Gaming Forums => General Gaming => Topic started by: MukiDA on May 15, 2013, 07:06:26 AM
Title: On why I love the tales series... [Wall 'o text warning]
Post by: MukiDA on May 15, 2013, 07:06:26 AM
So first off, a warning: I write walls of text. A lot. They may not be particularly cohesive, so please skip on if rants give you migraines. =3
My dissapointment about the "Tales" segment on Connectivity a few months back stemmed mainly from the fact that there was very little discourse regarding the actual game mechanics, and this is part and parcel what MAKES these games. Whatmore, much like the Bourne movies (legacy notwithstanding), the formula is so tightly knit that we go into sequels with FULL KNOWLEDGE that we're getting more of the same with a different story skin (though I could easily go on about how good Vesperia's story was).
I realize that many people have glanced over other people's shoulders at this game series and wondered just why there's such a fevor amongst its fanbase. So with that, I give you:
Why I love the Tales series. (umm, starting from Symphonia).
Okay, so this is gonna be a running theme: Tales games to most JRPGs (the Final Fantasies in particular) are very much like Eternal Darkness is to Resident Evil: The budgets are much smaller but the focus on gameplay results in a far more pleasurable experience. (note: A very self-professed Tales Whore is making that statement. You may need a packet or small jar of salt to swallow it.)
1. Items you'll actually use. Generally speaking, health/mana restoration items in RPGs fit into a very "junk/jewelry" mentality really early on. Health restoration items don't scale with your health, and you burn through the ranks of them pretty quickly. Combined with the post-battle group health casting that becomes standard 10-20 hours in, and the health potions pretty quickly get relagated to the junk drawer. Magic restoration is the opposite. They're either so ridiculously expensive (being 10-100x the price of the health-restoring items) or so rare (being outright unbuyable, and only showing up half a dozen times over the course of hte adventure) that you pretty much hoard them up to the ending credits. Just like jewelry, most of them stay locked away, and only find use on special ocassions. So the Tales/Star Ocean series fixes this problem quickly and sucinctly. One, all items scale. HP and MP (or TP or SP, or whatever they're calling it nowadays) restoring items restore a percentage of the resource. Meaning, the potion you bought an hour is is just as useful in the final boss battle. The trade-off? Item cap of 15-20. This means you can't just spam these items in battle, and still have to use them stategically. But you will use them.
2. Casters and fighters stay neck 'n neck. This RPG flaw isn't J- specific, and has probably been around for as long as the term RPG has existed, as it started in D&D. May I present you with: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LinearWarriorsQuadraticWizards (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LinearWarriorsQuadraticWizards) This is by far the biggest source of annoyance in role playing games. Fighters are cool and all, but if you want an experience that stays fun for more than a day, you go with magic casters. In a party system, this means your fighters eventually fall to the "waiter" roll of dolling out items because you're not gonna waste your summoner's turn with trivial stuff like that. While there's always new spells to learn, your combat specialists don't go far beyond *"attack". For this one, the Tales series basically pulled things straight out of anime (or possibly fighting games) in giving the swordmaster a variety of special attacks, and combat mechanics around linking them into a variety of combs. Heck, some of them even get healing attacks, making them just as versatile as your spellcasters while being significantly more mobile. And that's another thing...
3. The party "dynamic". Most RPGs have the concept of defending instead of attacking on a given turn, and most of them teach you early on to put your weaker spellcasters in the "back row" of your party, and your attackers up front. Is it just me, or does the difference in both instances so negligible that it almost doesn't matter? In the SNES era, the difference between defending and just taking a hit after attacking was so minuscule that you might as well call the defend option "skip this turn". There were entire swaths of games where my healer would be in the front row because it just didn't make that much of a difference as far as damage was concerned (especially when enemies started casting spells), simply because they accidentally fell into the front row and it didn't matter enough to change. Sooooo, here's where the Tales series makes a monumental improvement in the formula. Spellcasters don't just insta-cast when their turn comes up. They open up a magic circle beneath them (signifying a spell is being cast) and then cast it after a few seconds. While this timespan can be sped-up, it does take time. And if they get hit by a significant degree, that spell is interrupted. Blocking attacks usually results in taking significantly less damage (170 vs, say, 20). Between the two of these, not only do you now have fighters and spellcasters on equal footing (each with their own strengths and weaknesses), they now need to work together. A fighter's job, in part, is to actively look out for their spell casters and intercept enemies making a beeline for them to assure that their area-smashing lightning spell, or their party-saving healing spell, actually gets cast. Whatmore it also forces the players to make judgement calls, as they need to decide on dealing with a knight now or taking a couple of hits in order to intercept the enemy mages.
4. Real-Time Battle I'll have to hold off on this one in any major depth, because I could write a page centered entirely around "how not to hate real-time combat", but this one I think is more left up to personal taste. I personally like taking a fully active role in my combat, to me, turn-based feels a bit archaic (I say this, having just burned +150 hours in Disgaea 3...), and far more importantly, I like fighting games. Fighters and RPGs are by far my two favorite genres, and any game that combines the two tends to be seen favorably in my eyes. But I'll leave it at, the battles are real-time, meaning you move and attack in ways pretty similar to adventure games or, as previously mentioned, fighting games. And the Tales series, especially from Symphonia on, bring a few elements to the table that make it far more enjoyable a combat style than, say, Star Ocean (Which I could also write at length about).
5. A whole mess of story... if you want it. So my biggest complaint about Golden Sun, and this becomes especially jarring if you try playing it again, is that the game had a truck-load of dialogue for a game where, story-wise, not a whole lot really happened. I mean, you could take the average 5-minute a-button-tapping jamborie in that game and condense it into about a sentence's worth of information. This is a common issue with a lot of J-RPGs. You want to tell your story, but you also want there to be a lot of inter-character dialogue. You want your characters to feel like real, fleshed-out human beings. The problem is that animation is expensive. So chances are, you're going to have to make a decision, budget-wise: You can either have a few scenes where your characters have believable expressions and solid acting, or you can have a BUCKET-TON of dialogue, and more character depth to go with it, at the expense of a lot of "porcelain doll syndrome", or what a friend of mine affectionately calls "The Squeenix Valley". This ruined Star Ocean 4 for me. The Tales series came up with a storytelling mechanic that finds a solid compromise for this problem. Basically, at various points in the game, you'll get a quick "story segment", that is 100% optional, that you'll get from pressing the start/select/back/etc. button when the prompt for the scene comes up. You get a brief dialogue, usually text-only, between 2D portraits of the characters. Usually they'll have animated mouths, and their expressions will change as the sequence demands it. They're 100% character pieces, which basically lets you experience all the intra-story banter between your party members, and usually only reiterates or reinforces major parts of the story itself. You might even get funny bits about characters you'd never **see or guess otherwise. The magic, is, of course, that they're all optional. This becomes increasingly noticeable when you realize that a 2nd run-through of the game takes you half as long as the first one did, EXP boosts notwithstanding. It lets you keep all the fun parts of playing a long adventure, without forcing you to sit through multiple instances of the minutia. Now if only they'd allow you to skip what few dialogue sequences remain, especially ones that precede boss battles.
6. Cooking! I'll leave this one brief. I could write up a list of "Stuff Tales games do right", which I think I've just about done here, but this one is a cute work-around to an issue that comes up with point #1. Fact is, while the item dynamic works really well during battle, it leaves you with an issue about dwindling resources over the course of a long dungeon. So they came up with the concept of cooking, which allows you to put together a meal after every fight. As you can store MANY different kinds of ingredients, this allows you to stay on top of keeping your health and mana at a moderate level without having to constantly use your precious "gels" (the health/mana-restoring items). As you can't eat food while IN combat, it makes for a way to keep combat exciting while limiting dungeon fatigue. Whatmore, it creates a whole new gameplay mechanic in learning recipes and figuring out who the best cooks in your party are while enjoying a practical side benefit in improving your dungeon and exploring stamina.
7. The last brick in this wall of text. So yeah, that, in my opinion, is what gets people enamored with this series. While the gameplay has stayed pretty steady/familiar since the initial Gamecube offering, that core foundation is so well tuned, and the formulas that lead into it so solid, that picking up entries in the franchise is now pretty much a given for me (got my pre-order set for the idiotic collector's edition of Xillia the day I found out it existed). I could go at length into things that Symphonia specifically did that I really wish would come back to the serie (like the brilliant anti-maze dungeon designs), but I'll save that wall for another day. *I've played a lot of FFs, so yes, I know there's other skills for those types of jobs, but for the most part, they're either spellcasting with a REALLY low spell list ceiling or getting skills which enhance what "attack" does. ** Like finding out that Yuri Lowell is really into catgirls.
(Modified a whole mess of times because the forum software did funny things to my formatting)
Title: Re: On why I love the tales series... [Wall 'o text warning]
Post by: ejamer on May 15, 2013, 08:41:20 AM
*standing slow clap*
Tales series is awesome. Wish we got more games from the series on Nintendo consoles.
So did everyone hear the rumor that Tales of Symphonia and Dawn of the New World are getting HD re-releases on PS3?
