Finished Tales of Rebirth with my buddy via Parsec, on hard mode!
There’s a really great 10 hour game in this, a project that took us literally 100 hours to complete. We’re glad that we finished it because we have brainworms, but it’s very true that you can just stop playing the game after the Geyorkias fight at hour 10 and you will miss essentially nothing of import.
This is my second-ever Tales game and my impressions are that the combat is absolutely killer, I fucking love the multiplayer JRPG brawler arena thing they have going on here, it’s like playing through Turtles in Time and gaining abilities for it. I have some gripes about the way its executed (summoning interrupts, very low and very high placed enemies) but honestly, this was more than good enough to make the random encounters great. Battles in a JRPG can very often be the most brain-dead, dull-as-dishwater, tedious part of the game, and here we would look forward to them, we’d be excited during them, we’d be hooting and hollering!
Story-wise, man, this has very little to it. The promise of those early chapters is never realized, many plot threads abandoned completely in favor of circuitous plot buffoonery, empty platitudes about equality or duty, and characters that are never allowed to change. This is probably what other Tales games are like, which is damning, because the main thing one tends to come to JRPGs for are the story and the characters.
Visually, this game is a feast, every location is vibrant and colorful and alive, the game just looks great all the way through, the places feel lived-in and historied, it’s a world you enjoy poking around. We were surprised to find the world map was fully 3D, including unique 3D models for every character, which are not used anywhere else in the game, and look excellent. A lot of this game speaks to a tumultuous development, and this is one example: Maybe they didn’t like how the 3D models moved? Something like that? Whatever the reason, there’s a lot going on here visually and all of it is done extremely well. The beast design is often horrifying too! They are fucked up demons called “
iruses” that often have organic growths akin to, like, nails having grown out too long, or deformed tusks, just really unique shit. Loved it.
Overall I don’t think I can fully recommend the game, it’s just too long and pointless and aimless, but I can suggest one plays through the first 10 hours and calls it there. That much makes for a fun multiplayer experience!
Previously on Tales of Rebirth
games you played today: winning eleven - #1756 by Mothra
games you played today 12 times the fun and the excitement! - #280 by Mothra
Final Thoughts on Tales of Rebirth
Story, Characters, and Progression
As I’ve griped about before, this is clearly a game where they finished up the story and realized, to their horror, that the game only had 10 hours of content in it. So, the story starts doing loops, you start re-doing character arcs, you start going on completely pointless quests that end up being “tricks” by random villains, and brother, you do sidequests. You do an absolutely ridiculous number of tedious sidequests, like delivering individual library books to each end of the world or cataloging rivers or navigating a floaty island that controls like dawgshite, it’s bad. But you do it because these give permanent stat buffs to various characters (+3 defense, for example) and it turns out you absolutely 100% need this to survive and succeed in the late game dungeons.
I’m honestly stunned by how, for 90 hours of this 100 hour game, every single soul in this game said some variation of “I don’t trust the huma, they’re bad” or “The gajuma are evil! We shouldn’t suffer them any longer!” because of the effects of the Racism Dragon. THAT’S IT. Everyone in the game suffers under the specter of racism but it turns out this is due to some big horrible defeatable space dragon, not because people’s fears and insecurities and ignorance. You guys made 100 hours of story about racism and did not actually write anything about racism!! What the fuck!!!
We both agreed that Mao and Tyree were the standout characters in the cast. We could not believe Mao was not the main character, it defies all reason. He is revealed to be the amalgam of all saint beasts, constructing him as a way to experience the world of the mortal races and understand them. That’s a great concept for the protagonist of a game like this! Why stick him in the side-character role??
Tytree was mainly just a fun personality, he didn’t have much going on character-wise. We came to appreciate his energy, often paired with the black void of personality that is Vaigue. He does a lot of heavy lifting there.
Anne and Eugene were pretty good in concept. I did not think they succeeded much at all (their drama is all caused by mind control misunderstandings, so, ugh) but I liked them both and I liked the concept that Anne wanted to literally murder Eugene for a good portion of the game until they had their falling out, that was good. It really really really strained credulity that Anne would continue to suffer her father’s literal murderer on the team for as long as she did, but, whatever.
Also! The Dark Wings! There’s a Team Rocket-like trio of bumbling villains we were quite charmed by. We kept hoping the game would just let us do a sidequest as them, with a graphic-swap for a few of our characters in combat, but alas, like many ideas here, they don’t really go anywhere or do anything notable.
Combat
As I mentioned before, the combat never stops being immensely fun. I absolutely love Tales’ multiplayer brawler arena thing with JRPG elements dashed in, it makes combat - often the worst part of a JRPG - something you’re very happy to do again and again. My MVP was Tytree, a close-quarters pugilist that did uppercuts and flurries-of-fists and sliding kicks, all that good shit, focusing on many many small strikes over big or multi-enemy damaging attacks of the other melee characters. My friend mained Mao, a spellcaster, which tended to be our biggest damage-dealer.
I have gripes! Spellcasting is absurd in how, even if you don’t get interrupted in casting the spell, you then cannot take damage or the spell cancels. This is absolutely not a game balanced well enough that you are not beset by beasts often that peck at your spellcasts with annoying burrow strikes and the like, making your role in battle nothing much but an infinite string of stun-cancelled attacks. Pretty frustrating.
You also simply are required to bring Vaigue, he’s way too powerful and useful to afford not to, which sucks because he’s such a braindead sword-striker. Ugh. We also were pretty irritated by the host of iruses that would be very short or flying, meaning we could not resister more than the occasional hit on them with an uppercut or a sliding kick, really irritating. Famously, we got our asses handed to us a few times by a boat deck of 10 limp fish, simply because it was almost impossible to hit an enemy that low to the ground.
Music
Not great unfortunately! A whole lot of this sounded like placeholder music:
https://youtu.be/nqO70Y3Jw0w?si=ZOZmm0I3h9rktV7p
https://youtu.be/Q0R4qces-zY?si=vRktgvlDKAwbpaba
https://youtu.be/GtwysBcLvr4?si=x9wjXhetUxgVznhE
But there were some exceptions. It definitely got the job done, but it’s very forgettable.
Art Direction
Gorgeous game, the environments, the monsters, the sprites, the visual effects in combat, all done very well. One of the things that made me shocked this game wasn’t more well-known was how good it all looked, you’d think there have been more frothing for it in the west, more clamoring to bring it over.
The Final Stretch
The last boss, particularly on hard mode, was a complete and utter slog, indicative of how poorly-implemented the difficulty is in this game. We settled on a strategy of simply focusing on the spawns, killing them while our occasional hit whittled down the main boss, and this ultimately worked, but only after many, many, many, many instant-wipes from the boss deploying three screen-spanning magic attacks at the same time. It feels a lot like these were meant to be spaced out, but the AI didn’t know how to handle them properly. A whole lot about the boss design in this game gives the sense it is not acting as intended.
The Ending
Pretty strange ending! There is a body-swap storyline between Claire and Queen Agarte that truly does not impact the overall story at all, they are just body-swapped for the entire duration of the game to very little effect. WHY? WHY AS THERE BODY-SWAPPING AT ALL?
After killing the final boss, Claire and Queen Agarty swap souls back to normal, but then Agarte dies from this??? It is not explained why, it is just to give some kind of drama to the ending I guess. Very bizarre. Claire is right there unharmed at all from the body swap! What??
There is a final cutscene that shows all the female characters in domestic roles, then showing Tytree working a field shirtless (?), then shows us that the mascot character Zee - a thing that the game forgot about for 20 hour stretches at a time - pairs off with an identical pink girl version of itself. THAT’S IT THAT’S THE END