Mid on the whole (my ranking is Vesperia>Graces>Berseria>Zestiria>Abyss>Arise>Symphonia>Xillia or something close). The game does allot of stuff right and allot wrong. Off the top of my head:
+Presentation's on a whole other level. The world is so much bigger than before and the combat is as flashy as Tales has ever been.
+Sakuraba swung and hit this time. Most of his music is really good - particular shoutouts to the main battle theme and the dynamic tracks in major dungeons that switch gears depending on whether you're in the field or battle.
+Start of the story is decently exciting and the main duo have good chemistry. I dig the Utena callback and the fire sword in general.
-Ironically, the mixing is kind of garbage, making the awesome tracks not as easy to hear as they should be and somehow Bandai doesn't have individual volume sliders for different sounds (music/voice/sfx are the standard three).
-Some elements of the combat interface were annihilated. For god knows what reason, AI instructions for your teammates are not available in this title and you can't... say, instruct your party to attack other monsters on the field instead of the one you're trying to combo. Baffling.
-The rest of the cast did not land with me. Part of this might be related to replacing the 2D animated artwork in skits with their in-game 3D models which have... just so less personality.
-Story falls to pieces by the end, as is often the case in Tales games, but this one's particularly memorable for its mind-numbingly long and tedious cutscenes by the end. Middle section isn't great either.
