{"id":694,"date":"2010-12-25T01:13:26","date_gmt":"2010-12-25T06:13:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/majinken.pmsinfirm.org\/?p=694"},"modified":"2011-09-11T21:51:50","modified_gmt":"2011-09-12T01:51:50","slug":"ps3-tales-of-graces-f","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/majinken.pmsinfirm.org\/?p=694","title":{"rendered":"PS3 &#8211; Tales of Graces F"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/majinken.pmsinfirm.org\/images\/Tales%20of%20Graces%20579%202.jpg\"><\/center><\/p>\n<p><strong>Title:<\/strong> Tales of Graces F<br \/>\n<strong>Console:<\/strong> PS3<br \/>\n<strong>Genre:<\/strong> Action RPG, Fantasy<br \/>\n<strong>Language:<\/strong> Japanese<br \/>\n<strong>Company:<\/strong> Namco<br \/>\n<strong>Summary:<\/strong> Currently at around 200 hours of gameplay, I&#8217;m on my fourth run which might be my last even though I STILL didn&#8217;t get every grade shop upgrade I wanted. ORZ Maybe in a decade later if things are still moving along, I&#8217;ll feel the nostalgia enough to pull through a fifth playthrough. XD It&#8217;s one of those good ones.<br \/>\n<!--more--><strong>Story:<\/strong> 7. Story starts off better than most Tales games I&#8217;ve played, but it gets as predictable as a kid&#8217;s book as it moves on, worse than any Tales games I&#8217;ve played, really. Eh, but I honestly don&#8217;t care about how predictable a game is if it&#8217;s THIS FUN. Although the story progression is rather childish, the overall theme of &#8220;protecting what&#8217;s precious to you&#8221; is pretty nice. And MAMORUMAMORU makes some nice gag material outside the story. I liked it, but I would have liked even more something with more depth with a game this fun to play.<\/p>\n<p>Although there&#8217;s a HUGE amount of dialogue, there really isn&#8217;t much STORY in it. My speed run (skipping through every cutscene) took 6 hours to complete the main story, and I tend to be slow even in a speed run. I bet some crazy person could do it in 3 hours. You only need within 10 hours to get the full grade bonus though so I spent a couple more hours doing Zoon Cage and fighting extra bosses to rack up more grade points.<br \/>\n<strong>Characters:<\/strong> 9. Personally, I felt that the Vesperia characters had more depth and a certain kind of maturity I appreciated more, but I do still love the Graces characters for their own reasons. The Graces gags were much more entertaining too XD; The &#8220;protect&#8221; theme got a little too&#8230; much sometimes, but I think at least the writers were at least quite aware of it, just like Veigue and his &#8220;KUREAAAAAA&#8221; for Rebirth. XD;<br \/>\nPersonal ramblings as I play&#8230;<br \/>\nThe prologue feels like Rococo and Aphrodi hooking it up with a bit of Coach Kudou on the side. WHY DID THEY HAVE TO GROW UP<\/p>\n<p>I mean, I like Sakurai and Namikawa&#8217;s voices kind of, but I was getting such NICE SQUISHY vibes from the girls voicing guys for ONCE and it&#8217;s all because of Inazuma Eleven hahahaha. orz It really didn&#8217;t help that young Richard (Sanpei Yuuko) looked like Aphrodi with a haircut and spoke with the same speech patterns. And Asbel (Kaida Yuki, but Sakurai when he gets older) uses &#8220;nante ne!&#8221; as one of his victory quotes. Wtfffffffff<\/p>\n<p>Well, at least Mizushima comes in later >w< ~ I just wish his character had a better haircut. As a side note, it's amazing how Kaida and Sanpei really did sound like younger versions of Sakurai and Namikawa in the game.\n\n<strong>Graphics:<\/strong> 10. These more recent Tales titles are always pretty, and this game is no exception. The character expressions are an extra step up from Vesperia, so I shall give it the full boost.<br \/>\n<strong>Sound:<\/strong> 9.5. More on this later?<br \/>\n<strong>Gameplay:<\/strong> 10. Again, smart on the seamless gameplay thanks to game installation. Still getting comfortable with the system, but it&#8217;s been entertaining thus far. More challenging than Vesperia, but in a generally better way.<\/p>\n<p>I am a tiny bit turned down by the level of chaos this game system brings, however. Especially for the first 20 or so hours of gameplay, it lacks a lot of variety, and it&#8217;s really easy to get tired of hearing the same move noises over and over again. I REALLY don&#8217;t need to hear Asbel going &#8220;IKAZUCHI YO!&#8221; like 5 times in a single monster battle. At least the characters in Vesperia were more interactive with each other and thus created more aural variety during battles. XD; As someone who&#8217;s ultra ultra sensitive to the audio variation, this part of the gameplay experience definitely could use some work. I&#8217;ve even turned the battle sounds\/voices super low since I&#8217;ve gotten tired of it after a while. Thus far, this seems to be a good solution, as further down the line when the characters FINALLY learn more than a couple techniques, there turns out to be so much random noise that turning it down makes it that much easier to take. XD;<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, yeah, the starting barrier is a pretty big chore, as I&#8217;ve noticed in a lot of Tales games. Unfortunately, that&#8217;s probably what disappoints a lot of RPG players who try out the Tales titles from the recent generation consoles. You really need to invest a lot of time into the game before the battles really become worthwhile. Like&#8230; 100 hours before you can even start on the real awesomeness it contains.<\/p>\n<p>One end complaint I have about the system, I hate so much that you can&#8217;t even carry over upgraded weapons onto the next gameplay. I hope Xillia has a better Grade Shop system.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Replay Value:<\/strong> As per usual, a 3rd play is demanded in order to obtain all the worthwhile grade shop upgrades. In fact, it&#8217;s pretty much impossible to get it in just 2 playthroughs with the setup in this game, since you earn grade through certain accomplishments rather than through battle grinding, although grinding is still part of it. I never really appreciated that aspect about the Tales series, and one of the biggest reasons why I love Vesperia is because you can get all the grade you need during the first playthrough rather easily, and thus you spare yourself a LOT of pointless grinding or just time in general. We&#8217;ll see what I&#8217;ll be able to manage with Graces F. XD;;;<br \/>\n<strong>Overall:<\/strong> 10. They boast the Future arc having a script 2\/3 as long as the original story, but a lot of that Future script is pretty&#8230; gag-filled. Which I was personally okay with, but I bet some others would have a fit with it.<br \/>\nRegardless of any of that story quirkiness, there&#8217;s just so much good stuff in this RPG. It deserves a good score.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not going to get into the whole Wii versus PS3 thing except that the Wii version was obviously a pseudo-beta for the PS3 version anyway, so eh. <\/p>\n<p>In terms of Graces F versus Vesperia, however, I will say both of them are amazing in their own ways. Gameplay-wise&#8230; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gamefaqs.com\/boards\/604158-tales-of-graces-f\/57944886?page=1\">The rare civil conversation on Gamefaqs<\/a> does a pretty good job at portraying the differences. In my personal way of summarizing it, Graces F is more enjoyable in general battling. But Vesperia offers a more unique challenge with the Overlimit Hi-ougi (I&#8217;ve yet to pull off Yuri and Flynn&#8217;s combo because I suck XDDD). Where Vesperia has faults in its overdependence on Overlimits, one could say Graces F has just as much fault in not reaching that extreme extra level in combo technique. It&#8217;s not to say Graces F doesn&#8217;t offer a challenge, there&#8217;s always raising hits (although it&#8217;s one-sided all up to Hubert XDDD) and such.<\/p>\n<p>Also, it could be I just don&#8217;t have access to it yet, but the battle arena doesn&#8217;t have a team mode to start off with? Soloing bores me, to be masochistically honest. I like having my AI allies even if they aren&#8217;t as useful XD<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www23.atwiki.jp\/talesofgracesf\/\">wiki<\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/wiki.mmo-station.com\/wiki\/ps3togf\/\">PS3 wiki<\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/jaysonic.blog42.fc2.com\/blog-entry-1608.html\">I like this post XD<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Title: Tales of Graces F Console: PS3 Genre: Action RPG, Fantasy Language: Japanese Company: Namco Summary: Currently at around 200 hours of gameplay, I&#8217;m on my fourth run which might be my last even though I STILL didn&#8217;t get every grade shop upgrade I wanted. ORZ Maybe in a decade later if things are still [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[35,12,11,28],"class_list":["post-694","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ps3","tag-35","tag-namco","tag-rpg","tag-tales"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p16zCk-bc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/majinken.pmsinfirm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/majinken.pmsinfirm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/majinken.pmsinfirm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/majinken.pmsinfirm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/majinken.pmsinfirm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=694"}],"version-history":[{"count":34,"href":"https:\/\/majinken.pmsinfirm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1131,"href":"https:\/\/majinken.pmsinfirm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694\/revisions\/1131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/majinken.pmsinfirm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/majinken.pmsinfirm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/majinken.pmsinfirm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}