More Rain and the End of Tales of Rebirth.

[leene_chan]

Ack, ack, it's raining again and my stomach hurts! No thunder today, though.

That's right, after 104 hours of playing I'm done with my third venture into the Tales series! ^o^

I beat the last boss at level 66 with Veigue, Mao, Eugene and Hilda. I was controlling Mao and I don't know who got the death blow... ^^

The last boss was really, really easy. In fact, the whole game was easy. I played it through on Normal and I have to be honest and say that I NEVER LOST A SINGLE BATTLE! This may be a first for me!

Agarte's death was sad but it made the ending seem like it was more about Millhaust than Veigue (too bad Claire didn't die instead grumble grumble grumble). It was nice to see Millhaust without his helmet in the lovely anime ending movie, he was very pretty! I didn't care to see that shot of shirtless Tytree, though, he's not exactly hot in my book. =_=

I liked this game a lot. Still, it wasn't perfect. It would be hard for me to give it a number rating without explaining its highs and lows. So, here we go!

Gameplay: This was excellent, for the most part. Out of the Tales series I'd only played Destiny and Destiny 2 and Rebirth outshined both games in terms of battle system. My only real problem was the lack of solid healing magic. Annie was a pretty weak character and I ended subbing her out and relying on items to heal. It reminded me of the time I played Seiken Densetsu 3 with a party of Reisz, Hawkeye and Angela. No healers! Well, using items still worked out fine, so I'll give the gameplay a 9.

Characters: Hrm...kind of a mixed bag here. Annie and Mao were my favorites, followed by Hilda. Annie was developed well, Mao was often the sole source of entertainment in the screen chats and Hilda, while not always likeable, came across as both cold and gentle. But why oh why did characters like Tytree and Eugene undergo next to no character development throughout the course of the game? Veigue was more attractive than the usual Tales hero but you learn nothing about his past and his over-zealous "let's save the world" speeches at the end of the game were cringeworthy. In spite of this, I didn't hate any of the characters, with the exception of that gajuma lady Popura and her yummy peach pies. I'll give the game a 7.5 for character development. Namco, why develop only half your main cast? ;_;

Music: Uh...this is a tough one for me. I found most of the music to be disappointing, at least when compared to TOD2's nice, solid soundtrack. I liked some of the boss music. I think. Too much synthesizer, not enough of anything else. The "sad" town music sounds like it was composed entirely from vibrations made by a car radio with the bass turned up too high. Boo hoo hoo....I'll give it a 7 for music, because at least it had music, unlike the crap that was Xenosaga.

Graphics: Great 2-D graphics. The anime-cut scenes are great and screen-chat portraits are nice and crisp. I'll give it a 9, only because the NPCs' sprites could've used a few more frames of animation. I think the world map was too small but that probably doesn't fit in this category, does it?

Story: Started out great, ended up not so great. The first half of the game when you're trying to save Claire has a cool, urgent feel to it with a few twists along the way (Hilda?)(creepy Agarte!) but once you start meeting the Holy Beasts it degenerates into a fetch quest with annoying racist NPCs. The screen chats for the most part weren't that entertaining. Heh, well, most games nowadays fall short on plot. The final dungeon picked things up a bit, at least,. I wish that Namco would've worked on this a little bit more. The story with a few tweaks could have been excellent but it ended up being just okay. I'll give it a 7.5 for this category.

Fun Factor: Okay, I've been bitching a lot, haven't I? I have to finish this by saying that in spite of its flaws I enjoyed playing Tales of Rebirth very, very much. It's a good game and definitely worth picking up if you're a Tales fan or like 2-D anime-style graphics. The extra dungeon is actually playable! I've give it a 10 for this category. ^^

My overall score is: 8.3

It's a fun game but I liked TOD2 more. Still, it's good--Go out and play it!