If the player hoards too much cash, the bank marauds Ludger after every battle, cutscene, or area change.
#Tales of xillia 2 rating free#
Aside from making free health care look good, this obligation puts Ludger on a tight financial leash. One key component of the story is the ridiculous 20,000,000 gald debt that Ludger incurs due to extensive surgery. In fact, the only reason the player is even introduced to the job board questing system is because they need money to progress through the story. Players can advance through chapters in a mere hour or two and major happenings rear their head in each segment. Now, I don’t mind linearity in my JRPGs in the slightest, but the subsequent attempts to flesh out the game feel superfluous at best. The player is spoon fed the exact parameters of the next task at the tap of a button and the plot is designed to progress at a crisp pace. With that story comes marked linearity, however.
#Tales of xillia 2 rating series#
Character backgrounds are cleverly written into cutscenes rather well, which makes the series trademark optional skits and the occasional character-focused chapters less essential than in other titles. The moral dilemmas the protagonists are thrust into are of particular interest. The actual plotline Ludger and company are hurled into is reasonably captivating by series standards as well. I suspect the amount of time needed to implement this would not warrant the cost, however.
Of course, one can also question the depth of these choices since you’re almost never given more than two choices to work with. You’ll also get different endings and cutscenes depending on the outcome of your decisions, which is a nice touch. The choices do have some merit as well the options one picks for Ludger do have direct impacts on character relations and there’s a bit of detective work involved in guessing which reply would cater to which character’s personality. Generally speaking, making Ludger’s character open to player interpretation is a clever way of integrating a new character into a sequel. That said, I appreciate the way these segments keep the player thinking about not just Ludger but the story at large. Some will complain that these choices are overused relative to their worth and that’s probably a fair assessment. Making decisions is a crucial aspect of most cutscenes so much so that grave decisions have time limits thrown in to add dramatic intensity. While many JRPGs offer the player the ability to occasionally pick from dialogue options whilst locked in conversation, Xillia 2 uses what feels like hundreds of them for its main story and sidequests alike and all of them revolve around Ludger. If you can bear with his stoic serenity, though, you’ll realise that this design choice pays off story-wise both design-wise. The Tales series is normally renowned for its characters rather than its storylines, so the choice of a largely silent protagonist is a jarring one that won’t gel well with many players initially. The key difference between these two sequels, though, is that the former game’s character was thought of as whiny and obnoxious whilst the latter’s hero might just evade memory altogether. Like with Dawn of the New World, Xillia 2 puts players in charge of a new protagonist within the familiar world: the rather fashionable Ludger Kresnik. The game borrows much from its predecessor but still manages to grant the new title a distinct feel through design choices that, while experimental, don’t compromise the integrity of the original title. Now while Tales of Xillia 2 doesn’t exactly ace the concept of a sequel JRPG, it gives me hope that Bandai Namco is realising what makes the concept work. The most notable sequel in the franchise, Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, was met with great criticism for doing a bit of both. There’s a certain appeal in revisiting the characters of a past instalment after a grand quest, but it’s also challenging to execute a story that doesn’t feel tacked on or too radical a departure from the previous entry. For as long as the Tales franchise has been running, it’s impressive that only two true “sequels” exist.
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