This allowed you to gain a full understanding of the story by experiencing important events from, where appropriate, two discrete perspectives. The majority of the game remained the same regardless of which protagonist you picked, but the very opening and a section towards the end were completely different according to who you chose to play as. In Tales of Xillia, you were offered the choice of playing through the story with either Milla (apparently the earthly incarnation of Maxwell, Lord of Spirits) or Jude (the mild-mannered, floppy-haired do-gooder medical student who quickly becomes embroiled in Milla’s mess). One of the most notable differences between the two games is in how it handles the matter of the playable protagonist. You’ll spend a lot of the game attempting to pay off a rather large, Animal Crossing-style debt. In this way, Xillia 2 quickly distinguishes itself as its own, distinct experience while still remaining recognisable and comfortable to those who played at least enough of the original to get a feel for how it did things. That aside, it’s also just plain interesting to play Xillia 2 after having enjoyed its predecessor, though, because although the two are superficially similar in many ways, there are also numerous differences that become apparent very quickly. You get a far greater appreciation of Xillia 2’s world and characters if you already have a certain degree of context for them when you start playing. That and Xillia 2 spoils the shit out of Xillia 1 fairly quickly. And the answer to that is an emphatic no. It’s not that Tales of Xillia 2 doesn’t stand by itself as a self-contained story - it does - but like the relatively few other examples of lengthy JRPGs enjoying direct sequels, you get a far greater appreciation of Xillia 2’s world and characters if you already have a certain degree of context for them when you start playing. Ludger (left) is the rather quiet protagonist his diminutive companion Elle (right) does more than enough talking for the both of them, though.įirst things first, then: the thing that some of you probably want to immediately know is whether or not you should play Tales of Xillia 2 if you haven’t played Tales of Xillia first. And where better to start, then, than with my aforementioned first impressions of the new game? I like it so much, in fact, that I’m going to spend the next week picking at it a little piece at a time for your reading pleasure. I’m not here to criticise Mackey, his review or his approach to critiquing the game - different strokes for different folks and all that - but it will probably not surprise you, darling readers, to learn that my opinion on the early hours of Tales of Xillia 2 does not, so far, appear to coincide with Mackey’s take. (Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that in itself, either, mind you - but that’s a topic for a whole other day that we won’t get into for now.)Īs such, then, I was unsurprised to witness a certain degree of dismay in the comments section of USgamer’s recent, post-Pete Tales of Xillia 2 review, in which reviewer Bob Mackey hammered the new game with a 2/5 rating: a stark contrast to the 5/5 I gave the original. In other words, those who dislike the more fanservice-heavy direction some JRPGs have taken in the last couple of hardware generations could find plenty to enjoy in Tales of Xillia without having to worry about whether or not someone would walk in on them looking at anime panties. ![]() Moreover, it was also one of the most inclusive JRPGs I’d had the pleasure of experiencing in recent memory, too. While the game had a few flaws here and there - most notably with some fairly bland environments in between the more lavishly detailed cities and villages you encountered in your journey around the game world - I came away from the experience thoroughly satisfied that it was one of the best Japanese role-playing games I had played for a long time. I absolutely adored the original Tales of Xillia, as my original review over at my former stomping grounds of USgamer will attest. ![]() By popular (well, relatively speaking) request, it’s time for us to take a look at Tales of Xillia 2, the newest Western release in Bandai Namco’s long-running Tales of series.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |