With school just around the corner, it seems appropriate for a new, lengthy adventure game to be released. Namco’s “Tales of Xillia” was released earlier this month and has easily filled that lengthy adventure requirement. For those who have never played a “Tales of” game, all of them have long involved stories with twisting plots, strong social messages and many pseudo-endings.
This new addition to the “Tales of” franchise uses the same free-movement encounter style which made the games famous but adds new features to battle. Players no longer have to be satisfied with the restriction of only four party members in the battle. This game allows players to switch members in and out at will. This is amazingly convenient which, of course, means the game designers expect players to utilize this ability. Personally, I never had an issue with it and rarely felt the need to switch party members during combat.
The game also has a new battle linking feature. During a battle, it is possible to “link” to another party member to receive benefits. For example, if a player links with Rowen, then Rowen will automatically create a magic guard to protect both the player and himself from enemy magic. In addition to the added benefits, the linked partner also stays in close proximity to the other partner and can fight with joint combos. There are even linked “artes” which can be triggered to do massive damage. This makes battling more interesting and tough battles easier to handle.
These new aspects of battle have a few downsides. Because of an “Item Steal” link ability, enemies use items like crazy. Usually this is easy to manage, but there are also bosses who adopt this pattern, and it is annoying. The bosses can also use link artes which can cause massive pain if players aren’t expecting it.
The character leveling in “Tales of Xillia” is also more unique than any other “Tales of” game yet. When a character levels up they receive a number of growth points ranging from two to five. The values are set per level, so it’s uniform leveling. To use the growth points, they are added into the Lilium Orb, a spider web looking chart with nodes at each web intersection. The nodes all represent the different attributes a character has such as strength, hit points, technique points, etc. This allows players to customize their parties even further than normal. There are also nodes that exist in between the lines of the web that represent different skills and artes. Once the node in the middle is surrounded the skill or arte is acquired for use.
Those who do not like the huge amounts of customization can use an auto-leveling option and an auto-skill equip option. These are both useful especially when players want to get back to the adventure quickly. The auto-skill and auto-leveling options build each party member to their default specialties. Eventually, the leveling and skills even out as levels increase.
Outside of the battling, the game features a unique two-pronged story players can choose to experience. At the front end of the game, players choose either Jude or Milla to be the main focus of the story. Both stories have their own unique paths, but the majority of the time is spent as one big party experiencing the same story from two slightly different perspectives, with differences in some boss battles and even some dungeons. When the party splits, the time spent split is no more than a half an hour of play time.
Contributing to the two-pronged story are an alarming amount of sidequests and requests from villagers. These range from finding an item to killing a monster out on the field. The rewards for all of these sidequests are usually huge amounts of money and attachments. Unfortunately there is a reason there are so many extra sidequests, being that equipment is ridiculously expensive. I spent a good portion of the game with equipment that was not fully upgraded because I did not want to do the sidequests.
The attachments can come as rewards for the various sidequests and can be found on the field. The attachments can be resized, repositioned and even recolored. I spent hours stylizing my party. All attachments are available for all party members, so having Jude wear bunny ears during intense moments in the story is completely acceptable. The only real issue of the attachments is the recoloring is not very good. The colors of the entire attachment changes and just does not look quite right. Some attachments interfere with the cutscenes, but as long as the attachments are not huge there is usually no problem.
The game itself is about 40 hours in length and the stories are both compelling. The story lags a little bit at times, but overall the story is entertaining. The battle system makes battling interesting; however, a lot of the boss battles take a long time to beat. Overall, “Tales of Xillia” is a great game and a good addition to the “Tales of” franchise and the adventure genre.
