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.