Tales of Zestiria

The gameplay is...alright, I guess. Graphics and sound are...adequate for the time. The writing is what takes this from "kinda meh" to "avoid at all costs". The characters are all idiots, and what's worse is they're [i]inconsistent[/i] idiots who apparently change their whole personality every five minutes so that they can pick the dumbest possible thing to do at any given moment. Whenever one shows occasional flashes of likeability they immediately turn around and ruin it with the very next thing that comes out of their mouths. The plot is "I am 14 and this is my first-ever DnD campaign!" levels of generic and the humor, well...either something went [i]seriously[/i] wrong in translation or whoever originally wrote those "jokes" is suffering from some kind of serious issues. Possibly both. Verdict: Play literally [i]any[/i] other Tales Of... game instead.

It's called (Zest)iria because of all of the gay tension between Sorey and Mikleo.

This game, I feel, tried to experiment with the Tales formula. But they put "be experimental" over "be good" or "be fun". That said, stay awhile and listen to my complaints. What I don't like, you might actually love. I feel like there's audience for this game, but this audience is just not really me. The story follows a goody two shoes who basically becomes a messiah of religion. He talks to his imaginary friends all the time, but the twist is, those imaginary friends are actually real. There are up to 2 human characters in your party at any time, and 4 ghost members. Since ghosts can't be seen by anyone... they don't really tike part in most of the cutscenes. They might stand on the side and comment how stupid humans are, but nothing more. This is a big issue, since they have pretty well written personalities, and they can't really show those off outside of skits. So you're stuck with goody two shoes and one actually fun human member actually pushing the story. This game decided to drop regular skits jumping in when you did something relevant. Instead skits will be used as mandatory parts of main story, since making cutscenes is expensive. You also get optional skits when you're touching save points or when you're touching "points of interest" collectibles. There's not many of those skits though. Majority of the skits are locked behind sleeping at inns. Unlike old games you don't know if a skit is waiting for you at the inn, so you'll have to slip over and over again until skits stop appearing. This also means you get drop of 4-5 new skits and they kind of don't work too good. You also have to sleep at inns in order to get food buffs. There's no cooking after battle / in fields anymore. You sleep at the inn, and you get a buff for 8-12 battles or so. This game seems to have obsession with you sleeping at inns, as many things are tied to it. You need to sleep to get back SC, so your passive skills actually work and level up. And many story events will force you to sleep at inns anyway. The problem is, they also decided that fast travel using save points should cost you 6% of all your Gald. So if you run out of your 8-12 battles and want to get your buffs back it's 6% to get back to the Inn, 100-1000G for food, and another 6% of your Gald to get back to where you want. This can be easily tens of thousands of G, which makes it totally not worth it. Okay, but you could walk back, right? And avoid battles so your buffs last you whole dungeon, right? Well... no. First of all the maps are HUGE (and empty). And your walking speed is snail-paced. So it will take you forever to get back to the inn. There are solutions for the speed, yes. You can use passive ability "windstepping" which increases your speed for 30 seconds after battle. But that means you have to battle more enemies instead of avoiding them, and that makes your buffs run out much faster. The windstepping is your experimental sprint. You cannot just sprint when you want, or on some stamina bar. No, you can only run when you fight something. Or when NPCs at city randomly talk. So the one thing to avoid encounters forces you to fight encounters. Cool. Also, even with windstepping you only match the speed of monsters on the map. To outrun them you also need the buff from master of the domain, which means you have to feed the master of the domain hundreds of thousands Gald worth of items before you unlock faster movements. And each city (and area aourd it) has separate domain, so you have to repeat the process for each of them separately. Needless to say - you won't reach running speeds until late game or post game. The game also wants you to explore it's HUGE, boring, empty locations with no interesting things on them. There are points of interests that you might find, but even those usually are not too interesting (even if Sorey is all excited about them, I'm sorry, but bunch of grey rocks do nothing for me). There are also randomly spawning chests, and herbs. In theory you could use passive skills to search for those items, but the problem is, that even maxed out, those skills only have a range of around 1 step. It's always crazy, when you open the chest and afterwards the person in charge of finding chests says "look! there's a chest!". You can put multiple people on x-finding skill, which increases the range to "they'll see it as soon as you see it" which makes it at least somewhat useful... But overall another experiment that failed. Now, time to stop nitpicking and get to the make-or-break elemets of the game. First - the equipment system. In this game there's only few "ranks" of equipment. Say you have Topaz rank, so you'll have Topaz Sword, Topaz Axe and so on. Each piece of equipment can have up to 4 skills on it. First skill is guaranted and is based on the item, but other 3 are RNG. So Topaz Sword might always have +4% attack, but other 3 modifiers will be RNG. That means that you get dozens of the same Topaz Swords dropped from all fights. It's unexciting to get Topaz Sword after Topaz Sword. Now when you have multiple Topaz Swords you can merge them. Let's say you have TS which has +4% Art power on 2nd slot, and +4% defence on 3rd slot. If you merge them you get TS with all 3 skills(remember TS has +4% attack power on 1st slot always). Some RNG weapons won't have some slots filled, so you can merge until you get all 4 slots. But what if you have different skills on the same slot? Well, now the skills will also merge into a completely different skill. There's a formula for that and the UI shows you what you'll get, but now to get results you want you need to pray to RNG gods to get proper skills at proper slots, or intentionally get locked skills, to remove them from merge process to overwrite them with what you need. It's very involved, time consuming and boring process. It's also worthless to do it until you get into endgame gear, in my opinion. I just merged weapons to get bigger base stats and ignored skills mostly. Then if you merge item over 10 times you can sanctify it, to make first skill work double. That's what the game says, but it's a bit of lie. Because the item actually becomes new item with +0, and just new base skill. That means that you now it's harder to merge this item, because you need another sanctified one to merge with it(so it's really not a good idea to sanctify items when you reach +10). Do you think that's overly complicated? If so don't worry. It gets worse. On top of all this you have skill matrix. If you line skills on your equipment onto that matrix in certain order you will unlock bonuses. So now have fun preparing your excel sheet on how to setup your skills, to get best bonuses, calculate what's worth and what is not, and spend tens of hours getting perfect skills RNG onto perfect equipment. And once you do it, never change the equipment, or all that carefully prepared bonuses will disappear. Purely useless outside of endgame. But I accidentally got bonuses on one of my early weapons, and then it made no sense to change my equipment on Sorey until very late game... Did I mention all that merging is done in the worst possible interface for that purpose? You can increase your odds of finding what you need by setting up Normin at lord of the land. With proper set you can both increase your chance at getting the rank of the item you need, and the skills you need might be more likely to appear. That said you still can't manipulate the slots, and to be able to do it fully you have to farm levels in lords of the lands... You can also use one of passive skills to request an item at the store. Combat is good BUT the tutorial is locked behind COLLECTIBLES. You might not find proper collectible, and feel like the game is cheating when your attacks do nothing to enemies after dropped combos. That's one of the worst ideas in this game. They also made healing very strange, it takes time using to it. I like it, but some might hate it.

Took a while. A lot of false starts and stops over the years. Opinion has not changed. Zestiria is blatantly overhated, and unreasonably so. This is where we explain. [H1]Three Elements, Three Different Opinions[/H1] [hr][/hr] [olist] [*]Cutscenes/graphics [*]Gameplay/Combat/Controls [*]Story/Plot/Characters [/olist] Players of this game have chosen one of these, and disregarded the others. That's because for whatever reason, we got to a point where people stopped caring about good stories and characters and only care about fighting. Which then causes them to get bored easily and complain about the games being too short/easy/etc. Which then causes the game shops to pay less attention to quality in games, because of catering to the ADHD of it all. Which then causes them to shut down when they don't make as much money. Games must have ALL THREE of the attributes mentioned. But a game that has a "meh" battle engine is still workable if it's got endearing characters, a compelling story, a well-built world, great graphics, great music, etc. Case-in-point: Arc Rise Fantasia. Those that claim Zestiria is the "worst" Tales game, only care about the second bullet up there. Frankly, Vesperia is nowhere near as fluid as this one in that regard yet people think it's the greatest (it really isn't). Besides, everyone knows the worst tales game is Symphonia, and it's not close. If we had to list a negative, it's simply that it feels disconnected from Berseria, the canon prequel to the events here. It feels like there's a game missing in the middle of these two, and as a result, it's slightly difficult to connect the dots up. Very similar feeling to "Tales of Aionios" (aka Xenoblade Chronicles 3's base game) where the only real connection is by way of observed landmarks, rather than direct callbacks, because so much time passed in between. Eizen (from Berseria) has a whole experience that you never see, not even in flashbacks. It's annoying. Much was said about the abruptness with how Alisha was treated. It's abrupt, but it's clear they were trying to write her a specific way that just came off awkward. The DLC (which we missed the free of, and thus can't justify the paid version of) was an attempt to placate, but ended up pissing people off even more. We liked Alisha, but it's true that she felt out-of-place as a main character. But when you get to the almost-final boss and he flashes a bit of a "whoa" moment, that was excellently done. Haven't felt that sort of impact in a game's story in a very long time. Is it the "best" Tales game? Absolutely not. That honor still remains with Tales of the Abyss. But it's better than Vesperia, Berseria, Legendia, Symphonia and definitely Arise by a WIDE margin. Again, as an overall story and experience, NOT just the battle engine.

**Before reading this review, please keep in mind that this is MY opinion and shouldn't affect how other people view this game** So, I bought this game a long time ago. I first bought the physical copy for the ps3, got stuck, my ps3 broke and then I bought the Steam edition to try to continue it years later. And today I decided to give up trying to beat this game and am rating it badly even though I really did enjoy this game. Let me explain. You see, the story of this game, the characters and everything, are truly wonderful. Like I love how much details these games go into and the story is really nice. Granted, I've played quite a bit of Tales games before so I knew this was my cup of tea. But...there's just something about this game that I truly cannot work around, and that is the lack of directions this game provides. I tried to bare with it, when it would tell me to go somewhere with no indication whatsoever on where that was. I bore with it, because I really did want to beat this game. Like to the point it pains me to do this. However, now I am stuck in the part where I need to gather up ALL of the Iris Gems, and I have no idea where to start. Yes, I know that one can use the purple stars to see the side quests that deal with them. But 1) Why did they have to create 15 gems and not be part of the main game?! 2) I don't like how the first one I tried to do to get to the main quest and it didn't tell me exactly where to go! Just gave me the broad overview. And that's where I threw in the towel. Honestly... If this game was more clear cut on where to go to proceed, I wouldn't review it negatively. I am still heavily disappointed I need to do this. But for now, I really can't.... I've decided that this is where I stop trying. And for this reason, I can't recommend it. *shaking my head in pity* I guess for now all I can do is to watch a walk through to at least see the end of the story. Edit here (2026): After dropping and picking this game back up a few times, I finally got to finish it, and I must say that even though I thought finishing the game would make me give it a good review, I can't in good conscious. My previous points still stand (even though I powered through it just to see it to the end), and on top of everything it took to face the final boss just for that to also be a slap to the face, I decided to keep the negative score. It's a shame though, since I think the game has some really good characters and I really liked the story, but all of my points I have previously brought up, still stand, and I can't in good faith recommend it.

Ugh, well. Here it is. The "bad" one of the "Tales of" series Zesteria. The big celebratory special. Easily outshone by its predecessors and those that came after. Its...a game If you have no idea what I'm talking about then Tales of Zesteria is an Action Combat focused JRPG (can we still say that?) It has a ton of hours, a story? and characters? and a lot, lot, LOT of fighting. Too much infact. You'll be going to towns, having skits with characters, getting titles, and fightfightfighting. and honestly its just FINE but kinda a drag. These games trade heavily on narratives and combat mechanics. Pretty much every title shakes up the way you do battle, almost always for the better, and one can bet their hat you'll get a fantasy RPG story, complete with tropes and trends. Zesteria is no different, but it trends a bit too far into safe and obvious territory and waits way too long to get going. So long infact that I didnt finish it. Poo poo me I suppose Its also got too much fighting. after the 500th battle you'll have seen enough. The bosses are just longer versions of fights, and the merging system is actually kinda good. Credit there. Visually the game is not bad, not good. Lacks detail, has alright direction, and music that sometimes impresses. Par for the course. That the games problem really, its too much, too long, and too spread thin. Its decent, but stretched out so much that you'll drop it before act III begins. There are pretty much no hooks, and the combat cant carry it. Its certainly not a bad game, but there are so many titles out there you may as well skip this one. Play its (pre)sequel, Tales of Berseria instead. Much better game, albeit easier.

I’m a long-time Tales fan, so I’m honestly not saying any of this lightly. I’ve loved so many games in this franchise dearly, which is exactly why Zestiria is such a huge failure to me. I tried. I really, really tried to give this game a chance. I played for many hours and got pretty deep into it because I kept thinking maybe something would click eventually. But I just couldn’t do it anymore. The soundtrack is amazing, I’ll absolutely give it that. I also like the cast. They’re likable and their designs are nice. But almost everything around them feels like a failure to me. The world looks shockingly cheap. And please don’t give me the “it’s an old game” excuse, because there are much older games, even from the same generation, that still look far better than this. This is also not some tiny poor studio making a game with no resources. Yet Zestiria genuinely feels like it had an extremely low budget. And honestly, I felt the same way about Xillia. You can see the same cheap assets everywhere. Similar NPCs, empty-looking areas, gloomy environments, everything feeling flat and lifeless. And no, I don’t mean gloomy because of the storyline. A dark world can still feel rich, atmospheric and alive. We’ve seen that many times in RPGs. Darkness is not the problem here. The problem is that this world literally feels like paper to me. Paper buildings. Paper trees. Paper terrain. There’s barely any definition or richness to anything. Everything feels static, empty and unfinished. And then there’s the story progression. Yes, I know everyone says the story is good. Maybe the actual story is good. But the way it is presented completely lost me. It honestly feels like someone collected a bunch of scenes, edited them together in a video and just pressed play. There is no natural sense of progression to me. In a good RPG, you feel like you’re going on a journey. One event leads naturally into another. You travel, discover things, meet people, get distracted by side stories, and slowly the world and story open up around you. Here? Everything feels mashed together. Rushed. Scene after scene after scene. I genuinely felt like the scenes didn’t even flow properly into each other. The game just keeps throwing story at you without giving enough time to breathe, I got bored. That is probably my biggest disappointment with “modern” Tales in general. Somewhere along the way, especially with this whole Zestiria/Xillia era, I feel like the series lost something. Everything started feeling repetitive, cheap and stripped of the personality I loved. I will say Tales of Arise was definitely an improvement for me. But even then, I still miss the classic Tales feeling so much. I miss the vibrant worlds. I miss that wonderful feeling of an overworld map. I miss interesting side quests and little discoveries. I miss in game creative costumes that actually felt like part of the joy of the game. Those little things mattered. They were part of what made Tales feel like Tales to me. I genuinely hope Bandai Namco sees feedback like this, because I’m not writing it out of hate. I’m writing it because I loved this series for a very long time and I know how magical it can feel. I don’t know what they have planned next for Tales, but I truly hope the series finds that feeling again. And on a side note… please, please bring Tales of the Abyss to modern platforms. I’m still hoping.

i love twink on twink action

Don't let me 300+ hours fool you. Most of that is farming achievements. and I finally got bored and stopped. In total I spent around 30 hours running in a circle (Rubber banded my controller and went to work) so I get the "make all snacks" Achievement. Still dont have it. Lets go over some good and bad stuff Good: It's an open world but the games does a very good job of letting you know when you aren't supposed to be somewhere. the screen gets a purple tint and you're movement is heavily reduced. Lilah is a PC you get shortly after starting the main quest, she makes VERY bad puns, adds a little bit of humor to the game. Combat is very straight forward and simple to learn, yet can be challenging to master. Bad: The amount of time an enemy hit me while I was behind them is absurd. The fuse system is just a pain that I didn't figure it out until I looked up a guide. BY FAR! The worst thing this game does, is make mandatory content seem optional. Through out the game, you will find "Iris gems" they give a little detail on the lore of the game. yet, about the 70% mark of the game, you are told "Hey you know those gems you've found here and there, go find them all! Wait, you don't know where they are? Oh well, try looking around, you're bound to find them" YEP! The game doesn't tell you where they are are how to get them! The closest thing it does, when you use the fast travel option, it puts a purple star next the name so you have a general idea. One tip: If you are trying to play a higher difficulties, Play as your favorite human, and merge with Miklio. His bow is so powerful all you have to do is shoot, block to recover SC (Stamina) and BG (special attack points), Dodge (don't get hit) and shoot. Repeat till dead, this will take a while, but it's work VERY well. Oh you get hit and are low on HP? Dodge aware and spend 1 BG point to basically fully heal yourself. Overall, do I recommend the game? You saw the thumbs up, so you know I do, but be prepared to look up a guide,