"Why is it that birds fly?"

This is a story of tragedy, despair, regrets, hatred... and a bunch of more negative emotions clashing with each other, forming the ultimate story of vengeance.

Velvet Crowe, plunges into despair as she condemns the world to chaos, just because someone took something dear from her.

This is a tale of self reflection, a tale of what makes Humans, Humans, but told from the deepest of hells imaginable.

While the game surely involves dark concepts and pretty much what would be considered a villain driven story, there are a lot of heartfelt moments that really makes the game shine a lot.

This is an unhinged roller coaster of emotions, one moment you will be like "THIS ♥♥♥♥ LIT AF, SO HYPE", and then have you smiling and tearing up at characters interactions and their own development.

Character interactions are precious, probably one of the best I've seen in a long time, and since this story is really driven by character interactions and their motifs, the story by itself gains a lot of value from it. The amount of layers these characters have is astounding, being my second Tales of Game (the first being symphonia) I already knew that Tales Skits and characters interactions are often the strenght of the games, but this one took me by surprise given how crips and believable these characters feel, and they truly live up to the message this games wants to give.

Setting story aside, because I don't want to dwell into spoiler territory, let's talk about the other concepts of the game.

Gameplay is both great and very flawed, on one hand, the combat is excellent, filled with lots of rewarding mechanics that those that dwell deep into the core mechanics will certainly enjoy to pull off, but on the other hand, map exploration and level design is a little frustrating, the game involves a lot of backtracking (and for some reason treasure chest content's respawn), and some mechanics that would have been great to have from way earlier, are given way too late, like the infinite "Exit Dungeon/Warp to Town", which are given practically during midgame/endgame, and given how much you have to walk and traverse big areas, the comically slow and unstable hoverboard could have been implemented better.

Fortunately, the combat loop prevents me from totally hating backtracking a lot.

In the sound department, the comically unhinged monster sounds make them stand out, as creepy as they sound, but the sound effects are really good and you can feel the impact of pretty much everything, voice acting (specifically the english voice acting) was really good, you can tell the characters were given a lot of passion.

Unfortunately, this may be some of the weakest Motoi Sakuraba's scores I've heard so far. Sakuraba is quite inconsistent at times, there were a couple of forgettable tracks here and there, and some that, unfortunately, felt really repetitive at times, and there were a couple of bangers too, but unfortunately, not enough to drive the excellent story and characters into a whole new level of epic (and often some tracks feel a little muffled for some reason).

Game would be a ten, but some of it's design did not age well.

Velvet/10