Partridge Senpai's 2024 Beaten Games:
Previously:
2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023
* indicates a repeat
1~50
51.
Adventures of Lolo (Famicom)
52.
Adventures of Lolo 2 (NES)
53.
Adventures of Lolo II (Famicom)
54.
Adventures of Lolo 3 (NES)
55.
Kickle Cubicle (NES)
56.
Adventures of Lolo (GB)
57.
Cocoron (Famicom)
58.
The Darkness (PS3)
59.
Haze (PS3)
60.
Animaniacs (GB)
61.
Lair (PS3)
62.
Bionic Commando (PS3)
63.
Donkey Kong Land (GB)
64.
Darkwing Duck (NES)
65.
Donkey Kong Land III (GBC)
66.
Donkey Kong Land 2 (GB)
67.
Metroid II (GB) *
68.
Pokemon: Brilliant Diamond (Switch)
69.
Eggerland (FDS)
70.
Eggerland: Meikyuu no Fukkatsu (Famicom)
71.
Eggerland: Souzou he no Tabidachi (FDS)
72.
Marvelous: Mouhitotsu no Takarajima (SFC)
73.
Legendary Starfy (GBA) *
74.
Legendary Starfy 2 (GBA)
75.
Tales of the Abyss (PS2) *
76.
Tales of the Tempest (DS)
77.
Tales of Eternia (PS1)
78.
Nier: Replicant (PS3)
79.
Tales of Symphonia (PS3) *
80.
Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World (PS3)
81. Tales of Zestiria (PS3)
I’ve owned this game for just a touch over five years now. It was one of the first bundle of PS3 games I bought when I moved here to Japan, but despite two prior attempts to start this, it just never holds my attention for more than a couple hours before I just put it down and never feel compelled to pick it back up again. This time was different, however. I really wanted to finally player Berseria, the game after this one, and given that the games are narratively linked, I resolved to finally play through this before I could play through that one, and I finally did it. It took me around 51-ish hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on normal difficulty while doing as many sidequests as I could and not really bothering with the post-game (which this oddly has) at all.
Zestiria is the story of a young man named Sorey. With his best friend Mikleo, he’s lived in the rural mountain village of Izuchi all his life, never leaving once. Obsessed with historical tales, especially of the legendary savior, the Shepard, Sorey dreams of one day leaving the village to go on a journey to all the world’s ruins just like the Shepard did. Destiny happens to fall right into his lap one day, though, as he meets Ashley while exploring the ruins outside the village. Ashley is special for Sorey not because she’s a girl, but because she’s a human. She’s the first human Sorey’s ever met, as Mikleo and all the other villagers in Izuchi are all Seraphim, human-like spirits who are invisible to nearly all humans other than Sorey. As a mysterious disaster and news of far worse beyond the village, Sorey sets out from Izuchi with Mikleo and Ashely on the adventure he’s always dreamed of.
One of the main reasons I never really stuck with this game until now is because the story is just so dull. When it came out, Zestiria got a lot of flack for being “unoriginal” narratively when it came out, and Japanese fans also expressed a lot of dissatisfaction with how shallow the character writing was. These are both terms the story pretty fairly deserves, though I think the “unoriginal” criticism is ultimately a much deeper issue than just a lack of novel ideas. To put it succinctly, Zestiria feels like an unfinished game more than an incompetent one, and that goes especially for the story. All the talk of shallow characters an unoriginality really centers on this, I’ve come to believe, as there’s just *so* much here that feels like a solid yet completely unrealized idea.
The broader themes of the narrative touch on convictions. It's a story *trying* to explore what drives people to believe what they believe in as well as how that affects their actions, but it does it incredibly clumsily. Rather frustratingly, the back third or so of the narrative is really quite competently put together (as one would expect from the main writer who brought us very well written Tales games like Xillia before this and Berseria after it), but all of those otherwise very well-conceived scenes and climaxes to characters and ideas end up falling really flat due to just how weak and plodding the theming and character development up until that point has been.
The actual characters are a ton of fun, and I grew to love just about all of them. Characters like Edna and Zabida have a great dynamic with one another, and even more minor characters like Ashley get really excellently acted climaxes to their character arcs. But all of this is tied up in a narrative that is so superficial and confusing in its first two thirds that it just doesn’t really matter in the end. There’s a really good story hidden here somewhere about how being torn between your convictions and the reality of your practical situation can cause people to become horrible monsters (both metaphorically and literally), but this story really fails to find it, and not just because exactly what the Corruption even is isn’t really made clear until the last leg of the story.
Despite some baffling assertions early in the story, this game’s heart is ultimately in the right place and its characters are all quite well put together. Just how well it manages to stick this very shaky landing made me leave my experience with Zestiria far more positively than I ever expected to, but that doesn’t mean that I can forgive just how sloppily put together the journey to get there was. This is a story that starts slow, but it can be warmed to very nicely. It’s definitely very far from the best Tales story, but it’s pretty darn far from the worst written/themed one either. As embarrassing as something of this quality is for a series like this in 2015, it’s still something that can be enjoyed despite how weak the underlying foundations of the narrative often are.
Mechanically, Zestiria is also something of a pretty bad mess that ends up nearly drowning in its own ambition. This is still mostly the battle system that most of these 3D Tales games have used up until now, and people who’ve played the previous several Tales games on PS3 will likely recognize quite a bit. It’s got things like Ludgar’s super mode from Xillia 2, but they’ve once again foregone a mana mechanic in favor of a combo system that plays like a simplified version of Tales of Graces’s gameplay. That said, there are a slate of changes that make things significantly worse than either of those games more often than not.
In a truly baffling decision, they have decided to move the camera to behind the player’s shoulder. While Tales of Graces uses a slightly off-center camera to make its very fighting game-like combat work, it’s nothing remotely as disorienting as this. There’s a very good reason that 3D fighting games like Tekken don’t put the camera behind your character, and this game demonstrates that very well. It ends up being very hard to actually see what you’re doing and if you’ll actually connect with the enemy in front of you when you try and land an attack. This is made even worse due to how this game is the first in the series to have battles take place in the actual environment instead of in little pocket arenas, and there was more than one boss fight where the uncontrollable camera got stuck behind some scenery meaning I died due to not even being able to see my opponent.
Those battles that take place in the environment hurts the dungeon and environment design as well, as there’s a ton of really overly sprawling maps with not much in them because they need to be flat enough to accommodate monster encounters, and a *ton* of the game’s caves are also clearly copy/paste layouts just to save on development time. It’s not game ruining by any means, but it certainly cheapens the experience, and it makes the whole concept of battles that take place in the environment feel like a really lousy trade off given the kind of environmental and dungeon design we’ve so clearly had to sacrifice compared to previous games in the series.
You’ve got normal attacks as well as Artes, the spells/techs that all Tales games have had up until this point, but your normal attacks generally take the form of quite elaborate “many hits from one button press” animations. Combined with all of the camera issues and such, this made trying to land Artes so frustrating that I ended up abandoning them entirely. The game actually waits some 15+ hours before it even tells you how to manually assign Artes to different hotkeys on your X button (something any other Tales game would tell you within the first hour or so, generally), and I don’t really blame them. This game introduces a mechanic where you just don’t even assign different Artes to the X button, and instead just picks one effectively at random when you press it, and that ended up being more than enough for me.
The game also has so many ancillary systems that are such an awful chore to engage with. For example, you’re able to combine weapons together to make +1 versions of them and having different combinations of your equipment’s passive skills make rows on a bingo board to get even more passive skill bonuses. These systems (among others) are introduced to you with pages of difficult to comprehend text box tutorials that are dumped on you en masse very early in the game, and the awful menu UI for actually looking at what skills you have and what they do doesn’t make actually understanding, let alone using, these systems any more appealing. The game also isn’t particularly easy either. Maybe if I’d bothered to min/max my equipment harder or really sit down and comprehend those tutorials I would’ve had an easier time on just normal mode, but that level of mechanical trudgery isn’t what I come to the Tales series for, and it’s a problem virtually not a single other main entry in the series has either.
All that said, there are *some* things I did like about the mechanics and combat in this game. The most major thing I like is how the artimization (kamui in Japanese) system works. You’ve got two human party members at all time, and four Seraphim. You can have either human merge with the Seraphim that’s currently linked to them to enter a super mode, and swapping which Seraphim you currently have as well as hopping in and out of your super mode is super easy and doesn’t require nearly the saving up of resources like Ludgar’s super mode did in Tales of Xillia 2.
It took me a good while to get used to it (like over 20 hours), but I did ultimately walk away from this game’s mechanics being fairly comfortable with them after a long process of trial and error to naturally learn what the game’s million tutorial boxes were too clumsy to teach me properly. At the end of the day, me enjoying it by the time I was done with it is pretty cold comfort. Zestiria is a not all too easy game that does a dreadful job of teaching you how to play it for a game that came out in 2015 in a series 20 years old at the time, and that’s something that really can’t be ignored.
Aesthetically, the game is a very mixed bag. On the surface, it looks very nice, and battles in particular are quite impressive looking. Music is also as good as it’s ever been, and pretty hard to complain about. However, just how inexperienced the development team was with their new engine (or just how hard pressed they were for manpower, resources, whatever) really shows through quite a lot. Cutscene direction feels very stiff and amateurish. This struggles to compete with games like Tales of Symphonia or Tales of the Abyss (both of which are close to or over 10 years older than this) in terms of just how bad so many cutscenes are.
Characters stand around at attention and look at each other, often with the camera to one of their backs, in cutscene after cutscene, and it’s something that plagues the whole game. In yet another example of the game being unfinished, it really feels like the environments didn’t get the polishing they needed for cutscenes to happen in them nicely, and it feels like the blocking for where characters should stand and how just didn’t get the time and attention it usually gets in these games. Much like the quality of the writing itself, it’s hardly the worst thing I the world, and this isn’t stuff that’d be all that mentionable if this were a one-off RPG by a smaller company or a game that was much older than this, but it winds up being an embarrassing showing for the 20th anniversary title for such a high quality and respected RPG franchise as the Tales series. This is a series that Namco Bandai have made fans expect better from, and Zestiria simply fails to deliver in this way as it does in so many others.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Despite how much I’ve talked about how rough it is, that’s just it. Zestiria isn’t *awful*: It’s just pretty darn rough. It’s not just a game that’s not as good as it should’ve been. It’s a game where you can really see how great it *nearly* was in so many places throughout the game. So much of the game, particularly the story, is so strongly done despite so often being so clumsy that it’s hard not to feel that Namco Bandai just pushed this one out the door too early. Had it had another six months or a year of early development time, this could’ve been another one of the real greats of the series. Probably not the best ever, but a game really worth caring about just like its sister game Berseria is.
As it stands, Zestiria is a really mixed bag, and your mileage will really vary for how much you’ll get out of it. I ultimately came away from it with happy memories of my time with it, but that was after no shortage of complaining about all of the game’s shortcomings. If you go in with your expectations set accordingly, I think there’s quite a fun time to be found between the fun characters and spectacle that Zestiria provides. However, if you were hoping for the Tales series’ 20th anniversary title to be a knock-out all-time great game like the 10th (Abyss) or 15th (Graces) was, then you’re going to be very sorely disappointed and feeling like you wasted your time, and I frankly wouldn’t blame you.
