Zestiria: You know the game is overusing child deaths when you are at endgame and you walk to an alley in the first town, see a crowd of people, and actually honest to god laugh out loud when they are like "We found the body of a child, it was pretty gruesome. Oh it was that kid you thought you saved earlier in the game. And all his friends are dead too."
Let's see what else we got for kid deaths since last time:
- In a separate incident, a kid you saved earlier (a survivor from an earlier kid-slaughter) is killed right in front of the party at the end of a quest to find out who murdered his friends. OTL.
- An optional boss rants about how all the children were killed by disease in her town.
- Another similar optional boss had her kid killed and turned monster.
- The big-bad's extended family had all the chidren die because of a curse.
- The big bad had a kid that was born a monster because of a curse. Cue (yet another case of) infanticide.
- Still not an exhaustive list.
Tales writers have never been good, but Zestiria takes the cake for being godawful. Although in fairness I didn't play ToD2 or ToX2.
Skill system rant:
There are 50 'base' equipment skills in ToZ. They do things like "Attack +4%" or "Take 5% less damage while guarding" and so on and so forth. All weapons and armors come with 1 predetermined skill from this set of 50 and up 3 additional, random skills. The individual skills themselves don't tend to be too powerful, as the power is supposed to come from combining them. PC's have 5 pieces of equipment so in theory you can get up to 20 skills on a PC. By having skills in a row together or having multiples of the same skill (Doesn't matter which skill, having multiples gives you the same generic stack bonus), you get better effects like "Negate a status ailment" or "+1 combo in a chain". Sounds cool, except there are *50* skills and getting the right things by random chance is highly unlikely. And stores stock limited copies of equipment, and may not stock a piece of equipment at all as a shop is random and they take time to refresh inventory! Equipment is also key to stats so you can't play around with this too much using earlygame stuff.
But wait, there is a fusion system! All you have to do is take a piece of equipment that is a COPY of the one you have skills on, and fuse them for a price to combine there skills! Except if two skills are in the same slot (2nd/3rd/4th) on a piece of equipment, they combine to another random skill that requires battling with the equipment to even unlock. So if you have a cool new sword you want to use you can't fuse your existing skill setup for a sword onto it. No you'd need to get MORE copies of that cool new sword and hope they have the skills you'd want... Did I mention that shops don't stock multiple copies of equipment usually and that it takes time to refresh inventory, and that even then it's totally random in what you get?
Not to worry! The game helpfully gives you tips on how to grind specific randoms for equipment drops, raising odds from like 2% to 4% and so on! And by finding hidden midget seraphs in dungeons and stuff you can slightly boost the chance you'd get a specific skill on it!
Yeah Zestiria has a special kind of skill system. The kind that sucks.
