Honestly embarrassingly bad for a game made by a professional studio. I don't like to abandon things so quickly but absolutely everything about ToZ just screams "avoid me" like a poison dart frog. The entire thing reeks of cheapness. I can't find any real information on it online but this whole debacle must have been rushed out, or given a bad budget, or a team of people new to the industry, or something. I really hope there was some excuse, cause the alternative is just sad.
The most noticeable thing here is that the game is just butt ugly- I'm not usually the type to really get on something for "graphical fidelity" and play the "but in X year there should be Y HD-ness" card, but it really does just boggle the mind how the company behind games like Tales of Symphonia, Vesperia, even Legendia could produce something that looks like a low budget, early days PS2 game (discounting the character models). There was a smash cut early in the game from a cutscene to an enormous, perfectly straight, low poly hallway bridge on a flat environment that actually made me lose my composure and burst out laughing. It's that bad.
The world is just flat, sparse, and drab- something that carries over to the characters, who all animate like stiff robots or marionette dolls while spewing out some of most amateurish writing I've seen in a professional production in a long time. Sure, Tales games can be a bit hit or miss with the characters sometimes, but this is just embarrassing. It reads like something written by a teenager for a school project, and isn't helped by being backed by the blandest "big evil guy and the destined hero" rubbish in the world. A story brief that was old 20 years before this game game out.
Mechanically the game feels like a very new-school RPG, full of button mashing, caked in stupid flash and flair, with jumbled piles of excessive gimmicky system nonsense lobbed at you in a big, useless, impossible to digest pile before you have a chance to acclimate to even the most basic parts of the game. Even hours in I was still getting tutorial prompts in almost every battle about yet another tacked on piece of nonsense the battles featured. Like they believed if they crammed enough crap in there it'd make it worthwhile to play, instead of just having a solid base to work something unique on top of.
Also, you know, gotta love the new-school thing where characters won't ever shut the ♥♥♥♥ up during combat OR exploration. How about instead of just bad characters, we have bad characters who you always have to listen to, yapping about total garbage 24/7, because god forbid the modern gamer doesn't have a button to mash, a big flashy animation to gawk at, or a quip to hear every ten seconds.
Maybe the characters and the plot get better later on, but why would I stick around for it? The game is grating to listen to, annoying to play, and obnoxious to look at. ToZ is the type of game that just gives you a sense of "you only have so many years to live- why spend those hours, those days, dealing with something so laughably, pathetically bad?
