Yeah, that was my point: you don't need to muck with fusion much at all to play as a casual player.
... 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.
I mentioned later however that there aren't nearly as many of those as skills in Vesperia or Graces, and for that matter the Xillias or even Abyss. You get a couple over the course the game and they're useful but it's certainly not as elaborate as skills in those games, nor do I get the impression they intended it to be. It's more of an auxiliary system, something you should watch and configure but clearly not the core of the game's subsystems like Weapon Skills in Vesperia and Zestiria, Titles, the Xillias' Orbs, or C. Cores.
Every game has some obscure or tedious abilities to find. It's nice that Zestiria tells you (Graces needed at least some kind of hints for some of those titles...), but in Graces and Vesperia you can play through normally and get enough. I don't feel any game, including Zesitira, asks you to make a big investment just to be able to get ones that will let you beat 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".
I don't feel you get weaker often in Zestiria, so I'm not arguing that. I do think, however, that "stagnation" is easier (more "acceptable") in Zestiria's core subsystem than it is in many previous games. It reminds me a lot of FFX's equipment system in fact. You can keep a lot of the same skills you had a good deal earlier in the game, or just do things randomly as you said, and even if you're not really getting skill arrangements that are much better than what you had many hours before, you can still push through well enough. I myself remember just trying to preserve the all stats Union bonus on Sorey for many hours since I didn't feel like using the synthesis system to build anything that could be better and more elaborate, and I never felt like the game tried to punish me for doing that. A game like Graces or Xillia 2, even on Normal, would be noticeably harder or more constrained if I let my Titles or Allium Orb stagnate in the same manner by sticking to a Title or Orb Element I preferred for so long, however.
I do think it's a testament to the flexibility of the system, it would suck for a lot of people if the game expected otherwise, but that is quite a difference from Zestiria's main subsystem versus something like Graces or Xillia. I think other games are much more structured to push you down a path of increasingly elaborate and greater abilities in their core growth system, while in Zestiria's you're given more of a choice in how and when your equipment skills get to a level of complexity and strength.
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.
I guess if you count a guided run or a run where you're intentionally trying to make yourself really strong early things change quite a bit. But I'm guessing most people aren't doing that in their first experience through the game. Most people are playing through with the assumption that there's a normal growth curve that's good enough to get them through the game. I think Graces did well enough at that for most situations.
I think Zestiria's growth curve, when considering what the average player will go through, is noticeably flatter than a typical Tales game since you have more choice in how and when you get things, there's more of a zero-sum game to what skills you have rather than most previous games' "you can learn and retain everything" approach, and some of the abilities some previous games would just hand out are a tad trickier to obtain. It doesn't make the game harder, but it does noticeably change how character progression feels.
That's not what happens at all in Graces though...
How so? From the perspective of the normal difficulty (keep in mind this is my whole point here, I'm speaking from the perspective of the average player in their first run who I'm assuming is NOT regularly consulting guides, doing a ton of excessive grinding/farming, or playing on the hardest difficulties they can get to), you really aren't pushed to use Dualizing much. I don't remember really using it much at all in my first play through, using the titles I learned over the course of the game and just buying equipment was more than enough to get past anything. Maybe people didn't necessarily
like it, but Titles were easy to understand, could be highly automated, and in a first playthrough usually flooded in a decent enough rate that you didn't have to watch it much if you didn't want to. You got more complexity added to the mix when Dualizing became a real factor in victory. It's how it went down for me and this seems to have been what happened with a lot of other people. In what context, besides the higher difficulties and post game I already mentioned, does this not happen?
