Tales of Grace F...FINALLY!

I  nearly forgot that the NA release of the English version was out last month, yet I somehow can't find it anywhere in KL (specifically, at Low Yat), stock sold out in each and every store that I went. A month passed, it was not until a 2 weeks ago when the luck was on my side, that when I went to the gamestore I've used to go, there's a single stock of the game. FINALLY!!! Being a big fan of Tales of the Abyss and Tales of Vesperia, I was really looking forward to the English release of Tales of Grace. The graphic, the occasional humor, the character diversities, the real-time gameplay are just the kind of thing that I love for an jrpg.

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Title: Tales of Grace F
Developer: Namco Bandai
Platform: PlayStation 3 (PS3)
Genre: Japanese role playing game [jrpg]
Release date: Dec 2010 [Japanese], March 2012 [NA]

Currently just a little bit after finishing Chapter 3, I have to admit that there's still a lot about this game that I have yet to know and explore. Things like Dueling, item quality and levels, title unlocking, arte mastering, Inn Requests....But still, I think I've already got a lot of good impression from the game so far. Some comments that I could think of:

-Nice gameplay as usual. "Style Shift Linear Motion Battle System", a somewhat modified battle system than any previous Tales series, where the gameplay emphasized more on players attacking, defending/evading/dashing and switching between A-style artes and B-style artes. Each action in battle now consumes CC (Chain Capacity), which limits how many combos you can do in a go.  Then there's Eleth Gauge (a bit like 2-sided OverLimit) and Critical gauge. 

-There's a lot of titles in this game. I mean, A LOT of titles. The main character, Asbel alone had 100 titles to collect. Some are easy to collect, but the last few ones are relatively tough. And the bad thing is, there's thophy required for these...Star Ocean 4's 100% Battle Trophies trophy anyone?

-Duelizing was quite a complex form of weapon/item customization. Fusing basic items were easy, but fusing weapons and shards, creating gems, creating uber traits etc can be confusing at first. I definitely need to read more about the mechanics.

-The story was okay so far, can't comment much since I haven't ventured that much into the game. I like the fact that the story started out with the character's Childhood years, then fast forward a few years to go to the Adult years (aka the main story). And apparently, there's also another part, the Future years which was available only to the PS3 release.

-The characters were also interesting, though I thought Vesperia's was better. Asbel was quite a changed man after joining the knights (kinda like how Luke fon Fabre changed after "that" incident"), Cheria's outfit was...kinda unfitting I think. Sophie's a loli, Pascal was one hell of an eccentric girl, Malik was kinda boring, Richard too, Hubert too. I wish there's a Jade Curtis-like character in Tales of Grace... Nevertheless, all of them made many of the scenes and skits enjoyable to watch with their unique personality and antics.

-The graphic is a given. I don't think I need to elaborate much on this, it still retains anime-style art with beautiful setting, while in battle, various flashy skills and effects were added to attacks and skills to make battles more, well, interesting. Music-wise, Motoi Sakuraba came with another masterpiece that suits well with Tales series. 

-Platinuming this game seems harder than I thought. It doesn't need to be as detailed as Vesperia (eg 100% items/monsters and such) and you won't easily miss many of the trophies (except beating some bosses in 1 min, which was really hard even on Easy), but to get a full Platinum, it seems like we need to grind. Grind for titles, inn requests, and grind for rare items...Well at least I didn't have to play the game 4 or 5 times, like I did with Vesperia just to Platinum it.

The Platinum Series [11]: Final Fantasy XIII-2

Right after platinuming Atelier Totori, I went straight into full Final Fantasy XIII-2 mode. Took me awhile, but finally after about 3 weeks, I’ve got what I really wanted: a Platinum trophy for the game XD Following my first impression post a while back, I was actually at the point nearing the end of the game, though in term of trophy completion, it was less than 30% completed. So after finishing the main story (and the not-so-favorable ending), I spent some time working on the rest of the trophies, which 90% of the time involved collecting and completing fragments of time….

Title: Final Fantasy XIII-2
Developer: Square-Enix
Platform: PlayStation 3 (PS3), Xbox360
Genre: Japanese role playing game [jrpg]
Release date: Dec 2011 [Japanese], Jan/Feb 2012 [NA/EU]


Platinum difficulty ratings: 3.5/5

I’d say platinuming FFXIII-2 was much, much easier than its predecessor FFXIII, hence the relatively low difficulty ratings (pretty much about the same as Atelier Totori). Why? Because we don’t need to collect all weapons/accessory (or else we’d have to farm some super rare items endlessly, like we had to with the likes of Trapezohedrons in FFXIII), we don’t need to get 5 stars in every single missions/boss fights (though I still get 5 stars in most of the fights on Normal mode anyway). And thank god there’s no trophy needing us to tame every single tameable monster in the game, or else, I’d probably gone crazy.

In FFXIII, the “toughest” trophies to get are probably Adamant Will (beat Long Gui) and Treasure Hunter (collect every single weapons/accessories). But in FFXIII-2, Long Gui (which gave 1 fragment upon defeated) was nowhere as hard as the FFXIII version (Easy mode helps, to say the least), and there’s no such thing as Treasure Hunter trophy. So basically the “hardest” trophy to get is probably, to collect all 160 fragments in the game. Not a hard trophy, it's just…time consuming, considering it constitutes every single damn thing in the game – beat the extra bosses Yomi/Immortal/Long Gui/Ochu; get all paradox endings, answer some stupid trivial FFXIII quizzes…and solve Temporal Rift, which was one of the meanest, annoying and ridiculous obstacle in completing all fragments. The Tile Trials and Crystal Bonds can be a tad bit annoying at times, but the Hands of Time, god knows how mind-boggling this puzzle is that I can’t imagine many people would solve this puzzle manually, without the little “helping” cheat” provided by clockpuzzle.pl. (Obviously I opted to use the shortcut. I’m not gonna waste my time calculating the solution for the puzzle, duh).

Talk about bosses and monsters, who is the strongest monsters/bosses in FFXIII-2, actually? I honestly don’t know myself. Words of people across message boards are divided between Yomi, Caius Paradox and Raspatil as THE strongest bosses in the game. To be honest I personally didn’t find any of them particularly hard. Raspatil’s is just annoying cuz his offense is nowhere strong, and he’ll keep on spawning monsters if we didn’t defeat him quickly (we even got a trophy on beating him on Normal mode). Yomi is basically the reincarnation of Vercingetorix of Mark Mission 64 in FFXIII, and hence poison strategy works best against him. Then there’s Caius Paradox, probably the hardest of the three on Normal, especially if you don’t have a good monster to accompany you (for Serah), and even worse for Noel, since you’ll be fighting him alone. But still, he’s not overly dangerous if your Serah/Noel are fully developed and went for all offensive setup (maximize Mag for Serah - increase ATB charge rate; maximize Str for Noel – lifesteal attack), as well as having a good sentinel/commander to accompany Serah. I guess I was lucky to have a fully optimized Chichu and Goblin Chieftain with Serah by the time I face Caius Paradox.

By the time I completed all my fragments though, I actually still had one more trophy left: Serependitious – amassing 10,000 net coins in Serependity. Be it by chocobo race, or the simplest, luck-driven way, by the slot machine. People said we can just put tape L1 and let the controller do the job for you while you go to sleep, but I thought it's better to at least keep an eye on the monitor while the slot is rolling, so that once we got a Jackpot in Super Victory mode, we can just stop and save, then rinse and repeat from scratch. Playing the slot machine while in Super Victory mode is quite risky as it consume a lot of coins...

Anyway that's it about FFXIII-2's Platinum. Overall my opinion about the game hasn't changed much since my first impression post - I'm enjoying the game more than FFXIII in many ways, and the concept of time travel made the story more interesting for me. The permanent 2-people party in Serah and Noel was nice, added with a third selectable monsters that you can raise to your own desire, to suit the battle's need. Talk about Serah and Noel, I feel that Snow was really a stranger in this game. Where is he at the end of the game? And the ending....well, I shouldn't comment too much about it, but I kinda not liking the idea of another sequel.

Next on Platinum list: probably Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2