This is a really good game. But it's also got some things that leave me quite baffled.
I'll start with what I think are positives.
The combat can get pretty fun once you actually get the gist of it (the in-game tutorials are actually quite bad at explaining the flow of it, in my experience), and setting up your artes chart in order to be able to potentially hit every weakness combination with your strings is a fun exercise. Getting long-ass combo chains going with Break Souls is fun, when the game actually allows it.
A lot of the characters are interesting, entertaining, or at least fun; Velvet is a fantastic protagonist and I found her almost excessive edge to be really endearing. Eleanor is another stand-out, a really well-written character who manages to be as annoying as she's intended to be, as weird as that may sound, and only gets better from there.
This is more of a personal thing, but I did enjoy how the story is told from the perspective of the "villainous" side, in a way. The main party are, for the most part, edgy anti-heroes and I think that's quite cool; I do have my issues with that though. I at least enjoyed the fact that there wasn't any overt and preachy "revenge bad" messaging, I can't stand that kind of thing. The writing absolutely knows what nuance is, and that's very refreshing.
The worldbuilding was very rich and interesting, and I'm sure it was a treat for people who have played Zestiria, but I don't think I'll ever do that.
The majority of the english dub was great.
Some of the music was pretty good.
On to what I think are the negatives.
While not as awful as in Xillia, exploration still felt quite boring, environments weren't really interesting and most dungeons felt like they were designed specifically to waste time.
The equipment system is really annoying to deal with, with random skills for each equipment part and such, and a very tacked-on upgrade system that ultimately isn't really worth it; you're essentially just getting randomized versions of each weapon and it just ends up being very uninteresting in my opinion.
While combat against most enemies feels quick, snappy and a nice distraction, fighting anything closer to a boss is a very... inconsistent experience. They love to block a million hits, so you need to either force a Break Soul in or guard a lot yourself until you can guard-break them, which wouldn't be a problem if they couldn't break out of combos at their own leisure, breaking the weaknesses string you were building up while having absurd amounts of hyper-armor; then they'll go back to blocking everything or never flinching from attacks. I understand it's to prevent players from easily trapping bosses into touch-of-death scenarios but the system is too arbitrary and inconsistent. Weaknesses themselves are annoying to deal with, especially when you run into enemies that resist certain elements so much they only take 1 damage from them (the ones resisting physical are the worst if you're playing as Velvet, and she's also a bit limited in the artes she can use to hit certain types of enemies, as they can be slow and unwieldy; no I don't want to play as the others she's my favorite!). Having to rely on the chance to inflict statuses to gain more Souls to extend combos can also be very annoying at times.
On the topic of characters and story, there were a few big issues in my opinion. Firstly, Rokurou... he's a cool character on paper but why is he there? They call him 007: 0 contributions to the story, 0 relevance, 7 aura-farming monologues. Some of the other characters felt a little out of place as well, with Magilou only really coming into her own towards the end of the game (your mileage may vary, but she only came off as annoying for most of the runtime), and don't get me started on Bienfu, that thing should die immediately. I was also annoyed by how most of the main cast got the resolution of their character arcs through kinda boring side-quests that for some reason are ALL crammed at the very end of the game, before the final dungeon, not to mention their backstories ended up being huge "tell don't show" lore dumps a lot of the time.
While the story was interesting and told in a kinda novel way, the insistence on trying to make the main party sound like supervillains while they're actually doing the right thing (regardless of motivation), especially when they're basically fighting against [spoiler]the equivalent of a fascist regime.[/spoiler] Ultimately it makes sense, these games are always going to lean more towards a more positive point of view, which is absolutely fine, and I understand that an actual "play as the villain" story wasn't the intent here, but I do think they played it too safe.
I also think the tone of the whole thing was wildly inconsistent. We have this somewhat more mature story with unapologetically edgy characters (which I find very fun), and then there's some absolutely stupid ♥♥♥♥ thrown in, like the Normin or the Turtlez or the awful ugly and unfunny Katz. It tries to put in some levity where it isn't needed, some of the character interactions and the edge itself were very funny to begin with, at least to me. I understand it's how Tales games go, and some people may like it, I just think it's annoying.
Speaking of character interactions, while I do get that it's probably intentional due to their nature and how they got together in the first place, the whole ass party lacks any amount of chemistry for about half of the entire game. That's like thirty hours by the way. And while it can be a source of funny moments at certain points, it's not exactly the most entertaining stuff. The after-battle victory banter is often so stiff because of it.
Towards the end, some of the english script was getting really screwed up, with grammatical errors and text that didn't match the dub (sometimes to a nonsensical degree, it felt like someone tried to transcribe by using a speech-to-text thingy, if you know what I mean), but it mostly just happened in that awful string of endgame sidequests. Maybe it was just me, but the voice acting there also took a turn for the worse in a few parts; I get the feeling everyone involved was tired.
Most of the music is just fairly generic anime game music, I don't particularly like that.
Despite everything I've said, I do think this is a great game that deserves to be played, even just for its amazing female main character and how it handles certain themes. The general gameplay isn't the best, but I thought it was fun for what it was.
