Noted ♪

Awhile ago, I was TL;DRing about this artist who owed me commission work for a bajillion years and was... actively doing other art/commissions. Again, I get that art blocks happen, etc. etc., but I sort of felt I was being ignored or something, and it kind of sucked. Anyway, I messaged her about this, trying to be polite and understanding, and...

...and she powered through the whole picture in one night because she felt bad. Wow. Wow. I'm pretty impressed, actually. Also, she offered me a freebie in addition for waiting for so long. I am appeased.

Additionally, I'm almost always totally broke in Tales of Graces F because, early on, I developed an immense addiction to dualizing items. I've made pretty much everything I can make at this point, too. The only thing stopping me from doing more is the fact that I'm not all the way through the game and haven't gained access to some of the drop items yet. Aaaaah, it's really fun.

I suppose I could use the dualizing addiction to be super rich because of the great selling prices, but I like to have one of everything in case I need it for an inn request. (This has turned out to be a highly prudent strategy.) BUT HEY WHATEVER FLOATS MY BOAT AM I RIGHT

Also, update: all my predictions so far have come true, even the one I was slightly iffy on. Let's see if my ending prediction happens, too, haha. At this point, though, I find that I've become endeared to the characters, so I'm sort of okay with it. Some things about Tales Of predictability have a nice familiarity to them, a little like crystals in Final Fantasy. It's sometimes kind of eye-roll worthy, but at the same time, it's like, you sort of smile as you do it?

I don't know. Some things they could stand to stop doing, for sure, but other things are kind of nice to repeat for nostalgia's sake. (The "withhold very important helpful information for basically no reason" thing definitely fits into the former category, though.)

TL;DR: Tales of Graces F, I love you anyway. The gameplay, content, replayability, item collecting, good localization (= good character dialogue, interaction) etc. balances out the shortcomings of the story.

I finally started seriously playing Tales of Graces f this week! It actually got here on release day (I was surprised, too), but I was a little over-engrossed with Avatar at the time, so I didn't do too much in-game. Now that I'm done Avatar, though, I've been playing regularly.

I think they really did a good thing by trying to mix up the battle system a little. Each character plays distinctly differently and has different nuances to their play style, the world map is a decided improvement (though approximately on par with Vesperia's, regardless).

However, I think Tales Of needs to reconsider its story-writing strategy.
( TL;DR with no spoilers. )

Wow, I organize my thoughts really poorly.

Before I stop, I just want to add that Graces is by no means a bad game. The core of any game is, well, gameplay, and it does that really well. There's a lot to collect and find and make, and the fighting is fun. If you've never played a Tales game, you're not as likely to see everything coming from 50 miles away--maybe just 40 instead. ;)

But it's solid, and the PS3 needs more JRPGs, even if they're a little predictable.