You normally control Sorey, backed up by his human companion and the seraphim, each of whom correspond to the elements: Water, Fire, Earth, and Wind. On top of that, there's an elemental weakness system allowing you to push your combo damage higher and higher. Each Arte type trumps one of the other types, putting enemies into a vulnerable state for higher combos. The basic concept is a rock-paper-scissors system of abilities called Artes: Martial Artes, Seraphic Artes, and Hidden Artes. Zestiria features what Bandai Namco calls the "Linear Motion Battle System", which is based around combo-heavy action gameplay. ( Warning: the combat camera can be really bad at times.) The game keeps track of your overall playtime and time spent in battles on average, a tenth of my overall playtime was spent on combat. A great cast of characters can make an average story better and that's the case with Zestiria.Ĭombat is equally enjoyable, which is why it's surprising how little of it there is at times. I also appreciated the variance in the character designs, running the gamut of fully-clothed to somewhat-naked there's something for everyone. Hell, even Edna, a collection of various tropes that tend to annoy me elsewhere, grew on me relatively soon after she joined the party. They play off each other well, to the point that I would stay to watch the after-combat vignettes and the various save point skits that were available. Sure, they're all character types you've seen before in various anime: the upbeat and somewhat dense Sorey, straight man Mikleo, proper lady Lailah, loli kuudere Edna, the revenge-driven Dezel, etc. The story isn't any great shakes, but the cast kept me playing. (Ganondorf still needs work in the Zelda off-season.) Anime: The JRPG sounds about right. It's up to him and his crew of elemental-based seraphim to go around cleaning up towns and dredging ruins for more power to defeat the Lord of Calamity. What the hell, Bandai Namco?) Sorey's the chosen one, the only person who can purify humans and seraphim tainted by the evil force called Malevolence and turned in Hellions. (The only surprising thing that happened was that one character left the party and never returned. Zestiria's plot is not amazing, it's earnestly straight-forward and predictable.
When I brought up that Zestiria was going to be my first Tales game, someone on Twitter told me that the entire series was "Anime: The JRPG". When a young woman is found during Sorey and Mikleo's ruin explorations, what she tells Sorey about the world below kicks off a quest that will make him the Shepherd, the world's chosen hero. Sorey has lived amongst the seraphim for so long that he can see them naturally - a phenomenon called resonance - which helps because his best friend Mikleo is one of them. The seraphim exist alongside humanity, but they're invisible to the average human so they're sometimes revered and worshiped as local protectors. Tales of Zestiria is the story of Sorey (pronounced Soar-Ray) a young man who's been living in the town of Elysia alongside the mythical Seraphim. I just had a number of games ahead of it on the queue - various Final Fantasies, Dragon Quests, and Disgaeas - and I never got around to it. I have a copy of Tales of Symphonia lying around here somewhere and I fully intended to play it at some point. That's not to say I was avoiding the series. This is the first Tales series game I've ever played.