Alright. I wrote too much again. Here you go
Tales of Graces f was an interesting game for me, because my opinion of it shifted pretty dramatically after a certain point. My early impressions of the game left me a little disappointed, and I initially thought it had a pretty weak cast of characters. After about 10 hours though, things got up and running and I ended up liking the game quite a bit. With that said, there are a few complaints I have with the game. In the following I’d like to take a closer look at the game and point out things I really liked, and some things that fell a little short for me.
Story & Characters
The Story
I find myself in a difficult position to discuss the story of the game. On the one hand, I don’t want to spoil anything, so I’ll be skirting around spoiling any important plot points in this discussion. But, also, I want to emphasize that I separate the game’s story, or maybe more accurately, it’s plot, from the characters. One of them I found kind of lacking, and the other I thought was pretty incredible.
So, first let’s talk about the plot. I’ll be honest, it’s not anything special. Basically Asbel and friends go on a quest to save the world. It’s a tried and true plot for most JRPGs. Sadly, there aren’t really any exciting plot twists or developments to keep the player excited. For example, Remember Tales of Symphonia? Remember when you first discover Tethe’alla? Or when you learn about Mithos? Those were exciting twists that brought a lot of excitement to the story. Graces is lacking anything like that.
Sure, there are some minor twists, but most of them are apparent much earlier in the story, before it even happens. Also, I feel that [The Villain] isn’t a great antagonist. [They] didn’t really inspire any sort of emotion in me, they were just sort of there moving the plot along. This is unfortunate, because I think a great villain is a great way of making you invested in a story.
No, if anything, I think the main plot of Graces just serves as the vehicle to deliver these excellent characters to you. It makes it possible for you to see their relationships, and character arcs unfold. And for that it serves it’s purpose, but it’s still a little disappointing that it didn’t take me along for a ride.
In it’s defense however, I think the moral of the story, which is about friendship and families further helps accentuate the colorful cast of characters, and made for some touching moments. Furthermore, I feel that as long as a game is able to keep you invested, whether that be through the plot, or the characters, that it’s doing something right. For instance, I think that Vesperia similarly suffers with having a somewhat weak plot, but the characters are so great that it hardly matters. And as I’ve said before, Vesperia is probably my favorite Tales game. So take that for what you will.
The Characters
Now, as I said above. The characters in Graces f are what really sells the “story” portion of the game. Jeez, I hope this makes sense but, like… the reason I got invested in Graces was because I found the characters really interesting. And even though I didn’t really care that much with what was going on in the over arcing plot. It was the interactions between the characters that drove me forward. You with me?
So, when the game starts, you play through a short section of the game where the main characters are children. This serves as a nice introduction to these characters, and helps establish how important family and friendship is. Now, upon completing this section, you get to the meat of the game where all the characters have grown up to be upper-aged teenagers. Now, this is where things get kind of interesting for me.
See, when I got to this point, I really felt let down by the characters. I had complained openly on Twitter about how much of a wet blanket Cheria was, and how much of a jerk Hubert was. Richard was being kind of a dick too, but, well you know how that goes if you play the game. Aside from that you had Asbel who is just kind of there, he’s your typical JRPG hero. And Sophie, who remained awesome throughout the entirety of the game. And finally you’re introduced to two new characters. Malik, who I thought was cool. And Pascal who was just way too over-the-top.
So, looking at all those characters I was just like “Well, this sucks.” But then something even more interesting happened. Most of those characters had fantastic character arcs. Slowly, over the course of several hours I went from feeling very underwhelmed by the characters, to genuinely loving them. As the cast of characters reformed their bonds of friendship, and made new ones with each other, you see them really grow as people.
It’s not something that happens that often for me. I usually form an opinion about a character, and stick with it. But I couldn’t help but reform opinions about these characters. As I saw how cute Cheria was, and how Hubert was actually still a nice kid when all was said in done. Even Pascal’s eccentric behavior grew on me.
So there became a point when I was just hungry for more skits, and conversations between the characters. And I feel that having three different arcs to the game went a long way too. Seeing the characters as they were when they were kids. Then seeing them grow up and come back together. And finally seeing the fruit of those relationships in the Future arc. It’s all pretty neat.
With all that said, I hope you can kind of grasp where I’m coming from with this. I just wish I could explain it better.
Gameplay & Mechanics
The Combat
What works:
The combat in Graces f is probably one of the cooler parts of the game. It takes the usual Tales combat and spices it up a bit by mixing up the mechanics. TP has been replaced by CC (Chain Capacity). So you no longer spam Artes until you run out of TP. Instead you start off every battle with your CC gauge filled to a certain portion, and then as you execute attacks your CC gauge depletes. In Graces f you actually only use “Artes”, but there are two different kinds of Artes. A. Artes which function as normal attacks, but you can string different A. Artes together to form combos. And B. Artes which act like your typical Artes system. To execute these various Artes you either push the X button (A.Artes) or O button (B.Artes) as well as a direction on the left analog stick. By mixing and matching both kinds of Artes you preform combos, and that’s the general flow of combat.
This is a pretty neat system, as you’re always going into every battle full blast. And since it’s a little more involved than usual, you’re pulling off some really cool stuff that not only looks awesome, but feels awesome too. I specifically remember fighting the final boss of the main portion of the game and pulling off a huge combo that filled up my Eleth meter. Then I did a Lv. 2 Mystic Arte, follow my a Lv.1 Mystic Arte. Then filled the meter again and did another Lv.1 Mystic Arte before the gauge ran out. Resulting in a massive 158 hit combo. I pretty much tore the boss a new one, and I wish that was how all the encounters felt.
What doesn’t work:
In addition to the above, there’s an additional layer of complexity which I personally felt was pointless. See, everyone of your attacks, be it an A.Arte or a B.Arte has several attributes. These attributes make each individual attacks more effective against different monster types. So, for example: Sophie might have an attack we’ll just call “Sophie PUNCH!”. Now, Sophie PUNCH! has three different attributes to it. Nova, Plant, and Insect. What this means is that Sophie PUNCH! is effective against Nova, Plant, and Insect type monsters. So kind of like Pokemon.
The problem is, this is an action game, and you have a lot of moves you’re using at once. It’s also not always readily apparent what kind of monster you’re fighting. Sure, you could hold down R1, pause the battle, look at the monster’s info. See what’s it weak to. Resume battle, then try to remember what button command to use on that particular monsters. All while everything else is going on in the battle.
It seems complicated, right? It is. But here’s something else about it. You don’t need to do any of this! That’s right. I found that I was able to get through the entire game with only a few hiccups with relative ease. And for those encounters which were troublesome (which I will cover later) I don’t think using the right kind of attacks was what was going to make those battles that much easier.
So in short, it just seems like an added layer of complexity, that I feel is really unnecessary. Now, it’s possible that if you’re trying to play the game on a harder difficulty level than Normal you might actually be required to do this stuff, but again, I don’t think that’s the real problem with those difficulty levels either, and again, more on that later.
Mechanics
What works:
In addition to the revamped combat system, they’ve also added a few additional mechanics to the game. For starters there’s the new Title system. In previous games you would get a Title for a character, and they would gain additional benefits from said title. You would also equip certain titles to wear alternate costumes. Now, in Graces f, each character has hundreds of different titles, and each title can be leveled up to gain permanent benefits. And yes, each title still applies certain bonuses while being worn, and you earn costumes by equipping and leveling these titles.
It adds another level of customization to the game which is pretty neat. I can see where micromanages could really get caught up in this stuff. Calculating what titles to level up, and when. For everyone else, there’s an auto-equip feature which will swap titles after they reach a certain level. I used this most of the time, but there were several points where I wanted Cheria and Sophie to upgrade their healing artes faster. So I manually set it up at those points. Either way, it’s pretty cool.
The other bit of customization comes with Dualizing. Dualizing is basically the crafting system in this game, and on the outset it’s not too complex. You take Item A, and mix it with Item B to produce a new item. In most cases at least. It’s a bit different with equipment forging. With Equipment you can do one of three things. 1) You can combine a weapon with a special item to form a new, rare weapon. 2) You can combine a piece of equipment with a shard to imbue the equipment with special attributes. 3) You can combine two pieces of equipment that have gone through 2) and have been “tempered”. This results in the weapon being upgraded, and producing an accessory along with it.
So, here’s the thing…
What doesn’t work:
For starters, it’s a little more complicated than all that. See, when you Dualize a piece of equipment with a shard, you’re imbuing that piece of equipment with a property. The property is determined by the shard. So, let’s use “Attack Shard” as an example. Attack Shard increases your Physical attack. There are different levels of shard though, and presumably the higher rank the shard you use, the better the effect will be. But that apparently isn’t the case(?), because you’ll also notice when you try to Dualize a piece of equipment and a shard you generate a word that defines the quality of the effect bonus you will receive. And the bigger the word, the better the effect. But you can sometimes get bigger words by combining lower level shards. Does it sound complicated? Because it is! It’s maddening. I can’t figure it out at all.
In addition to that, once you Dualize a piece of tempered equipment with another piece of tempered equipment you gain the ability to forge the newly upgraded equipment with another shard. Now, to the best of my understanding, the equipment retains the previous bonuses, but the interface certainly doesn’t help you determine if that’s the case or not!
It just… uhg. It’s needlessly complicated again. And either I was unknowingly doing the right sort of combinations, or it didn’t really matter that much, because, again, I got by just fine with what I was doing. So I guess in the case of this, and the additional layer of combat above, it shouldn’t bother me that it’s there if I didn’t even need to mess with it. But it still feels like “Why did you need to do it like this?” Ya know? I dunno.
Balance
Finally, to close out this gameplay segment I wanted to talk about the game’s Balance. As I’ve said before, I was able to get through the game on the Normal difficulty level pretty easily. There was the occasional tough fight where the battle system really shined, and I felt like an epic battle was going on. But then sometimes…
Now, as a rule, I generally avoid challenge in games. I love games, and I play them to enjoy them. I find that slamming my head against a problem over and over again to be frustrating, and I generally avoid it. As a rule, this doesn’t really apply to RPGs for me. Whether I’m just naturally gifted in that particularly genre, or just the very nature of the genre in comparison to more twitch based games- I can usually hang with the big boys, and appreciate a good challenge. With that said…
There’s a few bosses in the game where I had to pull out all the stops to beat them. And it wasn’t fun either. You might have heard me talking about the final boss in Phantasy Star IV before. Basically it was a real knock down drag out. I felt like it really pushed my abilities to the limit, but it did it fairly. The really difficult bosses in Graces f are… to put it bluntly: bullshit.
It took me a while to figure out why this was the case, but I came to this conclusion. The bosses have too much control over the battle. Are you familiar with the term ‘stunlocking’? That’s essentially what goes on here. Bosses will catch you up in a serious of vicious attacks so fierce that you literally cannot respond to it. And you are forced to sit there and watch as the game wrestles control away from you.
In most cases, I would get to a point in the battle where I would just stop pushing buttons until the boss killed that character, because it was pointless to try and do anything. In addition to this ‘stunlocking’ some bosses have massive amounts of health, are hard to hit, have allies, do massive damage, and have wide sweeping area of effect attacks. Thankfully a boss usually only has one or two of those, but…
…the final boss in the game, the one you fight at the end of the future act has every single one of those attributes. So, what took place was a half-an-hour long battle where I was constantly struggling to put a dent in the bosses’ insane health pool. It wasn’t easy because [they] were protected from half of my attacks during half of the battle. They also hit really hard, and were able to attack multiple characters at once, often inflicting one-hit KOs. And of course, when I wasn’t eating dirt, I was usually locked up in some ridiculous onslaught of attacks.
I used literally every item I had in the battle, and made it to the final part of the battle, just barely, when the boss used a mystic arte that took all my characters down to single digit health, and also summoned two minions! And of course I died, after thirty frickin’ minutes. It wasn’t fun, it was horseshit.
And then the kicker is, that if you bump the difficulty down one notch to Easy. You can complete the battle in five minutes without using a single item. It’s messed up. Furthermore, since I put all this in a section entitled “Balance”, I’d like to point out that most of these difficult boss fights are at the end of areas where you can literally face-roll the enemies. So you’re suddenly hit with this brutal difficulty spike that just comes out of nowhere.
I don’t know if the fact that you can just put the game on Easy mode to get by without any effort at all is a good or bad thing. It just feels unbalanced to me. And also if you’re playing on Easy then you’ll never actually get those cool moments when you’re in an intense battle that isn’t completely ridiculous. It’s just kind of a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. And it sucks.
Finally, as far as harder difficulties go. They’re only really there for multiple playthroughs. They essentially power up the enemies attributes and that’s it. I had accidentally switched the game to the hardest difficult you can choose on the first playthrough at some point, and went into a battle and got instantly steam rolled. Now, admittedly it makes a little sense that you could just buff up the monsters, because you can, after all, get to like level 255 or something. But, I was just never a fan of the “more numbers=difficult” mindset. Oh well.
Misc.
The Future Arc
The Future Arc is interesting, and I guess like many things in my analysis here, has pros and cons. The good thing about it is that it presents an extension to the main story, and as I mentioned previously shows you how certain character relationships have panned out, and, continue to pan out as you play through this additional content.
The problem with the Future Arc is simple enough though. The new dungeons are poorly designed. All the new dungeons you go to in the Future Arc are massive, and usually involved a bunch of inane puzzles or mazes. I just feel that in comparison to the earlier dungeons, they just aren’t laid out as well. And the crux is always padding out the dungeons to extend the length of this arc.
The worst example of this is a dungeon called Gustwork Ruins. You originally go through it early on in this section of the game. When I first went through there I was lost for like 2 hours. Obviously I eventually got past it, but it wasn’t fun. Then, later on, you can go back there and get some additional treasure. So I went back, and proceeded to get lost for an another two hours. Again - you guessed it. Needlessly complicated.
Presentation
I’ve already gushed about the localization, but to sum it up: it’s really good. Which is good because the translation and the voice over really sell the excellent writing of the characters. Aside from that, the rest of the package is fine too. Seeing as how this is a port of an older Wii game, the game looks exceptionally well. You can tell it isn’t a true current generation console game, but the art style really goes a long way. I also like the character design quite a bit.
As for music. You know, it’s there. It’s fine. It works. I don’t think I’ve ever noticed the Tales series ever having any really exceptional music. Aside from the Opening Themes which always get stuck in my head. It serves it’s purpose, and compliments the atmosphere.
Skits & Win Quotes
The Skits and the Win Quotes are one of my favorite parts about the game. As I’ve already tried to stress, I really like the characters. So the skits really go a long way in establishing their personalities, and provide fun and serious dialogue alike. There’s a few skits in particular around the Rockagong portion of the game that had me cracking up.
Another good thing about the skits is that they seem to be a lot easier to see. In previous games you’d have to randomly wander around an area until you saw the skit. In Graces you usually get skits by save points, and discoveries. Sure, there’s an occasional out of the way one that you might not see, but for the most part, you’re going to see a majority of the skits. And that’s really cool.
As for the Win Quotes. I just think they’re awesome. Some of the funniest ones I’ve seen in the series. I used a party of Asbel, Sophie, Hubert, and Cheria for most of the game, so I think I’ve exhausted all their win quotes. I also used Malik in place of Hubert for a while there, so I saw quite a few of his too. I’d be interested in playing through the game again with different party combinations to see more. But, in general I think the ones involving Sophie and Hubert are the best. And one between Sophie and Malik which might be my personal favorite from now on.
Tales Weapons
One final, random tidbit before I go. Graces really liked to reference the other Tales games, which I appreciated. The most obvious thing are the Carta Cards. Carta Cards are collectible cards you find around the world, and each one has the portrait and a quote from a character in another Tales game. There’s a lot of them!
The other reference comes in the form of the Ultimate Weapons. There’s two sets of Ultimate Weapons and all of them are named after previous Tales games. I just thought it was a neat touch.
Finale
Man, I guess I sounded pretty negative there. Honestly, I really enjoyed the game and I wish I could.. express that better. The characters and the combat system are both really good. The game just stumbles a bit with some of it’s peculiar choices, and some frustrating encounters. And who knows, your mileage may vary on wacky, convoluted mechanics. For me, I just yearn for a simpler time when you didn’t need a Wiki to figure out how to play the game.
If you’re a Tales fan, then you definitely want to check the game out regardless. And if you aren’t a Tales fan, well there are some better entries in the series, but this still isn’t a bad jumping on point.
And there’s my extensive analysis.
