‘Tales of Zestiria’ video game review
By Lauren Paulsen, Senior Columnist
4/5
The Tales series, developed by Bandai Namco Studios, has been very popular for years. I’d been meaning to try out some of the games in the series, but never got around to it, so it didn’t take much convincing on my brother’s part to get me to purchase the new installment in the series, Tales of Zestiria. Though I haven’t played too far into it, I am glad that I got the game, despite a few flaws.
The graphics are absolutely stunning, especially the scenery. If you have a strong enough computer system, then I think you should have the highest settings that you can for the graphics to fully enjoy this experience. If you don’t and have to lower them like me, don’t despair—they are still quite stunning even on low settings. I think the scenery and details are among my favourite aspects to this game.
I cannot attest too much to the story so far, as I haven’t delved far enough into it since this is a massive game that will take many, many hours to complete. The story follows Sorey, a young man blessed with magical powers that allow him to see the Seraphim, angel analogues who aren’t visible to normal humans. He also gains the ability to purify hellions, creatures spawned by malevolent energy, early in the story. Sorey travels the land with his friends to defeat these hellions and save humanity from the malevolence that has overtaken it. It’s a very typical story that I have seen a lot, but I am still finding it enjoyable.
My biggest peeve is the amount of lag in the game. I have a really decent computer, but even so I’ve had to set all of the video graphic settings to low just to get any decent number of frames per second, and even this still has not completely gotten rid of the lag. Although it’s no wonder when you look at the size of the game on your hard drive—it is massive. This does not seem to be a problem on the PS4 platform, only the Windows version from Steam. I’m going to have to look into whether I can improve the performance more, or I’ll be stuck with frustration over how long it takes to do anything.
Another few problems I had with the game may or may not have to do with my lag problems. I started off the game playing with subtitles, but found that they were quite late when compared to the audio. My brother has told me that he found this problem too, and that there are updates in the works to fix it. I also found the pauses between characters speaking far too long and sometimes irritating. I think this is actually part of the game, as even when I improved the performance for lag, I still found the pauses to be the same length. This is different during optional cut scenes that you can choose to view when at certain save points or points of interest. These scenes don’t have the awkward, unnatural pauses.
If you like RPGs as much as I do, then you will really enjoy playing this game. I just suggest that you look into your computer’s specs before purchasing the Windows version. Otherwise, you’ll probably want to get the PS4 version instead. The lag can cause quite a bit of frustration and detract from the game, but if you’re able to play it without that, then I’d really recommend getting Tales of Zestiria.
