Instead, you accrue elemental points in different categories, depending on which you’ve set the character’s Orb to generate, and managing which characters are generating what lets you gear them toward magic, support, damage or survival as needed. This new way of gaining skills doesn’t have the level of control and specificity, and you’ll likely miss choosing artes and skills through the web.
That explains away the suddenly-mortal party members, and it justifies the introduction of Xillia 2‘s new Allium Orb system. The first: Xillia‘s Lilium Orbs were broken by the events of the game’s ending. Resetting the world is accomplished by two logical leaps that, well… they’re not great, but at least they manage to consolidate lots of issues and get them out of the way as quickly as possible. Xillia 2 often uses the choice system for two reactions that are seemingly identical, and no amount of localization work is going to make a Tales game have the narrative weight of a BioWare space opera.] It’s hard to blame a game for finding a model that actually worked and implementing it, but it’s not without its flaws. As if the inspiration weren’t obvious enough, the narrative, from major story scenes to small skits, gets infused with sets of choices, mapped to the left and right triggers and often framed around doing “what you’re expected to do” and “what you feel like doing.” The kicker: when you complete them, you get alternate-colored looks for them. They’re optional but advised, and they explore more of each character’s personality. You’ll gather party members (unsurprisingly, the cast of the original game) and set out to build trust and take on unspeakably large tasks with little outside help.Īlong the way, you’ll take on what are basically loyalty missions for each character. You’re saddled with working for an organization with questionable motivations, seemingly-limitless resources and, at least occasionally, aligned goals. Xillia 2 spends a lot of its time in Elympios, the half of the world that was very lightly touched in the first game. Well Namco Tales Studio seemingly took a good hard look at a more Western RPG as a model: Mass Effect 2. The game was suitably grand, though, so how do you follow that up? Two sides of the same story brought replay value to a franchise known for packing lots of content into those successive playthroughs. It nailed the world, it brought the whimsy when it could and, most importantly, it gave the combat system a much-needed upgrade.
#Tales of xillia 2 kitty locations series
The first Xillia was, by all accounts (including our own), as good as the series has been in a very long time. It’s through that lens, then, that you should view Tales of Xillia 2.
How do you follow that? Especially, then, how do you do it while incorporating those very beloved characters when you do? It’s… not easy. Characters band together to save the world from unspeakable evil, becoming the strongest beings in the universe in the process. And when direct sequels do happen (think Final Fantasy X-2 or Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World), they’re not particularly well-received. Most of the JRPG pillars are standalone experiences: Dragon Quest. The focus can be on fixing flaws while retaining what went right, and the result can be a game that one-ups its accomplished predecessor.īut as enticing as this opportunity can be, it’s rarely seized in the genre, because it also presents a profound challenge. A developer can build on the hours of work of the previous game, both in asset creation and player buy-in, and the characters and locations can be fleshed out and given an ever-more-memorable presence in the minds of the fans and the zeitgeist of the genre. Building a direct JRPG sequel creates a special opportunity.
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