can't be configured how you want, which on the whole feels like a step down from the gameplay of Vesperia. I can't even shortcut the artes of my partners, something I could easily do in Symphonia and Vesperia (and while not able to shortcut, could still tell characters what to do in Phantasia with ease). Honestly, I just want my TP back. Why can't I just have TP, game?

Another gripe is the fusing system, which feels like you need a degree in some arcane witchcraft to know the skills change without a guide, which just led to me mostly slapping things together without abandon or care for the skills, and the fact the names had to match to fuse felt like a way to hamstring the mechanic. On top of this, eventually you figure out by leveling the shopkeeps you can just buy better gear than what you can bother with fusing, even stuff that is fused 15 times over.

Looking through guides on how to fuse told me about sanctifying and other multipliers from Hard Mode and higher difficulty drops, and only told me about EVEN MORE HIDDEN MECHANICS at play, namely the odds of getting a x3 vs. a x2 multiplier, and how if you're not careful, you can LOSE your multiplier in a bad fusion.

All of this, the lack of regular attacks that don't sap this god awful Spirit Chain, the fusion systems, the hidden mechanics, and Mikleo, eventually pushed me too far, and I had to quit. It's like they had a good thing with Vesperia and had to go and wreck it. I hope things get better in Berseria and Arise, which I plan to go to next.

i mean its alright

i really like the combat system. and the stories pretty good too. the armitization is cool. the battle camera kind of sucks at times. but i think its overall a good tales game. i dislike the store system. its cool and different. but not my cup of tea. my favourites still Vesperia. but id say the combat in this one is more fun. not as fine tuned but more fun.

I have to give this game a thumbs down and a pass. The story requires you to be a hardcore fan to enjoy, and even then, it's not that good especially with the ending. The battle system is terrible, and the gear system is even worse. And you MUST understand and use the gear system properly, or you can't beat the final boss' DPS checks unless you play on Easy difficulty.

I personally did enjoy the game's story overall. I really like the setting, the theme, and all the allusions to Christianity in a medieval fantasy world. I love all the allusions to Arthurian legend too, appreciating everything from Ladylake's Round Table and sword in the stone to the Tintagel Ruins and Great Camelot Bridge. Pendrago capital, all fantastic stuff. The characters were pretty great, as with typical Tales of fashion, their interactions and progressions with each other are written very well and cause a lot of laughs. I didn't necessarily have a favorite character, but each of them were still memorable and fun to watch and interact with.

But the combat and the gear system is just so terrible. It's a little better than Vesperia's but not by much. It's like they keep trying to "reinvent" the combat to "make it feel fresh," when all they need to do is just improve upon Abyss' if it's 3D or Eternia's if it's 2D. Zestria feels more like the "spin off" Tales of games, like Dawn of the New World. It feels very budget and lower quality. So, to explain a bit more, you have no more TP, instead "SC" which is basically where every action, including your basic attack combos, all consume SP that get spent and restore very fast. You restore them mostly by just being idle in battle, with some skills/gear that you can get to boost it further while blocking or getting hit. Every "basic attack" is classified as an arte now, so everything consumes that SC. You slowly unlock more and more artes and "basic attacks" as you level up, in addition to "hidden artes" which act like your normal artes from previous games. Your "special abilities" that would normally "consume TP," you use this as supplements with your "martial artes" (basic attacks). There's also a new type of arte called "seraphic arte" which is used when you're in the game's main gimmick: "Armetazation." These essentially are an evolution of previous game's Overlimits, where you build another special gauge through battle and can store up to multiple charges of this special gauge, then use it to either do that character's basic Mystic Arte (which does a little bit of damage and increases drop rates of items from enemies) or combine with specific other party members to turn into a different elemental "form." This special form makes all your "martial artes" (basic attacks) into "seraphic artes," and all your "hidden artes" become slow casting spells. These three types of artes (Martial, hidden and seraphic) play an integral role in the combat. Martial beats seraphic, seraphic beats hidden, and hidden beats martial. This means if you use a hidden arte against an enemy who's charging a spell, you won't interrupt them and instead they'll take reduced damage and you'll speed up their casting time. Sounds neat! But it just doesn't play well, because you only ever have access to 2 of the three artes at any given time, so it basically always feels like you're ill equipped to handle some battles. Particularly ones with tons of spell casting enemies.

And then the gear system... It's a mess. It's very much a "Diablo loot" system where every gear that drops your find in a chest has random properties attached to it so you have to deal with getting one with rolls that you want. But then you also can fuse them together to improve their base stats, and either add their rolls or combine them to create new ones that replace the previous roll. It's really terrible and just doesn't fit in a single player RPG experience, and you MUST deal with it to beat the final boss' DPS check.

Overall, pass on this game. Watch a YouTube summary or something. It's just not very fun and its few good points never make up for its myriad bad points.

The fighting system is at the same time too complex with so many little instructions and way too simple because you can ignore all that and just win by smashing your mouse.

Probably not the best "Tales of" games due to messy sub-quest management, story has many loss/unclear context even when the twist happened, probably experimental for future games.

However, it is not the worst at all. The story was hopeful and fun, many fun battle mechanics to try on.

Solid 7/10

Was pretty good.

*It was quite fun at some points, I really enjoyed this journey, but the more I think about this game after the final, the more annoyed I become, because the game is mostly wasting your time, some of it I enjoyed, but most of it's just a painful and useless waste of your time after which you even won't get any answers to the things you're interested in.*

Zestiria was my first game of this series and even after I played the new parts, I still considered it my favorite and also the best part of the series and I decided to play it again after 8 years, I want to show my love for this game because I really was a fan of this part but my review is not going to be good. Of course, there are good sides, beautiful landscapes, exciting ruins that are really interesting to explore, soundtrack, but the bad sides affect the gameplay and impression too much and it's hard to ignore. It's just a really bad game. The combat system is very poorly made and causes a lot of inconvenience, in fact, the concept is quite interesting. I liked the system of combining weapons and skills, but it looks pretty useless because you can't even figure out if these skills that you combined work and what kind of skills you combined at all + bad combat mechanics really don't let you enjoy this process, I'm still confused about how I was able to play it and enjoy as a child. I'm a little sad because it really had potential, it could have been a really interesting system.

The story itself...that's pretty bad too..I remember 8 years ago I cried a lot over the finale and in general over the warm relationship of the characters, but playing it right now I didn't feel anything because now I know that namco can do much better. The problem with the story is that it spends time on useless things instead of revealing the really important parts of the story. Many things remained unsolved, and even after the end of the story, I still had a lot of questions, like, there were side quests, like, help me find Seraphim or help Alisha with politics, but what was the issue between Zaveid and Edna's brother? What are these seraphim who bring misfortune to others? this became an important part of the story for 10 seconds, we had not heard of such cases before and also will not learn more about it even after, what are these bad luck seraphims? how does it work? We also didn't help Edna with her brother, but instead we spent time on some useless side quests. There is really very little real world history in this game. And what about Symonne's background? in general, the story is very bad. I know many things will become clearer in the berseria because it was their retaliation, but as an independent part, this game does not do its job.
I really love the innocence and purity of this story and the characters, but it's really poorly written and reveals very few things, we don't even know anything about Zaveid at all, so I didn't feel anything when I had to sacrifice him in the final battle.I just didn't have enough connection with the characters.

You can play this if you are really a fan of the series and are interested in all the parts and want to close the quota for the tier list, in any other case you should not play this, you can ruin your impression of this wonderful series, to be honest this game still holds a separate place in my heart and I still love it but I won't recommend it to anyone.

This is the "Meh" tales of game, its not necessarily bad nor is it necessarily good. its just meh.

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☐ Good
☑ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS

---{ Gameplay }---
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't

---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf

---{ Audience }---
☑ Kids
☑ Teens
☐ Adults
☐ Grandma

---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☑ Potato
☐ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☐ Old Fashioned
☑ Workable
☐ Big
☐ Will eat 10% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data

---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls

---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☑ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding

---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☐ Some lore
☑ Average
☐ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life

---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☐ Average
☑ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond

---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☐ Worth the price
☑ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money

---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☑ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☑ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☐ 8
☐ 9
☐ 10

TLDR: Game good

The story is good, but alisha cant do amartize. so sad for that. but offeral this game is good! recommended

ToZ gets a lot of hate from Tales Community
it's not bad, but not as "good" as other tales

personally though, this is my favorite Tales I've played so far
it scratch that a 'looter-shooter' itch I didn't expect from tales
I'll agree that the game is kinda slow on fresh start
the difference between NG and NG+ is huge, compared to other tales
this is the only Tales that I've played NG+ on
I feel like the "fun" stuff is gated in NG+ (which is kinda bad)

NG is still good on its own though

love this game

Not bad. Cheesy, plot isn't mind-blowing, combat takes some getting used to. Enjoyable way to pass the time, and the characters are kinda interesting.

Play if you're a Tales fan (I'm a new fan to the series), or if it is on sale.

Liked: Tota

The game has a lot of issues and it doesnt really warrant a newcomer starting with this game. Even as a Tales veteran this is only my second time since release playing this game. It's not good. The cast is pretty good though (Despite the you know who debacle). If you ever wondered what happened to Hideo Baba just play this game and you might start thinking maybe the series was better off without him. All in all if you want to get into the tales series PLAY BERSERIA,VESPERIA,SYMPHONIA, or GRACES F when it releases next year. For this one just watch the anime or sum.

Luckily I bought this on 80% or 90% discount
Long story short:

Story: lazy, boring, your typical JRPG
Characters: I personally don't hate or like any of them.
Combat: To be fair... There is an "attempt" to create an in-depth combat system, but it falls apart in reality.
Gear & Crafting: You will need RNG God to smile upon you, or you just grind the shit out of your mind.
Map & dungeon design: The map is large, that's it. Dungeon is a combination of hallway plus room.

P.S. It has been awhile that a game makes me feel leveling do bare minimal improvement on the characters since "The 3rd Birthday" a PSP title. Also, this game is capped at 30 FPS, but you can apply a community patch to uncap to 60 FPS, I suppose.

Equipped Rose with Alisha's altered color base skin, went down a hill, looked up and it was HEAVEN. lol

Gameplay: Good
Story: Generic but still good.
Controls: Good
Graphics: Great for its time.
Length: Good. Not much to do after the Final Boss. Didn't bother to finish the postgame content as you need to grind a lot.
Cutscenes: Good. The skits are good too.
Characters: Great. Edna and Lailah was just a blast.
Mechanics: Didn't bother to learn the equipment and skill systems as they're very complicated. Just went for high stats equipment. lol
Camera: Depending on the location, it can be really horrible.

Best Girl: Torn between Lailah, Rose and Alisha. But in the end, Lailah is best girl for me. (I'm probably the only one who thinks this. lol)

Rather than yes or no I would give this game a maybe.

A lot of the character gags are amusing and even funny but as per usual some translations are out of place or unfaithful to the original script. If you play jrpgs and wonder why uncharacteristically corny dialogue slips through thats usually why. While the combat has depth its also needlessly convoluted at many points with a questionable itemization system. Often suspension of disbelief will be needed way more than necessary to accept the story as well as moments where the intended impact falls completely off the mark.

Long story short for everything interesting theres almost equally something frustrating. If youre looking to sink some hours into a game with a confusing initial hurdle to mechanics and can shut off your brain for the main story there is enough to enjoy but otherwise maybe steer clear.

普通

ZAVEID IS IN THIS GAME! OOOOOO;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hr23P9_DPwg

Seru, santai

My partner loved this game. It was a miss for me. Got to the half way point, stopped playing for a few weeks went back to it and couldn't get back into it. One of the weaker Tales games.

I actually have over 50h on this because I played it over summer when my internet went down for 3 weeks, but steam never counted my hours for that (also missing over 100h on One Piece Pirate Warriors 3).

Pretty good game.

This is a really good Game. It's can be a little cleche but enjoy cleche. All tales of games are very story driven. This one is good but I'd not recommend playing it first there are better ones to play first. I'd recommend tales of arise first and then this or the prequel tales of zestria it depends on the person though. However whenever if tales of grace f remaster comes to steam I'd recommend that after tales of arise. Either way still a good game