Previews// Tales of Xillia

I suppose I should start by coming clean here – I’m not a big fan of traditional JRPGS at all. But I used to enjoy them quite a bit, and have played through quite a lot of them. As a gaming enthusiast, comic book reader and pro-wrestling fan I'm loathe to use the term, 'I grew out of it' regarding anything, but that does seem to be the best way of putting it in this case.

The stories began to frustrate me, the characters annoy me, and the gameplay bore me. The genre has developed a bit of a bad reputation for a lack of innovation and rarely straying from the same tired, formulaic approach.

But while they lost their shine to me quite some time ago, I understand a fairly massive number of people still do enjoy JRPGS and no doubt they've been dying for Tales of Xillia to reach western shores since its Japanese release in late 2011.

Tales games have a tendency to look very pretty and Xillia only improves on its predecessors. I might not be a fan of some JRPG elements, but I do appreciate the anime aesthetic when it’s done as well as it is here. There are some beautiful landscapes to witness and the overall design style is very pleasant, though it is let down in some places due to technical issues.

The character models don't hold up well under close scrutiny and the animations tend to be somewhat stiff. And the facial animation is just downright unsettling, even if the localisation team have done a fairly good job of matching up the translated dialogue. This wouldn’t be so noticeable if so much of the game wasn’t taken up by close-up cutscenes where these imperfections more or less have a spotlight shined on them.

The sample of the game I played started quite a bit into the story with a full team of heroes already assembled so it was hard to get too invested in the characters, but they made a good first impression at least.

Voice acting is solid across the board here, though some of the dialogue is pretty shaky. Things can get a bit sickly sweet and there’s some signature Japanese weirdness thrown in but from what I saw at least none of the leading cast is outright unlikeable, which is always a big plus in a lengthy adventure.

Perhaps the biggest new approach taken by this entry to the series is the incorporation of a pair of main characters rather than just one. At the start of the game you choose between idealistic student nurse Jude or assertive warrior woman Milla, who is also apparently the incarnation of the spirit god.

The game’s prelude leads your chosen character into the adventure until the two meet up shortly into the game. At later points in the game when you’re split up, you’ll again follow the character you decided on in the beginning until reunited with the rest of your party again.

It’s an interesting way of telling a story from two different perspectives, but you’ll need to play through twice in order to fully understand everything that’s going on which is a big commitment considering how much time these things can sometimes consume. But it’s hard to really complain about having too much added replayability.