We can at least agree on Xillia having a better battle system than Graces F, right?
....right?
Errrrr... I'd... disagree.
Wait, what's the worst game you've played this year?
Well how do you make a challenging boss fight without it getting extremely cheap? One on one fights are easy to control, but if it's 4v1, how can you balance it so a boss can't be chain combo'd to death.
I do think guard breaks are something that should be more reasonable. Something like 6-10 hits are far too little for my taste, but having the boss merely counter you whenever you spam certain artes, or use the wrong arte and they counter, or something like that. Make bosses more intelligent instead of tanks with Glory, teching out of combos, going into OVL/using hi-ougis consistently with little reprieve. Them using hi-ougis often and for seemingly little reason is just icing on the cake, and is not a decent way of providing any sort of challenge to the player. For the most part, the player is going to run circles around the arena, dodging the enemy when they have a red exclamation mark over their heads or dodging the attack that extends into the hi-ougi because the boss is designed with free-run in mind as opposed to proper side-stepping, dodging, parrying, etc. A lot of the time, you're not going to have your entire party hitting the boss for 100+ hits since you're going to be healing, supporting, etc. with other AI-directed characters.
This is nothing about "oh, hey, put some thought into your combos next time!" No, it's because the bosses are designed with Free Run in mind with consistent use of hi-ougis with little player reprieve. It doesn't necessarily enforce smarter play at all because your progress is going to be stilted since you're busy dodging an arte until the boss OVL is over. I
miss when Tales games used to enforce the player getting battles done as quickly as possible. That's what attracted me to the series in the first place. Being able to try to speedrun bosses and getting grade for that speed with combat elegance and efficiency. Getting through the game fast enough without NG+ felt great.
With that said, Tales games are designed with combo counters in mind, as much as people dislike comparing it to action games and fighting games. Games such as DMC, NG, Bayo, Rising, etc. balance their combo essentials with difficulty. Many of the broken combo videos on Xillia and from what I've experienced throughout playing the game are only on normal enemies. I honestly think Vesperia prior to Xillia was the best and more consistent way to infinite combo bosses with Overlimit. Infinite combo scenarios with Tales games in the past are more often cases where the player knows the ins/outs of the combo system, where they're on NG+, or if they're later on in the game. Going against higher combos, imo, just goes against the
entire idea of LMBS itself. It's a system that is
built on having decent combos and getting fights done as fast as possible for higher grade.
I would really wish they'd fix their difficulty settings, too. Don't make the stats multiply like crazy because the fights just get
tedious at that point (namely HP). Giving bosses extra skills on different difficulties would really make a difference as opposed to simply inflating their stats. Give players a genuine reason to play on these higher difficulties. Items, grade, something.
If Xillia's bosses are supposed to be providing some sort of newfound challenge, then I'm surprised people aren't thinking of bosses from games prior to Hearts that were challenging to a certain degree without enforcing this sort of thing on the player.
If you ask me, the
real problem that Tales battle systems truly have is the AI systems in place that make things easy to exploit in the first place. Fix that first and foremost before applying (imo) unneeded fixes to a battle system that relies on a combo system.
