Tales of Destiny 2: Beat the game. The last dungeon was shorter than I thought, but that's a good thing. I lost once to the last boss due to mashing the buttons instead of holding them down during the boss' final attack. Barring me forgetting what I was supposed to do, the elemental bosses were more threatening. Anyway, more about the game as a whole.
Fighting was fun. Compared to the ToD, the addition of attack strings and the defend button helped a lot in improving combat. Spells also works much better, even low levels spells are reliable and the high level spells don't cause more than a minimum of pause. As a result, there was a sense of coordination between spellcasting and physical attacks. On the minus side though, the techs fealt less flexible. I remember that I in ToD used on tech slot for a tech that could hit all enemies and that way disrupt their spellcasting, on slot for pushing enemies back, one for plain damage dealing and I think I found a purpose for the last slot as well. In ToD 2, it was less using the right tech for the right situation and more stick to the one that has the best combination of keeping the enemies stunned and dealing damage. All things considered though, combat flowed much better in ToD 2.
Combat still could have been much better though. There was a lot of features that could have done with more support. The attack string -> skill -> sacred skill combo gave no noticeable damage boost for either of the skills as opposed to using them separately which made it less useful than it should have been. Early in the game when TP management was an issue, there was always the "get the most bang for the TP" argument, but as TP management became easier, I just stuck to skill -> sacred skill and eventually just went for the sacred skill directly.
This brings me to the next point, TP management. Early in game I only had the orange gels and I had a hard time getting the TP to last through a dungeon. As the game progressed, restoring TP became just easier and easier until eventually I could spam the most expensive skills with impunity. Combat worked the best while I wasn't under a direct threat of running out of TP replenishers, but still couldn't just spam the most expensive skills carelessly. Being able to do so overshadowed a lot of other strategies.
The plot was ok, but hardly great. It did have some neat moments though and was relative trainwreck free. Sure, it did occasionally include some less well handled things such as king douchebag sudenly sobbering up suspiciously fast and the rather pointless "it wasn't person X, who we haven't meet before, who did it, it was person Y, who we also haven't meet before" plot-twist, but I had no major WTF moments.
I liked the playable cast. They fealt rather well balanced, they have great interaction with each other and there was a sense of mutual dependency within the couples. The villain cast is very weak though, but it isn't as if ToP or ToD had an impressive villain cast either.
Reid is surprisingly unadventurous, a bit simple minded and also a bit of a doormat. I find him the least interesting of the main four, but he still interacts well with the other characters, doesn't annoy me and his development from the unvilling adventurer who Farah drags along to the determined defender of Eternia fealt natural and is trainwreck free.
Farah is of the reckless adventurous do-gooder type, like Justin, but she does show quite some common sense when she doesn't see someone she thinks is in immediate need of help and also seem to be aware of that her behavior is less than perfect, unlike Justin. I think she is the kind and reckless adventurer done right.
Meredy works well as the cute and mysterious girl. I don't know what else to say about other than that she interacts well with the other characters and yada, yada. I cannot recall ever hearing an explanation to why she refers to herself in third person, but I guess that's supposed to make her more cute or something.
Keele did quite a good job at being intelligent. His difficulty in communicating with others and expressing himself was pulled of really well. He managed to surprise me once when he left the party seemingly in order to pursue his dream, that in a situation where it was obvious to me that he would not be able to realize his dream like that, but later it turned out that he instead went to do a very good and awesome thing.
Now, I'm very unimpressed by how Infernia looks once you can traverse the waters. The feeling I get is that someone just painted a few green isles here and there and didn't have time or energy to add details. I think it's the same deal with Celestia, but the desolate feeling matches Celestia's atmosphere much better. BTW, it's not a big deal, but why the heck are the celestians the dark skinned ones seeing as Celestia is the cooler of the worlds? Maybe I should instead have asked how the planets managed to be both round and have each other as heaven as well.
Overall, I really like this game. it has some great strengts and the flaws are more of the unused potential type than game degrading type.
