Well, that'll teach me to have hope about anything, ever. I'm just entering my tenth hour of the incredibly messy game that is Tales Of Zestiria and I'm thinking about the preview I did with a sense of wistful nostalgia. That Joel? He was naive and filled with optimism. The one writing this is feeling unaccountably cross and cheated.

 

In fact, if somebody took my psychological profile and decided to create the game that would annoy me most, it would probably be a lot like TOZ. So let's take it from the beginning, and see how far we get. Buckle up kiddos, it's going to be a bumpy ride.

 

Well, Zestiria is starting on minus points from the get-go, because it's loaded with day-one DLC that could've easily been in the main game. Except that it isn't in the main game and there's a lot of it. How many times do we have to go over this? Day-one DLC is cheapening to both the product it's tied to and the art form in general, and makes the public suspicious of what else has been cut out. We're off to a wobbly start and it's only going to get worse, a bit like my use of the Oxford comma.

 

So I started up the game, and three long hours later it told me the tutorial was over. I know this is par for the course with JRPGs, but for what it's worth, Zesty is on an incredibly slow boil. Information about the world, the characters and the mechanics is drip-fed to you at a terribly drawn-out rate, including the game willingly hiding important facts about combat around the overworld, most of which I located only after my ignorance had killed me.

 

And whilst a slow progression when it comes to plot might be fine if this was a jigsaw-discovery world like Dark Souls or Bastion, Zestiria doesn't have any mystery to it. It might have done once, but it takes too much glee in waving the clues under our nose and it's not long before we've worked everything out. When the girly-looking protagonist "Sorey" (as in, "I'm Sorey you had to endure this name") finds the mythic glove of the legendary "Shepherd," and is told by the love interest that he's what she always thought the Shepherd would be like, and we find out that he's been adopted through mysterious circumstances, I wish it wouldn't keep pretending like we don't know what's going to happen next.

 

The problem is that a lot of what I don't like about Tales of Zestiria are what others do like about JRPGs in general, and whilst I don't understand why they like this, I do get that my opinion might be more subjective than normal. So let's be clear about just how anime this thing is: It features a generic hero with an androgynous face, a weird bromance with a more serious BFF character, horrible J-rock, outfits that look like swimsuits mixed with failed LARPing attempts, a pick-and-mix of randomly appropriated mythologies, the characters shout the names of their powers for no reason and the villains are so camp and colourful they could have been trained for war by Bruno Tonioli.

 

So, yeah - it's a JRPG, all right. All that's missing is the mandatory airship and the weapons so large that they defy common sense. Oh, wait, I just remembered the fusion mechanic, so scratch the latter one off the list.

 

All this might be tolerable to me if Zestiria was approaching the story with a sense of self-awareness or even subtle parody, but it takes itself utterly seriously and becomes all the more embarrassing for it. It doesn't help matters that the voice acting is pretty poor. I opted for English speaking as I didn't want to have to spend the whole time watching subtitles and in retrospect that was probably a mistake. Hearing some awful joke followed by that forced, robotic laughter, and not having a sense of cultural distance to lessen the impact made me want to stick spoons into every sensory apparatus I had, just to make it stop.

 

But enough about story, what about mechanics? Well, in the brief interludes between interminably long dialogue and story sections, there's combat. At least, I think that's what it is. It feels chaotic, and not in a good way. It's mainly hack-and-slashy with an overly-complicated stat adjustment system in the breaks between where you micromanage gear and buffs, that sort of thing.

 

It slightly reminded me of Dragon Age: Inquisition, because there's a bunch of berks you can flick control between mid-combat and it allows you to adjust the AI of those you're not inhabiting. But performing combos feels sticky and whilst there's some cathartic feeling to be had in blasting away giant purple spiders, I usually ended up just mashing the attack button and holding down block when anything looked at me funny, which served well enough. You also can't strafe except for a side-step manoeuvre, which makes mobility tough in a game where it's all too easy to get ganged up on. Add to that the unwieldy camera controls and fighting loses any appeal it might once have had.

 

The one USP that the combat has is the ability for characters to fuse into one in the "armatization mode." If you have certain characters in your party line-up you can have them merge together to go all Super-Saiyan and blast away whatever stands in your path with ease. But my question is this: why wouldn't you want to do that? The de-powered folk are useless by comparison, whereas fused characters are like Jesus on steroids. And armatization doesn't seem to have a real penalty besides a meaningless reduction in numbers, so it's like somebody taking two messenger pigeons out of a military squadron and replacing them with the Terminator, insisting that it's a fair trade.

 

Aside from decent graphic design on the main world and some interesting plot concepts that were left starving in their crib, I find little to recommend about Tales Of Zestiria. The story was a chore, the characters made me irritated and the combat manages to be both childishly simple and intimidatingly complex. Maybe things get better later, but a time equivalent to a Lord Of The Rings marathon is, for me at least, too long for a game to pull itself together. I guess the results of this experiment have only managed to create something nightmarish. It's my attempt at Thai food all over again.