The Platinum Series [12]: Tales of Grace F

It's not me if I didn't get a platinum for arguably my favorite JRPG series, the Tales.It's been quite awhile since my last Platinum (FFXIII-2), added to the fact that I didn't have as much time as I used to for games. Overall, it took me about 3 months to platinum this game, or roughly 150+ hours of in-game time. Not so much I guess, compared to the time I spent on Tales of Vesperia or Star Ocean 4.

Title: Tales of Grace F
Developer: Namco Tales Studio
Platform: PlayStation 3 (PS3)
Genre: Japanese role playing game (jrpg)
Release date: March 2012 (NA)


Overall Platinum Difficulty: 5/10 (moderate) 

 If I could compare Tales of Grace F with another games that I've platinumed, I would say the difficulty is roughly similar to Resonance of Fate - there's not too many overwhelmingly skill/technical-based trophies, and most of the time you need to spend time grinding for a few trophies. In Tales of Grace F's case, it's the trophy that require you to develop your Eleth Mixer to its maximum capacity of 9999. A time consuming process, considering you normally get only a few eleth increase (sometimes NONE) when you cooked a dish in battle. Thankfully there's this wonderful dish called Miso Stew that made the task much faster - going from around 6.5k eleth to the maximum 9999 eleth in about 4 hours (though the non-stop grinding is boring).

Talk about skill-based trophies, there are a few of those, but none of them are as gruesomely annoying and frustrating than special challenge 17 in Tales of Vesperia (aiming Yeager's heart core). (Probably) the most difficult trophy to get; the "Beat _______ in 60 seconds"; beat the last boss on Chaos mode; beat the secret bosses in Zhonegace/Coliseum etc; are all easily attainable in New Game+ with little to no effort, especially on Easy mode. They are harder to accomplish in your first playthrough, but still attainable through title grinding/eleth gauge preparation/duelizing weapons. 

And then the rest of the trophies, in which largely requires you to unlock about 100 titles for each characters (except Richard). That's it. We really don't have to go through the tedious process of completely do everything like we need to do in Vesperia. No need to fight every single enemies, no need to complete every single Collector's book, no need to watch all skits, no need to get all items etc. I kinda wish there's a trophy for getting every single titles in the game, and THAT's what I call a real difficult trophy to get.

guess what I'm playing right now XD

Overall,  Tales of Grace F was a real enjoyment for me. While the "friendship" theme of the story is a little bit too generic and boring, the characters and good voice acting made up for that. But most importantly the gameplay is one that I really enjoyed the most out of recent Tales series. It's fast-paced, balanced, easy to chain, and nowhere near as broken as Vesperia (blablabla Tidal Wave!). The Grade system in this series also ensure that we can't really "farm" grade for subsequent playthrough (again, blablabla Tidal Wave!). The only other disappointment I had for the series are the forgettable musics, it was definitely one of the least memorable OST in recent Tales's series. 

Okay, time to anticipate the next Tales series to be localised into English, Tales of Xillia!!!! 

Speaking of which, where oh where is Tales of Vesperia PS3 English !!! ＼(゜ロ＼)