Finally. Cool. Graces may be on the ugly side and it may be as dumb as bricks, but Tales has never topped how fucking awesome its combat system is. Every iteration since then has just been a worse copy of Graces that tweaks some element or another for the worse. QOL updates are much welcomed.
Dunking on Zestiria is a popular pastime but count me in the minority that really, really likes the game. It's colorful, it's cheery, it's attractive (when fps is uncapped), and it's a fun take on an Arthurian tale with an unconventional (for Tales) party. Its real flaws are undeniable - A gear upgrade system you need a degree in to use effectively, and a non-instanced area battle system that wasn't fully cooked resulting in height difference and camera issues in combat - But the rest of the complaints aren't so concretely universal. Complaints about the villain being underwhelming miss the point of this being a happy adventure and a heroic tale at its core. I don't think it nails everything either - It's a Tales game so it's gonna fumble the ball, but I loved my time with it overall. Probably top 3 in the series for me.
Talking out of my ass here, but I think the problem was that a lot of the core changes to the game were made to Symphonia's PS2 port. How that forever trapped the Bamco team to 30 fps versions of the game is beyond my understanding, and some of the shoddy work I've seen from screenshots (mixing button displays across different types of controllers on the status screen is the worst - how the fuck did that make it past QC) makes me wonder if the porting team wasn't quite up to snuff.
automaton-media.com
