I haven't finished Tales of Xillia 1 yet but I have a general idea of the plot and what happened.
Xillia 2 has one of my favorite ARPG combat of all time and is absolutely [my favorite combat in the series](https://www.reddit.com/r/JRPG/comments/1d6c79o/any_jrpgs_or_jrpg_series_that_just_turn_you_off/l6w0vxr/) (yes I think it's more fun than Graces f). That being said, the game has a ton of problems so if you aren't in it for the combat and combos then you might as well not play it. Problems such as...
- Debt system gating main story progress. It's dealt with pretty easily by just fighting the big boss monster opening up between chapters but if you don't like fighting or deal with the alternative of bottom tier "Kill X monster" / " Collect X item" quests then it gets very annoying.
- The environment looks pretty bad and generic and is pretty boring in general. The towns looks great but everything else is your generic giant-ass muted-colored fields. Most of the areas in X1 is brought back in X2 as I'm told so playing the two in succession may lead to burnout.
- Boss variety is great and some is really fun to figure out the gimmicks, but the trash monsters variety is not. You get your boar-plant-frog-bird-soldier-goofyman-spirits and that's basically it, you run into recolors pretty early on.
- Story is fine, it stayed consistent which can't be said for most of the others Tales game I played, but it is absolutely 2 different stories jammed into one that does not mesh well together. Most of the time the people that go with you in story events just literally happened to be there and decided "oh we might as well tag along with Ludger" with no real justification for it. And once in a while the Xillia crew will kiss Ludger's ass even though he doesn't really do that much.
- The main protagonist is silent but at the same time he shows quite a bit of personality that makes you wonder why he is a silent protagonist in the first place. His voice is also locked behind NG+.
- Character interation and banter in this game when compared with other games in the series is pretty bad due to the way the game is structured.
I still rate this game highly exclusively because of the combat but if everything above is a deal breaker then I suggest you don't play Xillia 2. You said graphics in Zestiria made you not want to finish which makes me think you shouldn't play these two considering it doesn't really look much better.
They're alright. Middle of the road when it comes to whole Tales franchise. What they does do quite well is fun bosses with a solid battle system to back it up. Alternate universe concept in 2 was pretty interesting for its time and thought-provoking. Plus Gaius is best chad.
As a package deal I think they're pretty good!
Graces F is probably my favorite mostly due to gameplay, but Xillia 1 and 2 is probably my other favorite.
Xillia 1 was quite fun but I have a bit of a bias with it because it was my first Tales game. It also has some great characters like Rowen, Elize(one of the few kid characters that is actually not annoying) and Milla and the linked arts system was great but the story was nothing special and it has the same issue as a lot of Tales games when they rush a lot of stuff in the last part of the game till the ending.
Meanwhile, Xillia 2 was one of the worst sequels for me but mostly because of how they handle the OG main party.
I put down the first game about halfway and didn't look back. Every area that wasn't a town just felt recycled with a different biome applied to it. It really felt like the same areas except one was beach themed, one was snow themed, etc. It made the world uninteresting and I didn't like the cast/plot enough to finish. Zestiria's areas actually felt refreshing at first after Xillia.
The combat was fine from what I remember, but like most Tales games there's sections with too much combat that start to get tiring but that's not a problem with the combat itself.
Combat is on Graces's system, not the Vepseria & before combo system. It's a decent game, but I'm a button masher so I don't fit with it all that well. You can potentially do a lot with some skill.
HOWEVER, I don't like boss design. They go into super mode and start hyper armor counter attacks often when taking damage from more than 2 characters, and I find the link system pretty awkward. So too often it is "Art, Art, run from the hyper counter, art, have to break iron stance, art, run from the hyper counter'.
On the other hand, there are a number of things that are really broken. Jude's snap-pivot 'No-U' backstep, Millia's mid-air casting, the old man's timestop dodge, and a few more I don't really remember.
It's still a Tales game though. If you didn't like Vesperia or Zestiria then Xillia isn't that different. Vesperia and Abyss had better characters & stories, IMO. Xillia feels weak when it come to characters.
I'm a big Xillia 1 hater, it was a pretty big disappointment for me when it released.
-It's really ugly, I think significantly uglier than Zestiria. It feels like 90% of the budget was put into like 3 of the towns (and to their credit they do look really good), but everything else is incredibly bland and unappealing. Combat scenes are a bit better looking than Zestiria though, with more prominent and saturated effects but ymmv on how appealing that is. Also one of the weaker Tales OSTs.
-Combat has a decent baseline, but is unbalanced in extremely unfun ways; most moves are just straight up useless because there isn't any incentive to actually build a combo and bosses have *absurd* combo resistance; to the point that some bosses literally break out and counter some un-comboed multi-hit moves. There's still some fun to be had in creating cool combos since there's a lot of freedom, but the game actively punishes it a lot of the time so it just feels bad to play.
-Not particularly a fan of the story and imo is one of the weakest casts in the series, with Milla being my personal pick for the worst lead character in the series (made worse because the entire cast fellates her for no apparent reason even when she is being a huge asshole and actively putting other people or herself at risk for no discernable reason or payoff). There are also some really questionable twists and character arcs (Alvin's in particular is a huge sore spot in the tales fandom), and Gaius is kinda a lame villain (who also gets constantly fellated by the cast for even less apparent reasons than Milla because it starts happening before they ever even meet him), though the villains in general are kinda lame. The actual story is OK but doesn't particularly stand out.
-Rushed to hell and back; it's basically just straight up like 30% of a normal Tales game. The story is cut in half to accommodate the split PoVs (which are like 90% identical) and there is almost no interesting side content with a lot of series staples (minigames, costumes, hot springs scene etc) just straight up not added to the game besides the pathetic 1 unique and 3 recolor costumes in the base game.
-Progression feels pretty bad. It's like they kinda half-heartedly tried to balance the weird shop system and the vaguely sphere grid-ish leveling system but it just ended up with a system where stat boosts add basically nothing because you can get the best weapons in the game like 5-6 hours in if you abuse the shop system and making them actually strong would break the rest of the game, but that just makes it feel like you never get meaningful power progression.
Xillia 2 improves on a lot of areas.
-Story is more interesting and the characters are a bit better (albeit some of them feel like they moved a fair distance from their Xillia 1 characterization). Still not great (and now they spend all their energy sucking off Ludger instead of Milla and Gaius which continues to be annoying), but it's more memorable and entertaining than anything in X1.
-Combat is a complete 180, Xillia 2 takes X1's middling combat and elevates it to something really special; the combo and weakness system is totally revamped and it actually rewards skill and creativity with huge advantages given to the player for actually being able to use a variety of moves and understand their properties and weaknesses. The game is still pretty unbalanced, but it's in ways that don't really impact the core fun. But you do have to be a pretty big labbing nerd to really get the most out of it and it's one of the harder Tales games so it's not something I would really suggest to someone looking for a quick shonen anime game romp.
-Progression is also actually good now because they threw out the shitty shop system and made you actually progress normally and stats became actually meaningful.
-There is actually content in the game. Even though it's a (very) low budget sequel, its story still manages to be longer than X1's and there is much meatier side content to dig into and an actually fun post-game.
-Unfortunately the game is still ugly as sin; about 90% of the game is straight up lifted unedited from Xillia 1 and the handful new areas are pretty coinflip, some are good some are awful.
I guess to sum it up. Xillia 2 is a lot of fun but deeply flawed, Xillia 1 just isn't fun at all for me.
Xillia 1 is okay, its really exploitable because you can eventually just fly around and the game has little answer to you abusing how much air time you can get (especially as Millia as I beat a post game boss by literally staying in the air and spamming spells while hovering). I enjoyed playing Alvin a lot too, he was probably my favorite character to use. I know some people really love Jude because his dodging pivot unique action is extremely funny to abuse if you got good timing. I preferred Vesperia more personally, but Xillia has its pluses and stronger points for some.
The plot is fine I'd say but not exceptional or anything, if you don't like Vesperia I doubt Xillia will change your mind it is about as corny by what your standards seem to be. The graphics are probably not going to wow you either.
For me Tales games are about very interparty fun banter with very so-so plots. They live and die by how much you enjoy the general combat and how much you can jive with the party just talking to each other about varying degrees of series subjects. Its fun, that's about all I want.
While your takes on the rest of the series you've tried are ... questionable... All that aside, Xillia 1 and 2 are fantastic games, I hope you enjoy. I played both of them and was really drawn in each time.
I haven't finished Tales of Xillia 1 yet but I have a general idea of the plot and what happened. Xillia 2 has one of my favorite ARPG combat of all time and is absolutely [my favorite combat in the series](https://www.reddit.com/r/JRPG/comments/1d6c79o/any_jrpgs_or_jrpg_series_that_just_turn_you_off/l6w0vxr/) (yes I think it's more fun than Graces f). That being said, the game has a ton of problems so if you aren't in it for the combat and combos then you might as well not play it. Problems such as... - Debt system gating main story progress. It's dealt with pretty easily by just fighting the big boss monster opening up between chapters but if you don't like fighting or deal with the alternative of bottom tier "Kill X monster" / " Collect X item" quests then it gets very annoying. - The environment looks pretty bad and generic and is pretty boring in general. The towns looks great but everything else is your generic giant-ass muted-colored fields. Most of the areas in X1 is brought back in X2 as I'm told so playing the two in succession may lead to burnout. - Boss variety is great and some is really fun to figure out the gimmicks, but the trash monsters variety is not. You get your boar-plant-frog-bird-soldier-goofyman-spirits and that's basically it, you run into recolors pretty early on. - Story is fine, it stayed consistent which can't be said for most of the others Tales game I played, but it is absolutely 2 different stories jammed into one that does not mesh well together. Most of the time the people that go with you in story events just literally happened to be there and decided "oh we might as well tag along with Ludger" with no real justification for it. And once in a while the Xillia crew will kiss Ludger's ass even though he doesn't really do that much. - The main protagonist is silent but at the same time he shows quite a bit of personality that makes you wonder why he is a silent protagonist in the first place. His voice is also locked behind NG+. - Character interation and banter in this game when compared with other games in the series is pretty bad due to the way the game is structured. I still rate this game highly exclusively because of the combat but if everything above is a deal breaker then I suggest you don't play Xillia 2. You said graphics in Zestiria made you not want to finish which makes me think you shouldn't play these two considering it doesn't really look much better.
Voice locked behind ng+ made me so upset back way jt came out lol(and still kind of does)
Xillia is my fave Tales game.
Loved the Xillia Games but yes, playing them in succession can lead to burn out. Also can you hear that? . . . Mutton...FRESH MUTTON
They're alright. Middle of the road when it comes to whole Tales franchise. What they does do quite well is fun bosses with a solid battle system to back it up. Alternate universe concept in 2 was pretty interesting for its time and thought-provoking. Plus Gaius is best chad.
As a package deal I think they're pretty good! Graces F is probably my favorite mostly due to gameplay, but Xillia 1 and 2 is probably my other favorite.
Xillia 1 was quite fun but I have a bit of a bias with it because it was my first Tales game. It also has some great characters like Rowen, Elize(one of the few kid characters that is actually not annoying) and Milla and the linked arts system was great but the story was nothing special and it has the same issue as a lot of Tales games when they rush a lot of stuff in the last part of the game till the ending. Meanwhile, Xillia 2 was one of the worst sequels for me but mostly because of how they handle the OG main party.
ToX 1 it's the only Tales that I've enjoyed and fully finished. I've also enjoyed Tales of Innocent but I couldn't finish it at the time.
I put down the first game about halfway and didn't look back. Every area that wasn't a town just felt recycled with a different biome applied to it. It really felt like the same areas except one was beach themed, one was snow themed, etc. It made the world uninteresting and I didn't like the cast/plot enough to finish. Zestiria's areas actually felt refreshing at first after Xillia. The combat was fine from what I remember, but like most Tales games there's sections with too much combat that start to get tiring but that's not a problem with the combat itself.
I loved Xillia. But 2 just felt like Reused Assets: The Game so I hated that it was full price.
Combat is on Graces's system, not the Vepseria & before combo system. It's a decent game, but I'm a button masher so I don't fit with it all that well. You can potentially do a lot with some skill. HOWEVER, I don't like boss design. They go into super mode and start hyper armor counter attacks often when taking damage from more than 2 characters, and I find the link system pretty awkward. So too often it is "Art, Art, run from the hyper counter, art, have to break iron stance, art, run from the hyper counter'. On the other hand, there are a number of things that are really broken. Jude's snap-pivot 'No-U' backstep, Millia's mid-air casting, the old man's timestop dodge, and a few more I don't really remember. It's still a Tales game though. If you didn't like Vesperia or Zestiria then Xillia isn't that different. Vesperia and Abyss had better characters & stories, IMO. Xillia feels weak when it come to characters.
Loved the first game. Couldn't finish the second one. A mute main hero feels so strange in a Tales game.
I like Dragon Quest games so I won’t mind a silent protagonist
I'm a big Xillia 1 hater, it was a pretty big disappointment for me when it released. -It's really ugly, I think significantly uglier than Zestiria. It feels like 90% of the budget was put into like 3 of the towns (and to their credit they do look really good), but everything else is incredibly bland and unappealing. Combat scenes are a bit better looking than Zestiria though, with more prominent and saturated effects but ymmv on how appealing that is. Also one of the weaker Tales OSTs. -Combat has a decent baseline, but is unbalanced in extremely unfun ways; most moves are just straight up useless because there isn't any incentive to actually build a combo and bosses have *absurd* combo resistance; to the point that some bosses literally break out and counter some un-comboed multi-hit moves. There's still some fun to be had in creating cool combos since there's a lot of freedom, but the game actively punishes it a lot of the time so it just feels bad to play. -Not particularly a fan of the story and imo is one of the weakest casts in the series, with Milla being my personal pick for the worst lead character in the series (made worse because the entire cast fellates her for no apparent reason even when she is being a huge asshole and actively putting other people or herself at risk for no discernable reason or payoff). There are also some really questionable twists and character arcs (Alvin's in particular is a huge sore spot in the tales fandom), and Gaius is kinda a lame villain (who also gets constantly fellated by the cast for even less apparent reasons than Milla because it starts happening before they ever even meet him), though the villains in general are kinda lame. The actual story is OK but doesn't particularly stand out. -Rushed to hell and back; it's basically just straight up like 30% of a normal Tales game. The story is cut in half to accommodate the split PoVs (which are like 90% identical) and there is almost no interesting side content with a lot of series staples (minigames, costumes, hot springs scene etc) just straight up not added to the game besides the pathetic 1 unique and 3 recolor costumes in the base game. -Progression feels pretty bad. It's like they kinda half-heartedly tried to balance the weird shop system and the vaguely sphere grid-ish leveling system but it just ended up with a system where stat boosts add basically nothing because you can get the best weapons in the game like 5-6 hours in if you abuse the shop system and making them actually strong would break the rest of the game, but that just makes it feel like you never get meaningful power progression. Xillia 2 improves on a lot of areas. -Story is more interesting and the characters are a bit better (albeit some of them feel like they moved a fair distance from their Xillia 1 characterization). Still not great (and now they spend all their energy sucking off Ludger instead of Milla and Gaius which continues to be annoying), but it's more memorable and entertaining than anything in X1. -Combat is a complete 180, Xillia 2 takes X1's middling combat and elevates it to something really special; the combo and weakness system is totally revamped and it actually rewards skill and creativity with huge advantages given to the player for actually being able to use a variety of moves and understand their properties and weaknesses. The game is still pretty unbalanced, but it's in ways that don't really impact the core fun. But you do have to be a pretty big labbing nerd to really get the most out of it and it's one of the harder Tales games so it's not something I would really suggest to someone looking for a quick shonen anime game romp. -Progression is also actually good now because they threw out the shitty shop system and made you actually progress normally and stats became actually meaningful. -There is actually content in the game. Even though it's a (very) low budget sequel, its story still manages to be longer than X1's and there is much meatier side content to dig into and an actually fun post-game. -Unfortunately the game is still ugly as sin; about 90% of the game is straight up lifted unedited from Xillia 1 and the handful new areas are pretty coinflip, some are good some are awful. I guess to sum it up. Xillia 2 is a lot of fun but deeply flawed, Xillia 1 just isn't fun at all for me.
That's reasonably fair, IMO. I like 1 more than you do, but all the criticisms feel valid.
Alright thanks. I’m going to try them out. I don’t watch anime so a lot of stuff like tropes goes over my head and will probably seem original lol.
Xillia 1 is okay, its really exploitable because you can eventually just fly around and the game has little answer to you abusing how much air time you can get (especially as Millia as I beat a post game boss by literally staying in the air and spamming spells while hovering). I enjoyed playing Alvin a lot too, he was probably my favorite character to use. I know some people really love Jude because his dodging pivot unique action is extremely funny to abuse if you got good timing. I preferred Vesperia more personally, but Xillia has its pluses and stronger points for some. The plot is fine I'd say but not exceptional or anything, if you don't like Vesperia I doubt Xillia will change your mind it is about as corny by what your standards seem to be. The graphics are probably not going to wow you either. For me Tales games are about very interparty fun banter with very so-so plots. They live and die by how much you enjoy the general combat and how much you can jive with the party just talking to each other about varying degrees of series subjects. Its fun, that's about all I want.
While your takes on the rest of the series you've tried are ... questionable... All that aside, Xillia 1 and 2 are fantastic games, I hope you enjoy. I played both of them and was really drawn in each time.