The combat really didnt look that bad to me, but i will see when i go through it. Atm i am playing through Xillia. Almost done with it. My main complains is that the series seeems to be falling in the same pittfalls as all other JRPG's. Still too slow paced for the first 25 hours. The story hardly moves. The last 15 hours are more like it.
The reusing of assets during those first 25 hours can get annoying aswell. I am hoping better things from Xillia 2 and the next mainline Tales games graphically with the sucess Xillia had. In terms of combat and game systems though, the game is pretty good though. No complains, wheres in Graces i disliked most of it.
There is still that japanese desgin where the game's combat doesnt get really fun until the later half of the game. Though its not like the combat on Xillia is bad at the beggining, it gets alot better further down the road.
These are the mistakes JRPG's stil fall into. Pacing, non-interactivity (not required if you have a good story pacing though) and the design where you must go through a grind to finally unlock the good part of the game. It needs to ne more imediate. We should be having fun from the get-go and should be motivated to keep going all the time. Tales of Abyss managed that for the most part, im sure the Tales team has it in them.
