Out most fearsome foe yet… nine fish on the deck of our boat…
My buddy and I are now 50 hours into Tales of Rebirth, and the combat is still enormously fun. I really love how they kept this fresh and challenging.
Tales of Rebirth Continues...
We’re having to regularly use all the systems available to us to keep pace, including completing every janky-ass minigame they deigned to include:
This boat minigame is probably the best-implemented one of the bunch, being about at Mario Party 2 levels. It was hard but largely because the paths you must complete are not clearly laid out at all, leading us to again return to the ol’ pad of paper to map out what we’d done and what we hadn’t.
Really makes me feel like a lot of JRPGs were fucking impossible without some kind of guide, back in the day.
Case in point: By far the most insane, difficult minigame I have ever seen. A kindly Old living in a shack in the middle of nowhere (how were you to find this??) tells us that he can’t sleep, because he keeps having crazy-ass dreams. We agree to jump into his mind and sort it out (not a thing we we can do!!!), leading us to discover that this man actually is manifesting his magical powers, and this has taken the form of a minigame arena in the men’s locker room:
What followed was the single most harrowing, ball-busting pit of chaos we have ever experienced, taking every ounce of our ability and every cosmic whim of luck we could grasp onto. There’s no fucking way this minigame received any amount of testing or refinement.
Wouldn’t have had it any other way.
The minigames yield big permanent boosts to your characters, so honestly, to play it at the difficulty we’re at, they’re essential. It does feel good to be turning the tide of these battles thanks to our good Christian work at the bathhouse.
Story-wise, Mao is with absolute certainty the main character, now solidifying a crazy backstory that is befitting the hero: He is in fact the creation of all the elemental gods creating a single huma life, so they might understand mortals and the world they live in.
It is the height of absurdity that every now and then Vaigue will speak and carry forward the same, unchanging plotline he’s been on since the start, which is, “I am worried about Claire.” I cannot imagine what the developers were thinking beyond that evidently the protag must always be a sword-wielding pallet swap of the other twelve games like this, so the box art will sell better maybe?
We are currently most of the way through your standard “there are 10 boss monsters, find them and kill them” story, which kicked in after the initial (and very good) storyline concluded. Because this portion of the game takes so long, it’s increasingly strange how every town and NPC we interact with must now tell us about the same plot beat: That huma and gajuma have inexplicably become incredibly racist against each other, because of an evil force called The Will, which we both unleashed by accident and have to destroy.
As a result, every single conversation is someone saying “I wasn’t racist before, but I am now” or “The people were didn’t used to be so racist, but they are now!” or “I’m racist against you, go away!”. It has gone far, far beyond getting old, is now Old, and holy shit there has to be something else to this story.
A thing I am starting to realize about the Tales games is that their most interesting content is somehow always trapped in lore or backstory that is never directly explored. It’s just there to create the world. Why not explore the history of the gajuma and huma? Why focus completely on this one single plot beat about The Will? Madness.
So yeah, the story is a bit stale at this point. Hopefully, once we defeat the last boss monsters, it will change gears a bit. Or, the game will end? In which case I sort of wish it had decided to do more with the very cool, very well-rendered world they built.
