So onto a game I played through shortly before Summer, just before I played another game after that, which I’m still currently playing and despise it greatly. The special word of today is friendship, because that describes Tales of Graces F’s plot in one word. This is gonna be a long one, I won’t go into plot much since there’s a certain someone who’s still casually playing this. There’s a childhood arc before the meat of the game which a lot of people didn’t like, and looking back on it I can see why, but it’s basically about the main character, Asbel befriending this prince called Richard, which kick-starts the friendship angle. The game’s combat (which is probably its best feature) becomes a lot better and more advanced in the adult arc. It has one of the best combat systems in the Tales series, I mean I can barely remember the Symphonia games since I played them so long ago, so I can’t point out what makes it the best BUT IT IS. A lot of people say the combat is really good too so that’s gotta be proof. I’m not sure if one of the other Tales games I know nothing about did this kind of thing before, but most of the buffing the characters get are from levelling their titles, but I’ll get to that soon. From left to right, the characters are Asbel, Sophie, Hubert, Cheria, Richard, Malik & Pascal.
You fight using CC (Chain Capacity) and all moves require it (dashing does too if I recall correctly). You start off with a very little amount (5-7) whereas one full length A-Arte combo takes around 9-10 CC, but over half the artes are gained through titles from story progression, or just a reward from some random title on the list since the character doesn’t have the move yet. There’s also dualizing which you do by upgrading weapons and armor by adding shards randomly dropped by enemies that increase its stats slightly and add special effects depending on the quality. I rarely did this since I was swapping out old stuff every hour or so, plus I wanted to save them for some really annoying inn requests much later on. A-Artes are standard moves that are part of a combo while B-Artes are special attacks that have to be set and you can only use 4 at a time with the analog stick (but the AI is allowed to use all the B-Artes at any time as long as the character knows the move) Wasn’t till like halfway through the game till I could do long combo chains from the extra CC gained from titles and better equipment.
There’s 5 difficulties: Easy, Normal, Moderate, Hard, Evil & Chaos, and the game lets you switch difficulties on the fly, and good thing too since the bosses really aren’t scaled that well. Very first boss I had problems with was this Slime Queen but there was more due to me not being used to the combat system yet, and the Queen producing minions while I fought the boss. My teammates died to the minions, and I was pretty much screwed. I unintentionally put Asbel on auto-pilot while I looked something up and he played better than I was and the 3 characters I had at the time beat the boss, clearly the AI was a better friend than I was. The biggest bump was a while later on two bosses within the same dungeon. I really should have prepared by taking a bit of time out to grind titles but I wanted to get it done and get the other party members. The first boss, while acrobatic, hard to stun & had long reach wasn’t too much to handle for Asbel & Sophie, the problem was Richard & Pascal, or should I say their AI. Both didn’t have the stats to really be taking major hits unlike the other two, not to mention numerous times they’d run right up beside me to attack the boss, they didn’t play along like good friends. At least Sophie’s AI usually had to sense to attack from behind so we don’t both get hit at once.
Honestly, Sophie’s AI stands out as being the only real competent one, at least when she did stupid stuff; it was nowhere near as obvious as the others. The next boss was a lot harder than necessary due to the incompetent AI, which was the point where Sophie’s AI stood out, since the others kept dying while just Sophie and I lasted much longer by ourselves. I retried after and swapped one member for a healer. One annoying thing about bosses is that they basically get free Mystic Artes, which are just supers. Not to mention the whole becoming much stronger & such at below 50% health etc. Bosses would normally get like 3 Eleth Bursts a fight at which point they can’t be stunned at all and they get free supers if they hit me even once. There’s one particular boss towards the end that a lot of people have problems with, and due to my annoyance with some previous bosses before that point, when I knew the boss was coming up at the end of a dungeon, I immediately put the difficulty down to easy, didn’t even care. Though the game handing the bosses free supers aren’t the cheapest thing, it’s the final boss’ mystic arte and in extension, the final boss of the future arc afterwards that really push it. As far as I’m aware, the final boss’ mystic arte hits everybody and not just one person. Not sure if distance really matters but for the f arc boss, that mystic arte hits everyone regardless of how far away you are and reduces their HP to 1, that’s ridiculously cheap.
Back to the titles, you have a menu for that and within are many different icons for each unlockable title. I think there’s around 140-160 for each character. You unlock the titles by doing all kinds of things like using certain special moves to hit enemy weaknesses, getting 50 hit combos 5+ times, use low rank artes a lot of times, killing multiple enemies 5+ times, using a certain arte 50-100 times, then using that same arte over 800 times to get another etc. There’s also some only certain characters get like Cheria getting some for collecting stamps on a point card and cooking the many dishes the game has, Sophie has several depending on the percentage of skits seen (the last is at 95%, which I knew right off the bat I’d never reach), Hubert has ones like finishing 200 battles on Hard and 300 battles on Evil (which is required to actually unlock Evil and Chaos difficulty) and so on. On each title, there are five effects that are permanently required once you level it up to 5, by equipping it and gaining SP from wining battles. So a title will have buffs like:
1. Eagle Dive – Damage +5%
2. Evasion +3
3. Elegant Flash – Damage +5%
4. Evasion +5
5. Parry Heal – Evade = HP Recovery +3%
A lot of titles generally follow that kind of structure. Basically levelling it up adds all kinds of boosts to skills, stats, special effects like naturally regenerating a little over time, being given brief invincibility after 1 minute into a fight, regain health when landing hits on enemies etc. Knowing this, as soon as I reached the point in the game where everyone finally joins and stops leaving every 5 minutes, I went back to a previous spot, turned the difficulty all the way up for extra SP and grinded out all those titles for 5 hours straight to get all the bonuses I could. While grinding I’d unlock new titles so I’d end up grinding those to level 5 too. Just to show how absurd the boosts can get with the massive amount of titles gained and levelled, I’ll just write down Asbels, who has the most:
Physical Attack +234 Physical Defense +275
Cryas Attack +328 Cryas Defense +231
Accuracy +246 Evasion +282
Maximum HP +1620 Defeat Enemy = HP recovery +110
Critical Hit = HP recovery +100 Near-Death = Chance of HP recovery +15%
Mininmum CC +3 Maximum CC+6
CC Recovery Rate Up (24%) Poison & Arteseal Effect Down +25%
Paralysis, Burn & Petrify Effect Down +20% Curse Effect Down +5%
Bird & Insect Resistance +20% Beast, Dragon, Fiend & Nova Resistance +25%
20% HP Recovery after 1 min Full CC Recovery after 1 min
4 secs Invulnerability after 1 min Eleth burst = HP Recovery 60%
Eleth Burst = CC+3 Eleth Burst = Physical Ailments Cured
Eleth Burst = Revive from KO Eleth Burst = Physical Attack +15%
Eleth Burst = Cyras Attack +10% Vs. Petrified, Critical +3
Vs. Slowed, Critical +2 Vs. P.DEF Downed, Critical +1
Vs. EVA Downed, Critical +3 Vs. Max HP Enemies, Critical +5
Level Up = Full HP Recovery Near-Death = Damage Dealt +30%
Near-Death = Stagger Time Down +20% Near-Death = CC Recovery Rate +10%
When Drawing Sword, Iron Stance +3 Not in Active Party = EXP Earned 40%
Not in Active Party = Post-Battle HP +15% Not in Active Party = SP Earned +40%
Evade = HP Recovery +9% Guard = Damage Down +15%
Critical Damage +50% When revived w/Life Bottle, HP Recovery +40%
Item Usage Wait Time Down +32% Stat Boost Effect Time +80%
Strike Stunned Enemy w/1 CC A-Arte = CC Recovery +4
A few bumped up due to gaining some new stuff much later on but I had a majority of that near the end of the main arc. The others had similar boosts with some tweaks here and there. There’s an arena called Riot Peak somewhere halfway through after getting everyone which was where I tried out everyone for the first time. It’s just going through waves of enemies with a character of your choice and facing a boss at the end, but with a team since the best way to beat down bosses is with friends. In the future arc, the arena is changed in that you have to go through the six waves using a different character every wave but you choose what order, so you’re forced to use characters anyway to complete that. The order I did that in was:
1. Malik (Though the AI makes good use of him, I can’t play the guy to save my life. He’s got slow & awkward standard attacks, and his main strength is his spells, which I can hardly cast with all enemies targeting me)
2. Richard (Not that I can’t use him, I just didn’t try him very much so I didn’t know much about him but he’s good in combat)
3. Pascal (She’s like a magic knight, who has a healing spell as far as I remember but it’s mainly for herself. She’s actually pretty decent & fast, without relying too much on magic though)
4. Cheria (She’s got some of the best magic in the game but her normal are slow, easily interrupted & have short range on start-up, though some normal speed up her casting time)
5. Hubert (Guy has long combos that stun enemies quite a bit but he tends to leave small gaps in his combos that sometimes allow enemies to get a cheap hit in if they aren’t stunned, plus his defense is so low he breaks easier than tissue paper, so he goes down pretty fast)
6. Sophie (One character I’m actually confident using, and never actually tried out until Riot Peak where I realized she’s actually a fun character to play as. Bouncing all over, twirling in circles, doing all kinds of mix-ups, firing laser beams & sh
it, the girl’s fighting style is insane once you unlock most of her artes, some of which are moves copied off the others like Mega Man which she learns just from fighting with them enough. She also has healing spells too)
7. Asbel (I used him like 80% of the time so I’d obviously save him for last. He’s got a lot of crowd control moves and can dish out damage rather fast, though he can’t heal. He’s like the Mario of the game)
