A little over a year ago Namco announced they would be releasing Tales of Graces f in North America, after almost three years of completely ignoring the series. As a fan of the series, it was a pretty great day for me. Now that it’s out, I figure I might as well review it.

The Tales franchise has never really had amazing or original stories, tending to stick to the same tropes and cliches, and Tales of Graces f is no exception. This game follows Asbel Lhant, heir to lord of the independent territory of Lhant, as he and an amnesiac girl he found in a meadow go on a quest that tests the bonds of friendship and all that good stuff and save the world when it inevitably ends up in peril. I won’t spoil the identity of the villain, but I will say he has the familiar motivation of, “People are bad and all of humanity should die for it,” and he’s defeated by the powers of love and friendship and kindness and whatnot. You may remember this same type of villain from Tales of Symphonia, Tales of the Abyss, Tales of Vesperia, and more things that I could possibly name.

Accompanying the lacklustre story is a boatload of groan-worthy dialogue about friendship and etc. You can only listen to people talk about how important friendship is so many times, which Tales of Graces f surpasses by the halfway point. This is made worse by the poor characterization that surrounds these friendships. The game tries to build the friendship between Asbel and Richard by setting the early part of the game during their childhood. But it doesn’t build this friendship very well. The two hang out as kids twice, and while Asbel does save Richard’s life, it’s hard to believe they’d still be such close friends when they don’t see each other for seven years.

What Graces lacks in story and writing it makes up for in gameplay. The game uses the standard Linear Motion Battle System of the franchise, where characters move around a battlefield on a striaght line to attack enemies. But like all the previous games, Graces puts its own spin on the system and uses the Style Shift LMBS, giving every character two different styles of fighting. Sort of. It says you can switch styles, but it really just means characters have two different kinds of attacks, Assault-Artes and Burst-Artes. Assault-Artes replace ordinary attacks from previous games, and Burst-Artes are just like Artes from any previous game. For most of the characters Burst-Artes are just spells, making them no different than any spell caster from previous games.

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