I'm assuming the average player isn't playing any of these games on the highest difficulty though.
Yeah, that was my point: you don't need to muck with fusion much at all to play as a casual player.
But to use Vesperia as an example, learned skills are retained permanently and usually there was a correlation between the strength of the weapon and the power of the skill, so your collection of skills grew in versatility and quantity simply by getting and equipping newer, better equipment. Or Graces, where abilities learned from Titles were kept, and you unlocked titles by basically just playing the game and doing all kinds of stuff intentionally or unintentionally. Their core character progression system were specifically structured so you're practically guaranteed to build a collection of abilities as you progressed through the game without you even having to put a lot of thought into it.
... If you are talking about Skills, those are Battle Actions in Zestiria. Like, they are literally the same types as the Vesperia ones.
And, you know what? Getting Battles actions is way less obscure in Zestiria than in either Vesperia or Graces:
in Graces you either needed to use a walkthrough, be lucky or have the Titles be linked to the story.
In Vesperia, you need to use a lot of gold and a lot of grinding for ingredients, AND you have issues with knowing where the ingredients are without a lot of work.
In Zestiria... you are told what most of those requirements are, and you then decide if you want to make the effort. Also, you get some via Story too.
In comparison, Zestiria's main skill/growth system isn't as organic with your progression through the game. Not only are the skills not retained permanently, a stronger weapon won't necessarily have "better" skills attached, nor is the game intentionally designed so you're 100% guaranteed to be lead down a path that will give you better skills and bonus skills as you go through the game.
This isn't true though? I mean, if you don't muck a lot with fusion you are guarenteed to get stronger through randomly getting new weapons and fusing them randomly, as well as levelling up.
If you do muck a bit with it, you MIGHT get moments where you get weaker because you are losing a union, but that's all, and that's already "mucking a bit with it".
Battle Actions and Titles kinda exist so you at least have some permanent abilities to use, but your collection of those grows pretty slowly and there's not a ton to begin with. The game isn't unplayable on lower difficulties if you don't use it much, but I'm not saying it's hard to avoid, more about how many previous games the main growth system correlated much more closely with where you were in the game.
This is more untrue for Graces than Zestiria, though Vesperia was not bad about that.
Graces, however, had a lot of titles gated between random activations that severly increased one's power. Same for equipment. So someone with a walkthrough and someone without would have a DRASTIC difference in power really quickly. It was easy, by the time you left the initial Kingdom, to be almost as strong as a player in normal when coming back from the moon.
To me Dualizing in Graces was more of an auxiliary growth system than the main one: useful on the higher difficulties and in the post game, but could be mostly ignored otherwise. Titles were where the bulk of your strength and progression was going to come from for the average player and like most Tales games, it was for that reason that it was made more accessible and developed more organically with story progression than the auxiliary ones. In Zestiria Synthesis appears to be the main growth system, it's the main one they were pushing back before the game released anyway, but it's handled like other games would handle their auxiliary growth systems, not their main one. It's not worse (though I admit I don't like it, lol), but it's definitely a different approach and I can see why people haven't reacted well to it.
That's not what happens at all in Graces though...
