1369: Closing Tales

Finally closing in on the end of my second playthrough of Tales of Xillia, and it’s led to some interesting observations.

First up, Xillia’s handling of New Game Plus is well-implemented, enjoyable and unusual. As you play, you unlock a number of “Titles” by completing various in-game achievements such as using certain abilities a particular number of times, completing various numbers of sidequests and passing various milestones in the story. Depending on the difficulty of (or endurance/patience required for) each of these titles, you’re awarded various amounts of “Grade” points. These are useless until you’ve completed the game once, at which point you can spend them when you start a New Game Plus.

The things you can spend them on vary from carrying across various things like items, levels, money, shop levels and so on, or they can be spent on bonuses such as boosters to experience and money gain. By carefully spending your Grade, you can put together a “package” of bonuses that makes your subsequent playthroughs of the game work the way you want them to.

Personally, I’m playing through with 10x the normal amount of experience, double the normal amount of money gained and carrying over the “Devil’s Arms” special weapons that I acquired through a sidequest in the first playthrough. This made the game quite easy, so I bumped up the difficulty to Hard, and it’s now providing a suitably-paced challenge even though I’ve been well over the recommended levels for most of the game, and will cap out at 99 before taking on the final boss in my second playthrough.

What’s also interesting about Xillia is its two-protagonist structure. For probably about 80% of the time, the game is the same regardless of whether you chose Jude or Milla at the outset of the game, but the points where it splits are interestingly distinct from one another. For those who are yet to play the game but who are planning to, I strongly recommend you play Jude’s storyline first, if only for the fact that a certain event that occurs partway through the story is infinitely more dramatic from Jude’s perspective than it is from Milla’s. I’ll spare you the details in the name of spoiler avoidance, however.

Playing both stories gives you an interesting amount of context and insight into the two characters, though. Jude’s story gives you a good understanding of the overall events of the game, while Milla’s focuses a little more on her as an individual character — thankfully, she’s an interesting character in her own right who is more than worthy of a little specific exploration.

Reviews of Xillia criticised it somewhat for being “clichéd” or “typical JRPG” in its narrative, but this is a lazy descriptor that tends to be levelled at pretty much every JRPG out there — and I’m not even sure how true it is, anyway. Xillia’s cast is unconventional and interesting, consisting as it does of a broad mix of ages from 12 to 62, male and female. The adventure they go on boils down to the usual “do a couple of laps of the world” but the setting is interesting and well-realised, and by the end of it you have a thorough understanding of the setting’s culture, spiritual beliefs and society. It’s a convincing game world that it’s easy to immerse yourself in; it feels like far more than just a backdrop to cutscenes, though I would argue that the areas between the major towns are a bit bland at times.

By far the highlight of the game, though, is the sense of companionship and camaraderie between the party members, emphasised by the optional “skits” that pop up in response to your actions throughout the game. There’s a real sense of these characters being real people, real friends and sometimes rivals, and they’ve been written with a wonderful sense of chemistry between them. It’s one of the most enjoyable RPG casts I’ve had the pleasure of hanging out with for 90 hours or so, and I’ll be sorry to leave them behind; but, of course, at least some of them will be back in the upcoming Tales of Xillia 2, so all is not lost.

Should polish off the rest of Xillia tomorrow, and then I can finally get back to Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory, which I was really enjoying prior to me having to play Xillia for review.