There’s a reason we don’t see all that many direct sequels in gaming these days: they’re extremely difficult to do effectively.

This is particularly true in genres where individual installments are sprawling, lengthy affairs with narratives of a length equivalent to your average TV series — such as, say, role-playing games. This isn’t to say that developers don’t have a good go at it — Square Enix has done it three times to date with the Final Fantasy series’ X-2, XIII-2 and Lightning Returns installments, for example, and one of the best things about the wonderful Shadow Hearts series is the coherence of its narrative, particularly between the first two games — but often it’s just easier to have games in a series like this be thematically similar rather than directly related to one another.

Such has been the case for most of the Tales series’ lifespan, bar a few outliers like Tales of Destiny 2 and Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World. Xillia 2 has a difficult role to fulfil, then: it’s the sequel to a great game, and it needs to follow up all the things that title did well, improve the things it could have done better and provide a very good reason for people to go back into the same world with the same characters.

Does it manage this without “reducing, reusing and recycling?”

Continue reading Tales of Xillia 2: The Difficult Second Game →

While it may be hyperbolic to say that an RPG can live or die by its combat system — I’ve played plenty of games over the years that remained compelling despite shambolic or overly simplistic battle systems — it’s certainly an important part of the experience as a whole.

The Tales series has always somewhat done its own thing with regard to battles over the years, eschewing both the turn-based nature of many traditional RPGs and the quasi-real-time Active Time Battle style of most Final Fantasy games. For those unfamiliar, a Tales game typically involves real-time combat with a party of four characters, with various button combinations unleashing both a selection of regular attacks and special “artes” that differ according to the character. In many cases, the games have even offered multiplayer functionality, with additional players able to take on manual control of other party members alongside the main player.

Tales of Xillia featured a particularly strong take on this battle system, with a cast of characters who all handled markedly differently from one another thanks to different weapon types and unique special abilities. When combined with the Link system that allowed characters to attach themselves to one another and trigger further unique skills, it became a flexible but easy-to-understand system into which you could delve as much as you desired. Those who simply wanted to button-mash hack-and-slash could stick with a single character; those who wanted a little more variety could switch around who they played as at a moment’s notice.

Tales of Xillia 2, unsurprisingly, follows suit, with a few little twists here and there.

Continue reading Tales of Xillia 2: Those Who Fight Together… →

Long gone are the days when an RPG could get away with a linear progression system, with characters simply learning skills at predefined levels.

Instead, these days we see all manner of different takes on the traditional “level up” system — and a few games that abandon it altogether in favour of alternative means of progression.

Tales of Xillia 2 doesn’t totally abandon a conventional progression model, but it does do some interesting things with how you develop your characters’ abilities and progress through the story. A number of different systems all interact with one another, ultimately allowing you to tailor the game somewhat to how you want to play.

But does it work? Well, read on and find out.

Continue reading Tales of Xillia 2: Becoming a Better Person →

One of the most important things for any party-based RPG to get right is that feeling of everyone having a place.

This can be handled in two different ways according to what kind of RPG we’re contemplating. Dungeon crawlers like Demon Gaze take a mechanics-focused approach in which every member of your party has an important role to play in combat, but outside dungeons they tend to fade into the background somewhat, with the player-controlled protagonist tending to take centre stage for important events.

Meanwhile, more story-centric RPGs emphasise the narrative trope of nakama, a Japanese term typically used to refer to the idea of true companionship — the idea of a group of characters who band together and become a substitute family for one another. They may not necessarily agree on everything, but they share common bonds that are usually strengthened by their shared hardships.

One of the things I liked most about the original Tales of Xillia was that it blended elements of both of these approaches. And its sequel, unsurprisingly, follows suit.

Continue reading Tales of Xillia 2: A Test of Character →