I mean it's only 10 bucks....I've never played a Tales game before and I have an itch for a JRPG...am I wasting my time?

Xillia isn't very good, and I would personally recommend Vesperia instead, though it's exclusive to the 360 for English speaking audiences.

it's certainly a deal but looking at all the jrpgs I've bought over the years I havent touched, I decided i better not add another that's not really considered must buy/play

Tales of Xillia is a good Tales of game or JRPG. Also the even better Xillia 2 comes out this year as well so if you really want to enjoy that you should play Xillia before 2. And for 10$ it is a steal so go for it.

@edgekasey: For 10$ your really can't go wrong man. It was one of my favorite games from last year and one of the more charming JRPG games I've played in awhile.

Trigger pulled! Thanks for the input!

Xillia is fun, and for $10 it's more than worth it.

Yeah nothing to lose, it's only 10 bucks and you might enjoy it.

I got it for full price and regretted it.

Eh good luck. I'm a long time Tales fan (or I used to be, anyways) and I found Xilla to be one of the worst of the bunch.

I enjoyed my time with Xillia but the only real positive thing I can say is that the combat is the best in the series. Everything else is really meh and the game feels super rushed at the end. For $10 you can't go wrong unless you want something extra with your lunch.

After a slump in the Tales series, I found Xillia to be quite the surprise. While it isn't a stellar JRPG, it plays very well and is essentially a fun romp. The game is fairly short and a steal at $10.

The timeline of Tales is really confusing to me 0.o

I like the Persona series and FF4, FF5, + FF6 but DON'T LIKE the Star Ocean series or Last Remnant. Is this a bad JRPG for me?

If you don't like the Star Ocean series then I would say avoid this game.

@chemystery: There isn't really a timeline aside from a few tales game that are sequels.

Damn, this just reminded me I bought the game during black Friday. I wish I could recommend it one way or the other, but 10 bucks is a pretty great deal regardless. I apparently deemed the 20 dollar price tag cheap enough to pick it up last November, so 10 sounds even better.

I bought it after it was brought up in the RPG of the generation thread. Its pretty good!

That is a great deal for a game that came out not long ago. It was €30 at the PS3 holiday sale but I went with Ni No Kuni instead for just €8.

At this point I have 5 JRPG's on the PS3 alone that I have not finished, I should not be buying them.

Xillia is a bad game but there are worse games to waste ten dollars on.

You're a bad game.

It's 10 bucks now? That price sure dropped fast and hard.

Yeah but I'm upfront about it!

@ravelle: It's part of Sony's 14 for '14 sale; it isn't always $10.

Ah cool, I'll try to get it as soon as possible then.

@yummylee: @chop: @donchipotle: What about Xillia do you guys not like? I am a fan of Tales but not a hardcore fan. I have only played Symphonia, Vesperia, and Graces. How does it stack up to those?

Better than Graces, worse than the others. Xillia has a really boring story with bland characters with very little in the way of development or growth outside of their typical cliche roles. Jude is a poor leading character and Milla isn't much better. The battles are fine but a battle system is not enough to make a poor game good. I just found everything about it totally boring, uninteresting, and most certainly unfun. Everything about Xillia is just bland, from the look of the areas to the characters to the narrative.

After you pull that trigger by the school uniform pack. I just imagine tales is some escaflowne type shit and they've come outta the present and are sent to the past.

@xyzygy: Part of it is admittedly down to a sort of Tales fatigue. It's not like i play these games in quick succession, but they're so alike in the character and story department, that it frankly gets to be rather dull when you're going through what is essentially the exact same story again with yet another predictable set of anime archetypes.

Though even besides that, Xillia has an incredibly bland art style and suffers from a lot of technical issues, like framerate drops during combat and a significant amount of pop-in when you're exploring the towns. Then there's the fact that its over-world equivalent is an ugly, boring set of open-spaces, and the combat also never drew me in quite like it did in the older games. While it certainly has depth, a lot of it just feels really flat, and it wasn't good enough to keep me locked in. I eventually gave up after about... 30 hours I think, and even Graces F I was able to see through to the end, despite featuring some of the most aggravating and poorly written characters of recent memory.

Basically what a lot of it comes down to is Xillia being another Tales game, only this time it also lacks the charm and generally attractive visuals to help it stand against the series often rote storytelling. Plus the voice cast for your party isn't nearly as good as the ones found in Symphonia or Vesperia.

I swallowed bile and vomit to finish Tales of Graces f but couldn't bring myself to finish Xillia, story and characters weren't bad enough and combat was a step down from the speedy dodging of Graces.

>The androgynous-looking cat seems to want fish...

Disappointed to hear that xilia is not as good as vesperia, which had solid voice acting that got me through the cliche story.

explain how Xillia is a bad game?

Considering Xillia 2 is the better game and is coming out in English sometime this year, I'd wait.

How can you say that Xillia is worse than Symphonia with a straight face? I totally get people who think Vesperia is the better game but Symphonia? Especially in terms of Story Xillia is better. Not to mention the really bad combat system of Symphonia.

@bocam you will miss a ton of story and other stuff by not playing Xillia first.

This topic made me feel better about my decision to not follow this series. After playing through Symphonia with my cousins back on the original Gamecube, I got everything I needed out of the series.

Played a little bit of it last night; the voice acting for the main lady character is painful. Definitely not grabbing me like Symphonia did. But oh well; ten bucks.

Because Symphonia had a likable cast of characters and its thrust/strike artes system allowed for a bit of experimentation and customization with different categories and types of abilities. The combat is only bad in Symphonia in retrospect, and even so it's not a bad combat system at all, it's still fast and fluid but without things like full 3D movement, which isn't an issue. The story of Symphonia, while nothing amazing (none of the stories in any Tales game is anything above good, and that is reserved for Phantasia), is at least more engaging than Xillia and miles more entertaining. Lloyd goes from idiot to idealist which is more than I can say for Jude, who had absolutely no reason for following Milla except because of his puberty setting in at just the right time. Symphonia is a better game and I don't even really like Symphonia at all.

Curious where I'll fall with this, never having played any of the Tales games prior. Gunna try and jump in over the next day or so. It's either gunna grab me or not...But hey like everyone keeps saying, meh 10 bucks....i prolly blow that on coffee in a week.

Nice to see Sony doing a sale like this though, hopefully it becomes a somewhat regular occurrence and not once a year or every 6 months sort of thing.

Not really.

@rorie: Keep with it Rorie! It gets better. Yeah, Millia's VO is sort of rough most of the other voice acting is at least passable.

@darji: @edgekasey: Darji, people can say that Xillia is worse than Symphonia with a straight face because it falls short of Symphonia in several ways, especially in story. I enjoyed Xillia quite a bit early on, but even then there were some glaring inconsistencies in the skits and different aspects of the story. I could overlook them at first because the Tales of games are mostly about lighthearted fun, but when Xillia got to its big twist, which was the same as Symphonia's in every single way, it was a slap in the face. And following that reveal, every scene that went for more serious character development was handle it the most awkward ways.

Also, the only problems with Symphonia's combat system were some awkward lines of movement when it came to having enemies in the foreground and background, and the occasion of getting stuck in a corner in solo arena battles. But the skills you learn in the game gave you several workarounds for the former, and the latter only appeared in a small part of the game. Xillia does deserve credit for its combat system; which I feel was as good as it was because it managed to capture the pace of simplicity of Symphonia's, while doing a good job with implementing free movement in the combat and having the interesting Link system.

But, despite feeling offended by how they handle the story, I did enjoy the game enough to feel it's worth $10, if only to try it out. Edgekasey, since you haven't played a Tales of game before, I'm sure you won't be as put off the game as I was, but go in knowing what to expect.

@viciousanchovy: Thanks for the info. :)

I beat Tales of Graces f and Tales of Vesperia and enjoyed both so I should enjoy Tales of Xillia too, right? $10 is hard to pass up. It's kind of distracting that the same VA for Flynn in Vesperia voices Jude in Xillia but I'm sure I'll get use to it after I play for a bit.

I bought it and kind of expect not to like it. It's too easy to get money out of me.

Boom. Plus Symphonia even looks better than Xillia, artistically speaking of course.

It is unquestionably worth 10 bucks... Great characters... You'll really enjoy it

Please don't blow your brains out - we're here for you.

I do not know about that in terms of story. Tales of games have basically all the same story aspects. At least the main parts. It is always about politics and religion. Yes Xillia is no Abyss but for me especially the scenes with Millla and Jude. The cast in general was the main motivivation for me in this game. The skits were great and then you had Alvin which was a very interesting character to say at least. Normally in Tales games I have a lot of characters I do not like but Xillia had not really a annoying character in my opinion. Even Tippo was tolerable. in Symphonia I hated almost everyone....

@xyzygy:

@yummylee explained it all better than I could. I guess the biggest thing for me, personally, was the stripped down battle system. To go from Graces to Xilla feels like going back in time =/