First a little summary of the game: Tales of Xillia 2 is a role-playing game with instanced, party-based combat. When the player enters combat they are in a circular arena with a character they control and up to 3 AI (or player controlled) characters. Now on to gameplay!
The controls of the game, on a PS3 controller. The game itself switches between two states (not including things like menus and not going into a LOT of detail): The overworld state and the combat state. The overworld state is when the player is able to run around freely (i.e. towns, fields and dungeons), obviously this has been simplified but that's more to cut down on length. In this state the player can encounter monsters (in the latter two) and controls by using the left joystick to move their avatar and the X key to interact with objects. The player can then transition to the combat state by colliding with an enemy on-screen and in this state the controls become drastically more complex. The player moves their character by moving the left joystick left or right (the player is on a fixed axes for the most part), but can press L2 to enter a 'free-run' mode where they can move in any direction on the field with the left joystick. The player can attack and guard using the X and square buttons respectively. The player can also use the circle button with the left joystick or the just the right joystick to activate special attacks. This is more or less the basic gameplay (not going into the depth of special stuff). Now a quick breakdown of how intuitive the gameplay feels!
The overworld gameplay doesn't have that much that needs to be said about it. It worked pretty well but it wasn't exactly special. The gameplay in the combat state though flows very smoothly, the basic attack handles very smoothly and the idea of tying the special attacks to the movement in a small-but-unaffecting way actually helps make the gameplay much easier to handle without breaking the flow. I don't think that there's anything that could be done to improve the gameplay as it requires the least amount of movements on the players part to change actions.
One gameplay mechanic for combat that I had previously omitted was the ability to partner with one other party member to work with them in combat (i.e. the character can block to stop you from being attacked from behind or flank an enemy you're fighting). The way a player links with another character is by pressing on the D-pad in the direction of the character's icon on the HUD. My reason for listing this is separately from everything else is to tie into the....
UI! The UI for the overworld state is pretty straight forward with a mini-map that shows where the player and other things of note are, as well as the option for pop-ups like objectives. It's very simple to understand and isn't intrusive, so it gets a pass! The combat state UI is very much geared towards melding with the controls by having it so that important meters are on the left and right while the names and stats of the 4 party members is laid out in a diamond on the bottom-center portion of the screen. This last part works very well with the the ability to link with the other party members as they line-up perfectly with the D-pad so that it's very intuitive. Overall, the UI is very clean and easy to read (for me, anyway). But I'll let you decide by finally providing a screenshot of the game!
And I'm not going to be going into super-fine detail on everything (I'm sure you can see that there are quite a few finer detalis) but that will just entail going into a lot of depth that you learn over-time.
At the end of the day, the game is very well-designed and friendly to both old and new players. Though far more importantly than that: The game is FUN!
And with that, I'm going to call this blog done...Namely because I'm rambling.
Thanks for reading, cheers!
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