Tales of Xillia Impressions - Part 1

Aviators make everything better

Over the past two days I've been playing (and streaming!) Tales of Xillia, the latest flagship Tales title to be released in the United States, to join the ranks of Symphonia, Abyss, Vesperia, and others.

Those unfamiliar with the series should know that, much like Final Fantasy, Tales is a long-running franchise of JRPGs, but with a more cult following than Square's far more well-known production. There are two things that define a modern Tales game: the aesthetic, and the Linear Motion Battle System. As you can see in the picture above, the games are pretty whimsical, with a colorful anime-like palette and funny cosmetic customization options. Plot and characters to match, though things can get a bit dark at times. Tales games also tend to base their conflicts around some allegory for a real-world socioeconomic issue; racism, cloning ethics, and climate change have all been featured.

The battle system has its own quirks and refinements in each iteration, but the general idea remains the same: battles are fought in real time, and characters have access to normal attacks and special Artes as they move around the battlefield, trying to defeat their opponents. The battle system is titled Linear Motion because in general your controlled character only moves in a straight line either to or away from its current target--but for many games now a Free Run system has been implemented to allow temporary totally free motion to reposition yourself.

So what of Xillia so far? I'm about 15 hours into it, give or take. So far, the game doesn't feel like it excels in anything compared to the other games in its franchise, but it notably doesn't feel like it has any remarkable flaws. In battle, plot, characters, and environment, Xillia feels like a solid, but not outstanding, entry in the franchise.

Features

The game has the player take the role of either Jude Mathis, an extremely intelligent medical student, or Milla Maxwell, avatar of the Lord of Spirits--the closest thing to a god the universe has. The majority of the game has the two of them traveling together, but for short bursts of time they may take separate actions in town or act on different aspects of a plan, and the game follows the one the player picked.

In keeping with the genre's steady adoption of quality-of-life features, Xillia's meta-mechanics are very strong. Fast travel to any town, dungeon, or overworld zone that you have previously visited is unlocked within the first few hours of the game; areas are locked off as the plot demands in order to maintain immersion. Sidequests are all hinted at via skits and progress on them is maintained in a menu accessible at any time. Skits, a series staple, are short conversations between party members that can be triggered by any number of things and which often provide extra insight into characters or plot, or even just silly humor.

Series-standard mechanics such as Grade and Over Limit make their return in yet another iteration that fans will find easy to adapt to. New to Xillia is the linked battle system; at any time, the player character may "link" with one of their CPU-controlled allies. The linked ally will begin to use a special ability unique to them. For example, when linked with Jude, if the player is knocked down, Jude will teleport to them and help them back up. Another character will steal items from enemies the player has knocked down. Various benefits regarding distribution of buffs and paying the costs of skills are also conferred to a linked pair.

Linking also enables the use of Linked Artes--special combination abilities that can be triggered between a pair after the player character uses one from a specific set of his own abilities. For example, if Jude and Milla are linked, and Jude uses his Demon Fist arte, it can be followed up with the Linked Arte Final Gale, in which Jude and Milla fire a Demon Fist and a Wind Blade respectively at the opponent.

Linking is clearly the fundamental gimmick of the game's battle system, but it feels so smoothly-implemented it almost seems like a natural consequence. I would very much like to see it return in a later game.

Plot

The adventure begins when Milla encounters Jude as she breaks into a military laboratory to destroy a weapon it's building; Jude is caught in the crossfire and ends up having to flee with her after he becomes wanted for the intrusion.

As they escape together, Jude learns more of Milla's personality and her mission, and decides to accompany her at great risk to himself. Other party members are encountered in standard JRPG fashion. To avoid the risk of spoilers, I won't elaborate any further; I'm fairly early into the game anyway.

The big twist of the game has not occurred yet, but Tales twists tend to be particularly earth-shattering, in that they often invalidate the party's progress up to that point. Learning about the existence of and destruction of Tethe'alla in Symphonia, learning about the weakening of the Sephiroth in Abyss, etc. all necessitated a complete rejection of the party's goals. I expect something similar to occur here.

Cast

Although not as strong as Vesperia's cast, Xillia's playable characters acquit themselves well and are far more enjoyable than their Symphonia or Graces counterparts. A shining feature is in just how reasonably the two protagonists act. They are perhaps too reasonable for the plot happening to them--perfectly in character for a god and someone who's supposed to be unreasonably intelligent.

Happily, I can now say for a second Tales game that there is no party member I actually dislike--the only other one being Vesperia. I have six party members at the moment, so we'll see if there's another one waiting. Vesperia had seven party members (two more in the PS3 remake), and Symphonia eight (technically nine if you count the choice of one of them).

The English voice acting for the cast is pretty good, and the dialogue and localization are amazing. There are a fair number of lines where the actors clearly emphasize the wrong things, but they generally do a good job of sounding natural and portraying emotion.

Looking back, and forward

I'm not very picky about the remaining aspects of the game that a typical review would cover--I don't feel engaged enough in the art or music or such to make any sort of evaluation of them. So instead I will just continue playing.

I really like what I've seen of Xillia so far. It has no notable weaknesses, except for perhaps that it has no remarkable strengths. Its battle system and character cast are definitely in the high tier of Tales games, and we'll see where the plot goes from here.

The problem with the game is that, having no great strengths, there is nothing to really entice a player into wanting to play it. It is, by all rights, a great entry in the franchise and one that all fans will want to play. It also makes a reasonable entry point; everything about it is representative of a good Tales game. But for those uninterested in the series as a whole, there's no one thing about it that's so excellent that someone would want to try it--unlike Vesperia's stellar cast or Graces' brilliant combat.

My hope for the rest of the game lies in its plot and battle. I don't really know where the plot is going, so it runs the risk of suddenly becoming awful. And as my characters grow stronger I'll have more options in battle to play with. I'll have finished the game within a few days, and I'll revisit these impressions then.

Internalization

"Internalization. This occurs when you've exploited impact, when you've molded the standard material to your needs and made it yours, when you've made your new skills strong through hard use. All of a sudden these new concepts stopped churning within you, and a new reality is born: You and the concepts are one. They have literally become you. You have become them."

-Tom Hopkins

Starting about four years ago, I was for the first time exposed to a large number of concepts and abilities with great depth. Entering university was an eye-opening experience of just what it meant to truly learn something; until then, education consisted mostly of rote memorization and regurgitation of facts, or straightforward application of rules. Of particular difficulty for me was in mathematics, where building a proof often requires a strong intuition and understanding of mathematical techniques. I had never before seen math that required me to really understand all of the implications of a theorem in order to build an idea of the sort of situations in which it's relevant.

Around the same time, I started playing Super Smash Bros. Melee as my first real competitive game. Say what you will about its validity in that regard; whether or not it's a "true fighting game" or whatever is unrelated to the point I want to make with it. In order to play this game at a reasonably high level, it is paramount to become mechanically proficient in a number of techniques that enhance your character's movement and attacking options. The most familiar example is probably wavedashing.

The term is borrowed from other fighting games, but describes a similar action: the character slides along the ground in a neutral state. In Marvel, this is executed by dashing and then immediately crouching, using the residual momentum from the dash to continue to push your character forward. It's a comparatively simple technique. In Melee, on the other hand, there is a lot more complexity. First, you jump, and on the first frame in which your character is considered airborne--which happens before the character has actually left the ground--you airdodge to the side and slightly downward. The character gains momentum from the airdodge, immediately becoming grounded again, and standing while still being carried by that momentum. For reasons that are well beyond the scope of this post, this technique enables a huge number of movement options.

The more movement-heavy Melee characters make incredibly extensive use of wavedashing and derivative techniques--you will see it used many times a minute in any given match. Yes, this means that every few seconds a Melee player is performing a one-frame link.

One of the frustrations that newer Melee players have with wavedashing is that, even when they can consistently perform it in a vacuum, they are often unable to perform it in an actual game, or if they can, they find its use limited because they don't yet understand either the situations in which it's appropriate, or the options it makes available to them. Wavedashing is not useful until the player has internalized it.

What is internalization?

For what it's worth, Merriam-Webster defines the verb "internalize" as:

to give a subjective character to; specifically : to incorporate (as values or patterns of culture) within the self as conscious or subconscious guiding principles throughout learning or socialization

In both mathematics and Melee, it's important to come to a complete intuitive understanding of the tools available to you. You must be able to recognize, immediately and without thought, when a tool may be useful to you. Melee adds the requirement of having internalized its execution, so that you cease to think about wanting to wavedash, or to perform its constituent actions. You must wavedash completely unconsciously; the tool needs to be an extension of you. This is what is meant by "internalizing" the tool.

There are a couple of litmus tests I make use of to determine how far I've internalized a concept. Whenever I achieve any of the following milestones, I know that I've internalized a little bit further:

• Making use of the concept with absolutely no conscious intention to, in a situation that called for it. In fighting games, throw breaks are an easy example. Breaking a throw that you did not consciously read occurs when you recognize either a setup or throw startup, and then you automatically press the button to break it. Occasionally, you may only recognize that a throw even occurred after you've already broken it.
• Using the concept in a way that you have never used or seen it used before, recognizing and understanding that it would be effective there, and being correct. A correct response to a mixup setup you've never seen before, for example.
• Automatically reacting to and handling a situation that you consciously misinterpret. Misreading an opponent and thinking that they're doing something else, but unconsciously reacting correctly, in opposition to your conscious intention.

And so on. In general, any novel or unconscious use is a sign of internalization. It's at that point when you've ceased to need to think about how to use your tool in order to actually do so.

Making use of internalization

As your internalization progresses, you can add more layers of abstraction to your thoughts. A beginning piano player may need to consciously determine the timing of the notes he plays, the fingers he uses to press each key, and the force he uses. After a while, he can stop thinking about that, because he's internalized it completely, and instead move on to consciously thinking about chords. Further, and he can think on the order of chord progressions.

In fighting games, there are two important factors of internalization. Most obviously, internalizing a combo or mixup, either on the offensive or defensive side, improves how likely you are to correctly execute your combo or defend the mixup. The other factor is that internalization frees up your attention. If you can spend the duration of your combo thinking about your opponent's patterns and selecting your oki, you are in much better shape to get your next hit than someone who is too busy focusing on consciously timing their attacks so that the combo works.

The second point is the primary reason why it's important to continually practice things you can already do, and why the aforementioned Melee players who can't make proper use of wavedashing feel frustrated. With their attention spent trying to wavedash, they don't have the mental capacity to consider any sort of strategy or intelligent ways in which to use it.

Understanding just how useful attention is as a resource was critical to me in changing how I thought about practice and study. The most effective way to determine what you need to practice or study is to figure out where a lack of attention is hurting you, and why you lack that attention. Perhaps your defense suffers because you spend too much time focusing on blocking your opponent and not enough time on looking for holes in their offense. In this case, you should find a way to practice blocking that character so that you don't have to think about it as much, and are free to look for holes.

It's not enough to recognize a flaw in your play: you must recognize where a flaw arises because your attention is being spent on something else. In doing so, you can then find a way to safely move your attention to where it is needed.

"I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."

-Bruce Lee

The surface level reading of this quote is that one effective tool is far more powerful than a host of tools that the user cannot effectively exploit. While this is true, there's a more important reason than simply "practice". Practicing a single kick 10,000 times awards an internalized level of understanding that permits proper use of that kick in all kinds of situations, while still leaving the user free to think about other aspects of the fight.

In a direct parallel to fighting games, practicing one combo thousands of times, or one hitconfirm, or one antiair, or one mixup, leaves you free to consider the more abstract mental competition. Practicing defense of course is a lot harder, but by extensively practicing offense you can free your attention to go towards your defense, making up for some of the difference.

Internalization as a feeling of power

To wrap this up, I'd like to talk about how internalization affects my enjoyment of a game. Not just a fighting game, but any sort of game in which there is a clear indication of skill. For a time, I played World of Warcraft as a member of a high-ranked raiding guild; my character class was a mage.

Mages have a spell called Blink. The spell is very simple: it's instant cast, has virtually no resource cost, and upon cast, you instantly teleport forward 15 yards, simultaneously breaking any movement impairing effects that were present on you. This is my favorite spell in the entire game, because internalizing its use leads to a host of creative applications that can optimize your performance in miniscule but important ways. To me, the greatest thing I ever did in WoW was not beating a particularly difficult boss or anything; it was a single cast of Blink during an attempt against a boss that failed anyway.

We were fighting a boss who had a mechanic in which he fired three relatively-slow projectiles at ranged targets. Upon landing, the projectiles exploded for a large radius, effectively rendering useless anyone hit by the them for a few seconds. During one attempt at this boss, I saw him use this ability. I was not the target of any projectile, but I would have been within the explosion radius of one, so I needed to move out of the way.

I could have simply stopped casting and ran out of the way. But instead, I intuitively recognized exactly where the projectiles were going, and exactly how long their explosion radius was. There was a very small safe spot completely surrounded by explosions, big enough for just one character. I considered when to move to it, and realized that I could finish one more spellcast and then immediately Blink to the safe spot, but the timing was so tight that if I was even slightly wrong about the time until my cast ended or the explosion happened, I would be hit.

But I was right in every single way, and I safely Blinked to that small safe spot in the absolute nick of time. To do that, I had to completely internalize how far Blink went, how long my cast time was, how big the boss's explosion radius was, and how long it took each projectile to explode. I had never felt more powerful in the game than at that moment, and I haven't felt as powerful since.

I realized later that this feeling of power by internalization is the thing I seek out of any game I play. Being able to completely control a character in a fighting game as if they were an extension of myself is the main reason I play them, and it's why I prefer games with many many options that can be used in creative ways. For me, internalization is the greatest expression of skill there is.