It’s probably clear that I really quite like the plot, the story, and the characters.
These are entirely optional, though, so if you don’t really care about Rokurou and Eizen arguing over who’s the best at fishing, you can safely skip it. This is normally for humour, though it occasionally displays character growth, relationships, or musings on recent events. When wandering the world, you’ll be prompted that a new Skit is available tap a button, and a little dialogue interlude will ensue. In typical Tales of fashion, these party interactions are highlighted through the Skits function. Everyone grows as a character over the course of the game, and I found the whole motley crew to be eminently likeable (although Velvet’s angst does get wearying).
And that’s without mentioning the absurdly over-dramatic witch who does her damnedest to troll the rest of the party as hard as is humanly possible. That daemon swordsman is a relentlessly cheery fellow, while the dreaded pirate loves going off onto self-satisfied tangents about history and art. Admittedly, Velvet herself either comes from the Squall School of Protagonists or was shot in the face by a phaser set to maximum brood, but this is mostly so the rest of the party can use her as their comic straight man, and her verbal frowning is occasionally punctuated by rage-filled outbursts. Meanwhile, those other party members include a daemon swordsman who wants to off a family member, a dreaded pirate, a young angel-like creature that you technically kidnap… Even when they’re doing good things, it’s hard to say that this band of villains is anything nobler than that. The initial jailbreak characterises this nicely when she incites a riot as a distraction, with the probable deaths of every other prisoner not bothering her one whit as long as it means she can escape. Still, it’s rare to get a sense that Velvet and her party are the “good guys”, considering she’s more than happy to sacrifice innocents and destroy livelihoods to make progress. As you probably expect, the Abbey isn’t actually the holiest of organisations, and there are some dark machinations afoot… but the antagonists firmly believe that what they’re doing is right, and from a certain point of view it’s not too hard to sympathise. So, yeah, this is a JRPG in which you’re arguably the villain, and the primary thrust of the plot is trying to track down and murder the great hope of the world. But she doesn’t give much of a shit, and the game’s primary theme is just that: raw emotion versus hard logic. Killing him won’t be an easy task, and besides the fact that Velvet’s goal will set the entire world against her, succeeding could doom it to destruction. Three years on and he’s hailed as the world’s saviour, and is the head of a militant church that champions logic over emotions. At the time when everything went to shit, he brutally sacrificed her beloved little brother in order to gain the power to save the world from the daemon menace. That hatred is aimed at Artorius, her brother-in-law.
It could only get more dramatic if it was raining, but that might block out the red moon.
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