I’ve been playing Tales of Rebirth with my buddy since the translation patch came out. It’s really good!
I’m particularly struck by how beautiful this game is, it all looks like drawn animation rather than spritework, the motion is fluid and the characters are expressive. It rocks.
The storyline is overall pretty good, nothing spectacular but I’m a fan of the unique hume/gajuma fantasy world they have where, where the only magic-users are the anthropomorphic “gajuma”, whereas the humans are mundanes, until a disastrous experiment starts waking up magic in humans as well.
It’s an interesting world where there is a significant power imbalance, but they’re arrived at a place where humans aren’t second-class citizens, which is sort of refreshing after a million games where there’s one dominant race and one oppressed one. That’s not to say most of the plot isn’t about race, because it is, but it’s more an incidental aspect of their world than the focus.
Cute characters and homes in each city we’ve gone to so far. I really love the warm style everything is cast in, from the streets to the beds to the desert caves.
If you’ve played another Tales game since the Gamecube, combat is as you’d expect. There’s 3 planes you can shift between, and up to four players can engage in the battles. We’ve got it on the hardest difficulty, and the challenge has been genuinely tough. We’ve had to adjust our builds and our approach a few times now. Good stuff.
We were absolutely not prepared for how big a factor cooking would be in this game. Us bungling around and finding a rice risotto recipe in a random house has become a load-bearing pillar of our combat strategy, with each battle yielding us enough ingredients to make the life-giving dish, keeping us alive for the next battle, and the next.
I like a system where you don’t whittle away until you must return to a town. Here, if you succeed in battle, you can make a dish and heal to half, and that keeps you going into the next battle, and so forth. There’s been plenty of times where we’ve gotten our balls smashed by like 12 regular crows or a line of demon gekkos, so I like that it’s kept us on our toes.
There’s are some systems here that, even with the translation patch, remain completely fucking alien to us. The “food ticket” and market system defies understanding at every turn:
But! Excited to keep trying to figure it out. It’s true what they say…
