My friend and I continue to give live birth to ADVENTURE as we near the latter 15% of Tales of Rebirth:
This game completely runs out of story after you battle Geyorkias, Sacret Beast King who rules all six Sacred Beasts, which is pretty strange, considering that happens at around the halfway point of the game and you have not encountered any other Sacred Beast. THEN you get the quest to find and defeat the remaining six Sacred Beasts. Seems like the kind of thing that would normally have happened at the start, then ultimately led to you fighting and defeating Geyorkias, but WHATEVER:
Thoughts on Tales of Rebirth Story So Far
So after you face and defeat the Zemus-like Geyorkias, you awaken back in your home town with two characters, FF6 World of Ruin-style, except the world is exactly the same save for one thing: Everyone is racist now! Fuck!!! We fucked up!!!
You come to learn that this is caused by The Will, a force that Geyorkias was suppressing (for reasons not yet explained). This sort of means that Geyorkias was a force of great elemental good in this world, but also he wants to kill all huma (humans) so the gajuma (furries) will never be under threat, so overall, Calegia is a land of contrasts. We had to defeat him and unleash The Will! It sucks when a story takes the choice of out a character’s hands like this. What were they going to do, not kill the genocidal superdragon?
This unfortunately leads to a big problem with the game: This is truly the only plot development that happens until near the end of the game. You will visit town after town after town where the huma are racist against gajuma, and gajuma are racist against huma, and sometimes at random a person might be like, ¯_(ツ)_/¯ “why is everyone racist now?”. This will be every single spoken line and interaction you will have with an enormous chunk of the game. It gets real, real old.
Which sucks! I love the world of this game, it’s got a pretty interesting history and a unique mixed society that seems reasonably “realistic” with how different species are regarded at this stage of history.
Well, there’s still much fun to be had in the sub-quests and combat encounters, as well as still extremely well-done environments. I consider a good JRPG one that establishes many unique places, in the visuals and the music and the people that live in there. It’s why Chrono Cross is one of my all-time MVPs! I feel like Tales of Rebirth’s excellent visuals save what could be a tedious game.
So, we’re still enjoying this a lot, but man it is disappointing for a JRPG to run out of gas at the halfway point. We have gotten out of the car and are fucking pushing this thing over the finish line.
I should mention that there is actually one ongoing storyline that has recently resolved: The slice of wonderbread we have as a protagonist, Vaigue, has literally only ever talked about how he needs to rescue his hometown sweetie Claire. WE HAVE DONE SO. THIS HAPPENED FOUR CHAPTERS AGO, AND SHE JUST MERGED INTO OUR PARTY AS AN NPC. HE STILL TALKS ABOUT HER ALL THE TIME BECAUSE THERE IS NOTHING LEFT IN THIS MAN’S HEAD.
The craziest part of this is that, the first character you ever recruit, Mao, is actually the amalgam of the spirits of the planet experiencing life as a mortal! He has a sunny and fun personality! He says cool shit all the time! He has by far the most interesting story of the entire group! How is this motherfucker not the protagonist?? What happened here?!?!
Madness.