Sunday Summaries 03/07/2016: Tales of Xillia

Welcome, everyone, to speedrunning season. SGDQ begins in but a few hours as of writing, and I'm stoked for a whole week of intermittently dropping in on some fast-paced game completion and catching up with those I missed because of my feeble human's body need for sleep. Fortunately, this being the Summer slump in more ways than one - see you in ten months, Game of Thrones - there's not a whole lot else to do than to catch up with backlog games (of which I have legion) and any speedruns you weren't around to see live. (I mean, there's also a bunch of sports happening this month and especially next, but whatever.)

With half the staff off on Summer vacations this week, it's going to be a slow one for content if you aren't into speedruns, so why not stop by ExplosiveRuns.com and chat with some GB folk about them as they happen live?

New Games!

Yo, I wasn't kidding about the slump. After last week's spike of activity, which I'm sure had something to do with it being the end of the second quarter, there's nothing but table scraps this week and, really, the rest of July barring a certain JRPG I'm very much looking forward to. Here's a list of what I was able to find for the upcoming week:

• Furi: This is that character action game Brad showed on UPF this week. It's built around consecutive boss fights that rely on a lot of bullet hell evasion and capitalizing on opportunities to strike a lot of damage in one blow. Reminded me a bit of the boss fights in Asura's Wrath, as does some of its trippy visuals and bizarre characters. It's coming to PS4 and Steam, and is (conditionally) free to PS+ subscribers this month.
• Romance of the Three Kingdoms XIII: Koei's latest in its longest-running series is getting a localized PS4 and Steam release this week, once again putting the future of China into the player's able (?) hands. This is the more tactical, turn-based brother to Koei-Tecmo's button-mashing, crowd-smashing Dynasty Warriors, and is nigh-on impenetrable unless you've already taken the time to become acclimated to RotTK or to grand strategy games in general. I'm not sure if GB has anyone to check it out now that Austin has moved on...

• Carmageddon Reincarnation/Max Damage: Carmageddon got itself a reboot last year that few people seemed to care about. I have a soft spot for Carmageddon, similar to Dan's own appreciation of the Twisted Metal games, but it's a definitely a series you can outgrow pretty quickly. It's hard to say if new one is a lot worse than those three original games, since they were fairly janky and had some dumb dated gags themselves. Nostalgia's a tricky thing to parse. Either way, both the XBOne and PS4 are getting their own "enhanced" versions this week.
• Xeodrifter: I didn't care much for this compact SpaceWhipper, but it's coming to both PS4 and PSVita this week for a whole new audience to get ambivalent about. It might actually be a game best suited to the mobile platform, given its short dimensions and brief length, but I think its problems outweigh its throwback appeal. There are plenty of better Indie SpaceWhippers out there if you're looking for one (I'm still internally debating about grabbing Axiom Verge before the Steam sale ends...)
• Lost Sea: It was released last week for XBOne and I forgot to mention it, but it's also out this week for Steam and PS4 so now I can catch up. It's an RPG released by the same publishers, if not the same developers, as the Rainbow Moon/Skies games - a top-down action RPG set across a bunch of islands with some crafting, survival, procedural generation and permadeath. Yeah, basically everything that's "in" right now. Reports indicate that it's a bit too generic and repetitive for its own good, unfortunately.

Hawken and The Banner Saga 2 are also on PS4 this week, having been released on XBOne last week, and Inside is coming to Steam this week too.

Wiki!

In wiki news this week, I've... not done much of anything since finishing up the SGDQ wiki project I began last week, which has been summarized in its own separate blog here. In total, not including mystery games that show up during the event's frequent "set-up" breaks or multiple games within the same schedule item like the Tetris: The Grand Master exhibition, the event's schedule is pointing at around 160 games as its total number. Sounds like a lot of pages to work on, but as I outlined in the previous Sunday Summaries and the above blog, most of these games already have fleshed-out pages either due to their popularity or because they were involved in a previous GDQ wiki project. Realistically, only about half of those pages required any work on my part, and most of those were just cleaning up errant 2nd-person usage and typos.

My next goal is to continue with the Super '95 wiki project, starting with October 1995 and hopefully finishing that year before Summer is over. Right now, though, I have a perfect "podcast game" in Tales of Xillia, so between that and the SGDQ streams this week I don't imagine I'll make much progress. Those SNES games aren't going anywhere, fortunately.

Tales of Xillia!

I'm having a fantastic time with Tales of Xillia, between its comfortably formulaic story and characters, the franchise's trademark rapid yet layered combat system and its Final Fantasy XII/Xenoblade Chronicles gameplay tweaks. The vaguely (but not really) open-world fields and dungeons with its resource-gathering and visible monsters, and the way that character and game progress is far more influenced by player agency than unlocked at arbitrary story milestones are very welcome additions to the Tales blueprint, and I'm just rolling around from one dungeon to the next looking for secret treasures and beating up weird fish monsters, and having a ball.

I went a little broad in my evaluations last time, since I was eager to discuss the game's big new changes. I think it ended up being a laundry list of game features that you'd see on the back of the game's box, if that box was big enough to hold a thousand plus words of excited waffling. For this week, I've put together a slightly more condensed and focused list of aspects I appreciate about Tales of Xillia and why:

• It's always difficult to accurately portray a 3D environment with a 2D static map, and the way Xillia does it is with a sliding bar that determines altitude. As you move up and down this bar, areas start to fade out and disappear to indicate that they're nowhere close to that level of elevation. This means that a particularly sneaky area can stick a tall wall of climbable vines in one corner with a chest at the top, and the map wouldn't reveal a thing about it unless the player does a full vertical sweep. Beyond tricks like that, the game's actually very fair with its maps - it reveals the full geography of the land whenever you enter a new area, so you have some idea of where the exits are, and will place icons whenever you open chests or find gathering spots - the former means you don't have to check everywhere for chests you may have missed if you're using online maps, and because the latter replenish after leaving an area having those icons on the map makes them easy to find again.
• The game has a really convenient fast travel system that lets you warp to any dungeon, field area or town. It even allows you to pick which entrance to appear at, though this only applies to external portals and not internal ones. No warping to the middle portion of a particular region, in other words. The fast travel is occasionally made inaccessible for various story reasons - if you're walking out of an area, say, and there's a cutscene that triggers before you leave - but it's one of those features where player convenience supersedes any in-world logic for jumping halfway across the world while the story's happening, and I appreciate whenever a game does that.
• The game introduces encounter links, which I've only seen in a handful of other games like Blue Dragon. Essentially, since enemies are visible on the map and run towards you when they spot you, you can drag two or more groups close together and fight them all simultaneously. This has a few benefits to offset the increased difficulty: you get a bonus reward of XP and cash on top of what you would've earned by fighting the groups separately (I believe, I haven't tested this too thoroughly) and it's made extra useful by the fact that there's a lot of XP and cash doublers, like the Sephira accessories or certain meals, and their effects become all the more pronounced with the larger payouts from these encounter links.
• Speaking of which, they changed how food works in this particular Tales (unless it was also in Graces F - I may have skipped past a game or two to get to Xillia). Instead of choosing a particular meal to cook after every battle, which lasts until you run out of ingredients to make that food, you simply buy meals fully prepared from stores. The effects of these meals determine their sale value, and these effects can range from a flat percentage of healing or TP (essentially mana) recovery, stat boosts and additional XP and money bonuses. The size of the meal determines how long this effect lasts, but also increases the cost. It's in the player's best interest to buy a bunch of meals between dungeons and just keep any effect, even if it's something as minor as 25% HP recovery after battles, active at all times. It's also why encounter links are so useful - if you have a big XP booster meal that only applies to three battles, it's a good idea to squeeze as many enemies as possible into those three.
• Titles and Grade are two more Tales mainstays that have been reworked into something more intelligent here. Titles used to be Tales's in-game version of achievements, with characters earning titles depending on hitting milestones (like "enemies killed" or "treasures found") or reaching certain points in the story. They still fulfill a similar role in Xillia, only now they're linked directly to the Grade system, each title awarding a different amount of Grade depending on the amount of difficulty/effort required to earn them. Grade is a bonus currency the player used to earn in battles depending on their prowess which couldn't be used until New Game+ - Grade could then be spent on NG+ bonuses from keeping your monster bestiary and item log from the previous run to game-breaking allowances like multiplying the XP you earned tenfold or retaining all your powerful post-game equipment and accessories. Grade cannot be earned in Xillia except via earning Titles, so the player is encouraged to do most of their side-questing and bonus dungeon exploration and grinding/farming in their first playthrough to earn as much Grade as they can carry for the subsequent runs.
• Here's a neat touch that I don't think I've never seen a JRPG do before: communicable NPCs in towns, the ones that generally dole out basic bits of world lore, gameplay advice and directions for where to go next, have two types of word bubble over their head: a bright Brad Muir-esque ":D" and a muted ":)". The :D indicates that they have something new to tell you, or that they provide a service you might need like travelling from one area of a town to the next, while the :) indicates that you've already gleaned everything you're going to from that person. It's a handy visual shorthand that eliminates a lot of repetitive NPC chatter, ensuring that you're only ever getting new information.
• A couple of features near and dear to my heart now. The first is collectibles, which are thrown in along with all the other treasures and materials you can find on the field. The Jet Black Feathers are a resource you can find anywhere, occasionally appearing instead of materials from gather points, and are sold to a specific trader in the town of Sharilton. In return, you can acquire a lot of permanent stat-boosting items or high-value materials, and get big rewards for every 100 you bring back. Grabbing a huge clump of those things is always rewarding for that reason, especially as you're getting close to the next milestone amount. The Mysterious Jewels tie into a sub-event I haven't encountered yet, but I've found a number of them so far in odd places like drawers in residences and remote treasure chests. They remind me of those Stones of Berenziah from Skyrim - they're very conspicuous, if not always easy to reach, and I'm just collecting them for reasons unknown so far. There's also Aifread treasures, which look like purple octahedrons and are placed in various hard-to-spot areas. These tend to provide silly cosmetic items you can dress your characters with - my team are all rocking aviator shades right now, which occasionally undermine the drama of certain dour cutscenes - but can also provide invaluable items and cash rewards too. (Aifread the Pirate King's popped up a few times in Tales games by reputation only, and I think his earliest mention was in Eternia.)
• The second are Bacuras. Those are the invincible spinning block enemies from Namco's 1982 Arcade shoot 'em up Xevious, and it's a little surreal to see a spinning 3D tile floating around a bunch of fantasy environments in Xillia. (They were also in Symphonia, apparently, though it seems I must've blocked that out. So to speak.) The game tracks almost everything for its Title system, and one of those is fighting "rare monsters". Rare monsters are usually just more powerful versions of regular monsters that you can randomly encounter, but Bacuras are one of a few exceptions (the other being the returning creepy Gentlemen enemies, which I'm almost certain inspired the popular internet boogeyman "Slenderman"). If you manage to beat one - their defense is very high, naturally enough - they give you enormous XP bonuses. The difficulty is in catching them, since they always run away from you on the overworld. Well, spin away from you. Namco really loves bringing those silly rectangles back for cameos (though there's something very uneasy about them in a realistic setting).

If I'm still playing Xillia next week, and I admit it's likely, I'll see about fitting in a brief Indie game to keep this section of the Summaries a little more varied. I can genuinely talk about Xillia for weeks though; it's easily one of my favorite RPGs from the past generation. It's worth seeking out if you still have a PS3 plugged in, and a game I regularly see price slashed in PSN sales.

Until next week, I hope to see you in ExplosiveRuns watching some games get beat expediently. Bye!