GrizzlyB
Confused and Dazed
So, I finished my Zestiria playthrough, mostly on chaos difficulty -- though I cheated a bit and turned it down for the cameo bosses in the EX dungeon (and I had 2x EXP for NG+ anyway). But I was able to beat all of the bonus bosses and do all the content, and did get the platinum trophy, after probably close to 200 hours of playtime all told. And you guys know what that means? It means I can finally make good equipment on my next playthrough. Whoopie!
Honestly, it really reinforced my initial impression of Zestiria. It feels like there were the makings of a good game in there somewhere, but it just didn't come together. I feel like the story starts off well, but after the first act it gets very haphazard, and the party just goes around dipping their toes in random events until they decide it's time to go confront the villain. The sidequests are artlessly implemented, because they're usually initiated by talking to your helper character, who says, "Hey, what if we went to that one place?" And the environments? It's a combination of huge, wide-open areas that don't contain anything, and ruins/caves/forest-that-for-some-reason-has-a-path-gouged-into-the-ground consisting of nothing but a series of small rooms linked by hallways with nothing in them. Legendia caught some flak for having uninspired dungeon design, but it's got nothing on this, imo. They look procedurally generated -- I assume that there's some truth to the rumors about the production shifting gears way too late in the process, and rushing the game out the door.
Then, in terms of gameplay, it's got a lot of kind of fake difficulty, where the enemies have massive HP pools, and the key to doing damage is hitting weaknesses, but by the late game they have one type weakness and resist a bunch of elements (this is really bad with the EX enemies, which also populate the awful DLC dungeon). There's also a bunch of BS with iron stances or super armor or whatever it is, which enemies get when your combos get too high, meaning it's actually BAD to rack up big combos. Speaking of which, your ally AI is an active nuisance, pissing away blast gauge by armatizing and de-armatizing at random, which there isn't even a strategy setting for. It's like they barely playtested it at all, and just assumed the system would work the way they envisioned (using normal form to build combos and then armatizing to deal big damage). And speaking of fake difficulty -- this is mostly in chaos mode -- but enemies cast spells in like 1.5 seconds, so you're really ****ed if you're up against a group of spellcasters and start getting juggled. That caused me no small amount of grief. Oh, and the battle camera is awful -- you'd think a game where the bulk of play is in narrow corridors of ruins would realize that you should have control of it, but no dice.
And the equipment system is really the entire Zestiria experience in a nutshell. Like, you can see what they were going for, and it's got some good ideas in theory, but man is it a clusterfuck in application. The sheer amount of items and money you need to make noticeably good gear is mind-boggling, and drop rates aren't even that high, even when you put everything you can into getting one specific piece (like, it took me an hour to be able to put together a pair of earrings to get the Stack 16 skill/trophy, even using the proper normin, luring, dark bottles, three drop rate boosts from the LotL, and another boost from NG+. And it wasn't like the gear was good outside of that specific use). Ultimately, you can just ignore the system and slap on whatever gear gives you the best stats, but it's, like, man... what a waste. Not least of all because most of the best abilities are stacks, and to use more than, like, one, you need an absurdly expensive grade shop option in NG+ and THEN you need to be playing on hard/intense (or better yet, chaos) to get 2x or 3x copies of skills and THEN you need to farm a bunch of equipment to actually fuse good stuff (and also, you needed to farm and then exchange a shitload of items to even have enough grade to unlock that skill in NG+ in the first place).
And another thing I can't figure out where to fit in above -- I hate the soundtrack. I know it's "BGM", but most games still seem to want to make music you'll listen to, while I found myself trying to tune out some really banal tracks that don't even loop properly. (Though I have to acknowledge that the elemental shrine tracks are all very dope, and might be worth looking up even if you haven't played the game. They're very much exceptions, though.)
I realize these are all complaints, but I do like the general setting of the game, the theme the story was going for, a lot of the combat options, the field talents (snack making, etc.), most of the cast, and I feel like the cast actually comes together as a unit a lot better than many other Tales games. Still... having played through it to this point -- and like I said, STILL not at the point where I can actually have cool abilities in combat -- I feel I have to reiterate that the hate for this game is well founded. I read up on a lot of the rumors swirling about how the production went down, and if even some of them are true, Hideo Baba's sacking was richly deserved. Berseria being such an improvement after a bunch of lacking games certainly points that way as well. I'll be looking forward to Arise when it arrives.
Ah, but until then, I think I'll move on to Vesperia next (for the first time in... 10 years, maybe?), and see if its combat is really as bad as you guys make it sound. And since I went through all the effort to get the platinum on Zestiria, I'm kind of ruing my decision to buy Vesperia on Switch. Nintendo needs a system to give empty accomplishments for playing too much!
Honestly, it really reinforced my initial impression of Zestiria. It feels like there were the makings of a good game in there somewhere, but it just didn't come together. I feel like the story starts off well, but after the first act it gets very haphazard, and the party just goes around dipping their toes in random events until they decide it's time to go confront the villain. The sidequests are artlessly implemented, because they're usually initiated by talking to your helper character, who says, "Hey, what if we went to that one place?" And the environments? It's a combination of huge, wide-open areas that don't contain anything, and ruins/caves/forest-that-for-some-reason-has-a-path-gouged-into-the-ground consisting of nothing but a series of small rooms linked by hallways with nothing in them. Legendia caught some flak for having uninspired dungeon design, but it's got nothing on this, imo. They look procedurally generated -- I assume that there's some truth to the rumors about the production shifting gears way too late in the process, and rushing the game out the door.
Then, in terms of gameplay, it's got a lot of kind of fake difficulty, where the enemies have massive HP pools, and the key to doing damage is hitting weaknesses, but by the late game they have one type weakness and resist a bunch of elements (this is really bad with the EX enemies, which also populate the awful DLC dungeon). There's also a bunch of BS with iron stances or super armor or whatever it is, which enemies get when your combos get too high, meaning it's actually BAD to rack up big combos. Speaking of which, your ally AI is an active nuisance, pissing away blast gauge by armatizing and de-armatizing at random, which there isn't even a strategy setting for. It's like they barely playtested it at all, and just assumed the system would work the way they envisioned (using normal form to build combos and then armatizing to deal big damage). And speaking of fake difficulty -- this is mostly in chaos mode -- but enemies cast spells in like 1.5 seconds, so you're really ****ed if you're up against a group of spellcasters and start getting juggled. That caused me no small amount of grief. Oh, and the battle camera is awful -- you'd think a game where the bulk of play is in narrow corridors of ruins would realize that you should have control of it, but no dice.
And the equipment system is really the entire Zestiria experience in a nutshell. Like, you can see what they were going for, and it's got some good ideas in theory, but man is it a clusterfuck in application. The sheer amount of items and money you need to make noticeably good gear is mind-boggling, and drop rates aren't even that high, even when you put everything you can into getting one specific piece (like, it took me an hour to be able to put together a pair of earrings to get the Stack 16 skill/trophy, even using the proper normin, luring, dark bottles, three drop rate boosts from the LotL, and another boost from NG+. And it wasn't like the gear was good outside of that specific use). Ultimately, you can just ignore the system and slap on whatever gear gives you the best stats, but it's, like, man... what a waste. Not least of all because most of the best abilities are stacks, and to use more than, like, one, you need an absurdly expensive grade shop option in NG+ and THEN you need to be playing on hard/intense (or better yet, chaos) to get 2x or 3x copies of skills and THEN you need to farm a bunch of equipment to actually fuse good stuff (and also, you needed to farm and then exchange a shitload of items to even have enough grade to unlock that skill in NG+ in the first place).
And another thing I can't figure out where to fit in above -- I hate the soundtrack. I know it's "BGM", but most games still seem to want to make music you'll listen to, while I found myself trying to tune out some really banal tracks that don't even loop properly. (Though I have to acknowledge that the elemental shrine tracks are all very dope, and might be worth looking up even if you haven't played the game. They're very much exceptions, though.)
I realize these are all complaints, but I do like the general setting of the game, the theme the story was going for, a lot of the combat options, the field talents (snack making, etc.), most of the cast, and I feel like the cast actually comes together as a unit a lot better than many other Tales games. Still... having played through it to this point -- and like I said, STILL not at the point where I can actually have cool abilities in combat -- I feel I have to reiterate that the hate for this game is well founded. I read up on a lot of the rumors swirling about how the production went down, and if even some of them are true, Hideo Baba's sacking was richly deserved. Berseria being such an improvement after a bunch of lacking games certainly points that way as well. I'll be looking forward to Arise when it arrives.
Ah, but until then, I think I'll move on to Vesperia next (for the first time in... 10 years, maybe?), and see if its combat is really as bad as you guys make it sound. And since I went through all the effort to get the platinum on Zestiria, I'm kind of ruing my decision to buy Vesperia on Switch. Nintendo needs a system to give empty accomplishments for playing too much!
