A Bug-Riddled, Half-Functional Mess – TALES OF CRESTORIA Review

I started playing Tales of Crestoria about a week, maybe a week and a half, after it launched. I was craving some Tales of... goodness. What I got was an expression of everything wrong with mobile games. I must preface this review with the statement that many other reviews I've seen have given 5-star reviews to Tales of Crestoria for its story. Please keep that in mind as you read on. First up, the good: - As you have likely heard or read, the story is good. Very, very good. It stands on the level of a proper Tales game, the characters are well-realized, and the social commentary is timely. However, as I played the game, the story began to suffer from a stilted scene system that effectively boils down thus: "Hey guys, there's the really important thing happening that we need to discuss. Okay, now that we've said a few things about it, let's battle three waves of generic enemies." Next scene, lather, rinse, repeat. Oh, and each one of these scenes comes with an AP cost attached. - Overall, I found myself wanting to experience the story in a proper Tales game, with pacing and animated scenes; I wanted an experience, not a series of well-written scenes punctuated by meaningless battles with meaningless repeats of meaningless enemies. There were two battles early on against important characters. Instead of fighting them, as the plot indicated, I found myself battling generic soldiers. It was baffling. As indicated by the tone of the above section, it is very difficult to discuss any positive facet of this game without tripping over some nonsensical negative ones. So, without further ado... The bad: - Let me just begin with the power-up quest time bug. If you are operating with your phone set to your local time and that time is not Japan Standard Time (JST), you will experience periods where you cannot access power-up quests due to the dates not syncing up. There is a workaround - turn your systems clock to JST. It does, however, betray a lack of attention to detail on the part of the dev team. - This game is a gacha game with no pity system. A pity system is, simply, a guarantee that a player will pull a high-rarity unit after a certain number of rolls. It prevents people from putting a large amount of time, effort, and/or money into the game and getting screwed over by low drop rates. Tales of Crestoria lacks such a system. - Dovetailing off of that, you have to pull a character six times to unlock their innate passive ability. It can be as few as five times if you're willing to sacrifice the memoria stone they come with when you first get them, but as rates are so low, and those stones are themselves basically the character's equipment, this is often ill-advised. Additionally, at least 30% of a character's power is locked behind awakening upgrades - that's the name of the system whereby you feed duplicates of a character to them to power them up. - Gleamstones, the in-game currency, are reprehensibly overpriced. Go take a look at the prices. Look at the entry for 2980 gleamstones. It costs forty dollars. A x10 pull in-game costs 2500 gleamstones. This is a game with no pity system that locks a large portion of character power behind a door that requires duplicate summons to unlock. Choices were made here. - This game has bugs that can completely lock you out of content. I experienced a near-two week span in which I could not start raids, which are the major source of resources used to upgrade your characters to higher levels. This was during an event which heavily featured raids. I could join raids, but I could not start them. The rewards for joining a raid are always lower than starting one, and it costs Battle Points (BP), the second stamina system in Crestoria, to participate. - Error Code ~1015. This pops up all the time. It interrupts raids, it interrupts loading screens, it interrupts getting awards, it interrupts accessing your guild, et cetera. Get it three times in rapid succession and the game restarts. - Loading Screens. Wait 3-5 seconds for screen transitions. - Arena Glitches. The arena is the in-game pvp system. If you should disconnect from an arena match, you lose. It doesn't matter if it was because of an issue with the game server-side. You just lost, and any win streaks you racked up just got broken. There is so much more. So much more. This game was developed with Bandai-Namco, the company at the helm of the Tales series, the publishers of Dark Souls, a major AAA company. The game was delayed by six months, supposedly to address concerns with game stability and perform bug fixes. That beggars the question, though: if this is what we got after a half-year delay, what was this game like at the original release date? How could the development team have possibly thought this game was ready? Final Section: Moving Forward Tales of Crestoria has potential. The story is a bright spot blemished by bad practices, but a bright spot nonetheless. The issues with the game are dragging it down rapidly. There are easy ways to fix this. - Drop the price of Gleamstones by 50%. This is a gacha game with a dramatically overpriced in-game currency and a finite amount of Gleamstones you can earn without paying money. - Change the way awakening works. Just as stats increase over the course of five awakenings, so, too should passive abilities. Characters should start with their passive unlocked. As they become awakened, that passive grows in strength. A good example of this is Langrisser Mobile. - Compensate your players for these glitches in a way that actually matters. A single x10 roll was a step in the right direction, but was a one-time thing for recurrent glitches. - Reduce AP costs by 25%. I do not have any trouble playing the game around the stamina system, but all the same, it is at time frustrating to see 10% of my stamina go down the drain for a single quest. This is a game made by a AAA studio. It needs extensive work, but it is still salvageable.
Review by Wren Fawkes on TALES OF CRESTORIA.