Honestly, that score is the right score in my eyes. 6ish score is below average and the game as a whole is below average. As much as I want combat to be a bigger factor it's not. It's about the experience and the packaging and Graces f does a terrible job of doing so. Part of it is because it's a port of a Wii game and I understand that limitation.
Fine, this bit is your opinion. I don't agree with it, but you can have it.
If this bombs, which it will, it's all on NB. They should've known that it would get bad/mixed reviews. As for people bashing the 6.8, I'm not being specific to GAF, they're dumb. If you can't recognize the faults that Graces has and exaggerate it's good parts, then you're not doing the devs a favor. I don't want cookie cutter JRPG design choices in EVERY JRPG. Xillia, did a good job in that aspect even if it had shitastic environments.
This is flat out stupid, and basically boils down to "I've decided that this is a flaw and one review site agrees with me, so if you don't agree with me then "you're dumb" and "not doing the devs a favour". Really?
Let's go through these flaws we're all universally supposed to recognise, guaranteed the game would bomb and Namco Bandai should've known then. Using Schala's post as reference here, I sure don't have time to watch the review. Not suggesting you necessarily agree with all of them but they're clearly what led GameTrailers to their score, which we're all supposed to agree with if we're not dumb. Obviously removing the lines that aren't flaws.
- Childhood Arc? It's an hour or so, is pretty important in the plot, and I found it enjoyable and liked the fact that between the childhood arc, the main story and the future arc you get to three different periods in the characters' lives. If the player absolutely hates children talking then that's up to them, but don't take it out on the game.
- Find the story predictable? Okay. Not every story has to be full of mind blowing twists that come out of nowhere. It's plenty enjoyable enough to drive the game along.
- Various exploration grumbling - All I can say is "So?" There's a decent amount of freedom in the game, as shown by people in this thread rejoicing about being able to explore stuff they didn't think they could, but no, this isn't some game where the whole world is open to you at the start. That's not some objective flaw. Two of the countries you obviously can't go to, the game really isn't THAT limited past the childhood arc, and it makes sense it would be limited during the childhood arc because... you're a child. You're not some seasoned warrior who's capable of entering areas with enemies 20 levels higher than you.
- "Dislikes the fetch quests and requests"? So don't do them. They're nice optional content for people who want it, you're not forced to do loads of fetch quests to advance the story. This isn't one of those games.
- I'm going to assume "battle system isn't a huge departure from past games" isn't a complaint, because it's more than enough of a change to be worthy of the praise people in this thread are giving it.
- "Combat is button mashy?" Stop playing on easy, everything action based is 'button mashy' if the difficulty is low enough, or you'll have people not buying the game because it's "too hard".
- "Difficulty starts low... battles are over in 10 seconds or less." Yeah, they're playing on easy. The Graces I played was generally challenging, battles were definitely not over in 10 seconds or less, and changing strategies and not button mashing was what got me through difficulty battles.
- "No effort to improve the graphics past the Wii version?" They're blind and exaggerating, the game looks nice and clean, vastly more so than the Wii version, and while the graphics aren't going to blow you away (Tales games don't have that kind of budget in the first place), they're nice to look at and are more than good enough. Next.
- Voice acting I can't comment on because I haven't played the English version.
- The music isn't especially amazing, they can have this one. It's not terrible or a huge flaw though.
So, basically, they're all opinions. Not agreeing with them does not make you dumb, and finding the game's many excellent points such as the battle system (when you spend half of the game battling) more worthy of focus over things like it not being a game it was never trying to be, like an open world RPG or a masterpiece of complex storytelling, does not mean you're "exaggerating its good points". If someone doesn't like the story, or the characters, or the childhood arc, or thinks the game is a 6.8, that's completely up to them and I'm not going to tell them otherwise. But the idea that these are objective flaws that everyone should notice and complain about lest they want to be labelled 'dumb' for not being able to 'recognise' them is just ridiculous.
