#Tales of xillia 2 tv tropes plus#
On the plus side, it’s easy to explore thanks to a forgiving fast travel system that lets you warp into and out of dungeons. It’s colorful and vibrant, but it looks like any other colorful and vibrant anime fantasy world.
The world of Rieze Maxia is beautiful but never breathtaking. Combat is fast and technical, timing is just as important as tactics, and it’s the rare RPG in which upping the difficulty to “Hard” makes it more fun instead of more frustrating. Overall, Xillia successfully merges the tactics of an RPG with the controls of an action beat-em-up. A well executed combo can end most normal battles in less than 30 seconds, which is always satisfying and ensures that the random battles (or not so random battles since you can see monsters roaming the environment) never get repetitive. In addition, you can Link with other characters to get access to unique, character specific combos. Combat is thus a balancing act between the explosive TP attacks and normal attacks. These special moves use up Technical Points that you then regain with normal attacks. As you level up, you unlock special moves that can be mapped to the control stick: flick up for one move, flick down for another, hold L1 and flick up for another, etc. You can hold the L2 button to break from this plane and run around, which is useful for dodging and flanking. Like other Tales games, Xillia plays more like an action game than an RPG.Ĭombat takes place in a 3D arena, but whenever you attack, you’re automatically locked into a 2D plane, much like a fighting game. Which is all to say that Tales of Xillia begins as a light and fluffy generic anime fantasy, but it eventually develops into a deeper, compelling story with its own identity.Įven if the story never evolved, Tales of Xillia would still be a good game thanks to its combat. Eventually, (25 hours in for me) the story takes a crazy twist, the world is put at stake, the subtext becomes an explicit part of the central conflict, and the plot rockets forward so fast it doesn’t even allow for fast travel. magic at the heart of Milla’s quest, but the game doesn’t do anything with that premise. There’s an interesting subtext of science vs. There’s some political intrigue, but no one is in much of a rush to do anything and the pacing suffers. They travel around the world, meet a bunch of people, but there’s no real sense of danger at this point. Jude, an everyman med-student, gets caught up in Milla’s quest to destroy a powerful weapon. She keeps the story interesting during its slow beginning. As the physical manifestation of a goddess (or rather the Goddess, seeing as how she created the world and all), she’s both caring and cold, wanting to help all of her people, human and spirit alike, but also very willing to make painful sacrifices for the greater good. Milla Maxwell, the mysterious girl, is by far the best character. The annoying comic relief character is even used as the catalyst for some surprisingly somber and interesting character development. There’s no love triangle between the boy, the mysterious girl, and the childhood friend.
So all the tropes are covered, but thankfully these characters do evolve over the course of the game and never become clichéd. The characters all conform to standard anime tropes: The small town boy in the big city, the mysterious girl who whisks him away on an adventure, the charming mercenary, the childhood friend, the old man who’s really a badass fighter, the child sidekick, and last and also least, the oddball “comic” relief character. But beneath that generic exterior hides a rather special game with top-notch combat, an intriguing and thought-provoking story, and a likable cast of characters. On the surface, it looks like just another painfully generic anime game (I’m looking at you Arc Rise Fantasia) with its quality resting on a coin flip. After all, JRPGs have declined in popularity in the States, and Tales of Xillia is unapologetically a Japanese RPG, filled with anime cut scenes, cartoonish character models, and an array of funny sounding fantasy names like Rieze Maxia, Rashugal, Auj Oule, and Elympios. So, the western world is way late to this party. As the 13th game in the Tales series, it was released in Japan two years ago, and a direct sequel was released a year later in 2012.
0 kommentar(er)
