This is another one of those cases where I wish there was a neutral option, because on one hand I want to recommend this game but on the other... it's complicated.
Tales of Xillia is one of those games I remember playing on a PS3 around 10 years ago and of which I had very fond memories for one reason or the other, though I could never finish it for some reason.
And while I like it, I have a lot of problems with it.
I'll start with everything I liked first.
The characters, absolutely amazing, most of them at least. Milla is a fantastic protagonist, she starts off as a very silly and entertaining lady, which I always really like. Alvin, Rowen and Agria were all stand-outs to me too, and many others were good and well-written in their own right. Character development was great and all that jazz, the kind where you can Feel the characters change in real time, save for a few times where a bit of telling and not showing happened, but it was maybe twice or something.
The story was interesting, it followed a cool premise and delivered it in fun and honestly unexpected ways for at least two thirds of the runtime, though it wasn't without its issues; I'll get to that later.
Many of the performances from the English cast were amazing.
The combat pulls out some very cool ideas (which I'm not sure if they were already present in previous Tales Of titles, I haven't played them, except a bit of Eternia, which I don't remember having this kind of things in it), by including stuff reminiscent of fighting game mechanics (airdashes, jump cancels, dash cancels, backdash invulnerability, fastfall, otg into juggles, to name some), and usually encourages having solid timing for some of the tech, though I do have a fair bit of grievances with this part of the game; more on that later.
Some of the environments, more specifically cities and maybe a couple dungeons, were beautifully crafted, unique and marvelous to look at despite the game being dated by modern standards.
Some of the music was nice.
Now this is where the Dean Norris meme goes from him smiling to looking pissed, the stuff I didn't like or had a hard time with.
Teepo. My GOD this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ thing, I hated it so much. Every time it opened its ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mouth a scene was being taken out back and shot as far as I'm concerned. The fact that it's technically part of a better character also doesn't help. I just couldn't stand this stupid plushy mascot ass imbecile and its irritating voice. An annoying and ugly blemish on what I otherwise consider to be a great cast of characters. Call me biased on this, because I probably am, I simply can't with these types of characters; you shove an attempt at a cutesy, irritatingly sassy mascot thing in my face and I'll just react with absolute bile. Whenever anyone talked back at it, I felt vindicated.
Agria didn't get enough screentime. Here, I'm probably completely biased, and the same might apply to a lot of the characters introduced in the later parts of the game, not just because they appeared for less but because their appearances were fairly sparse... but I felt especially bad in her case. I thought she was really entertaining, a riot to have on screen any time she appeared.
Speaking of later parts of the game, I'd heard before that the last third of the game was quite rushed, and I absolutely can't deny that. A lot of new, kinda outlandish and confusing concepts are shoved in the player's face all at once and given little time to develop, with situations getting solved in somewhat unsatisfying ways at some points. What's worse is picking Milla as a main character ends up making these last sections of the game a fair bit more confusing, and the player will lack some critical information about what happened and what's going on; to be fair this also happens a couple times earlier on, so it's easy to imagine Milla is intended to be a "second playthrough" type deal, to gain additional context on things that might have needed further explaining whilst still not being entirely crucial... but I still disagree with that choice as a matter of principle. I'm not gonna replay the whole game just to see a couple scenes, come on now.
There were a couple notably weak performances in the English dub, with Leia and Muzét having some really strange line delivery at times, for example. I think Teepo wasn't a bad performance, I just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hated that thing, to reiterate. The somewhat inconsistent sound mixing didn't help this part either, and I hear it was worse when the remaster first released; still isn't awful now at least.
All the cool ideas presented by the combat are made mostly useless in the grand scheme of things because everything else involved in it isn't great, or is downright a bad idea. The AC system is just straight up a bad idea in my opinion; I get that they wanted a way to prevent players from just mashing the whole time, but there's a lot of things in the game that already discourage this (and some of those things are negatives too!), and it just ends up making things clunky. The niftier stuff like jump cancels just doesn't work properly, and I believe this might be due to how the remaster is coded when it comes to reading inputs; it seems to have been a common complaint on release that might have been mostly patched out, but jumping during fights is still incredibly inconsistent in my experience, and even then there's actually no use for jump cancels as there's no real incentive to trying to go for launchers and stylish air combos in the first place most of the time (this also applies to a lot of the other fighting game inspired tech in the game, though at least fastfall turns out to be incredibly useful). This all gets worse when you take into account that battles will almost never be 1v1, so it gets quite chaotic in there, and reacting to enemy attacks with perfect blocks or well-timed backdashes (which have an annoyingly tight window, at that) ends up being quite difficult with all the effects going on, and not in a satisfying way. Even worse, bosses, which are probably the only enemies actually worth fighting (a lot of the trash mobs end up being very uninteresting in my opinion, or just plain annoying to deal with), have inconsistent amounts of hyper-armor that needs to be broken before they can be staggered and juggled (only for a short period of time, and you're probably still gonna be punished for it as soon as they magically recover from hitstun), and even then they absolutely love to block for long periods of time (same applies to trash mobs sometimes), with no reliable way to break their guard or having an option to beat blocking (and no, I don't believe linking with Alvin counts as a reliable option, ironically enough). All in all, the fun options offered by the combat system and skills end up not mattering, since it's far more convenient and effective to simply throw out Artes and use the linked Artes or whatever; the cool stuff is too much trouble for what it's worth. All of this to say, it's a massive shame. A Potential Man if I've ever seen one.
The environments that don't look incredibly cool and impressive end up being uninspired and quite boring, which applies to a lot of the "in-between" explorable areas... and I've got a few choice words for those as well as the dungeons. Tales of Xillia does away with the classic explorable world maps when it comes to travel, and this results in really awkward sections of traveling from one major location to the other that most of the time just end up being small clumps of traversable maps, usually two or three, where it's just some ugly open field lined by, ironically, unnatural-looking natural barriers, with collectibles and a bunch of enemies sprinkled around. The exploration does not feel good. Even in dungeons, most of those end up being repeating patterns of corridors, pretty much, with a few exceptions.
Steam review character limit means this review will end abruptly and be more rushed than the actual endgame
