Tales of Innocence Review by: deggle - 9.5/10
Objection you aren't Innocent as you say!Hello, everyone and welcome to another Review and Slay just kill me already.
Here is a game I really enjoyed playing so much that after playing the japanese version I was glad to know there was a patch online
I could use so I could understand more of the story. Namco Bandai has never ceased to make a bad Tales game, Innocence came
out in December, 2007 for the DS with the assistance of Alfa System and sold over 200k copies. But don't let the title of this game
get to you it's far from Innocent. Trailer Link
[url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8p6dtfoCDO8[/url]
Preset: The story focuses on a young Merchant's child named Luca Milda *Or Ruka if you prefer* Who is having strange dreams
about a demon king Asura and he is in a Giant war between the Sensus and Ratio. Later that day Luca runs into a young girl and
her mouse hybrid thingy namely by Iria Animi and Myusu and rescuses her but during that time he gets a memory about his past
lives and that he has obtained ancient powers from a past life. And with the help of Iria and others who own these powers from
their own past lives they all team together to save the future of their world while learning more about who they were and why they
are reborn.
Game Past-Life Settings: The universe of Innocence split in between a divine/refined world of Devaloka which is the world where
Asura lives and is made up of Sensus and Ratio, and the human world of Naraka. The people/demons of Devaloka could only live
with Human Souls so to survive King Asura wanted to use an ancient device called Manifest so he could merge the Human world
and his world but many didn't like this and started a giant war. The war ended with many of both sides dying and Asura loved
Innana betraying him and stabbing him and his allies but before she could win he murdered her and dyed after. So the manifestation
never completed and the population of Devaloka died out. And now into the time of Luca, the Capital city Regnum was also in a
state of War but they were searching for people called Avatars who are the people of Devaloka reincarnated and are hunted down
for their powers.
Graphics 8: Okay so most DS games don't have good graphics and aren't exactly 3D. Well they pushed the DS to it's graphical
limits when they made this game which took tons of time and it worked all out in the end. Everything is wonderfully designed and
rendered in the 3D aspect and the character sprites were truely impressive it was hard to decide whos I liked most, the monster's
also had very nice designs and even all the NPCs had some detail to them, Battle Graphics amazed me on how much was done all
characters had great attack motions, spell casting was made pretty straightforward on how you stay still and do some movement
and the spell occurs, damage recoilidge was inbued correctly in this game as well. The world map now was just darn beautes the
water was too clean if you ask me so shiny and good I wanted to drink it :/ stupid game tease. The towns and cities were also done
and when an event appeared it went fluidly whether they were walking or running away from someone, all dungeons in this game all
had the right feeling and colouration tone of the blocks that were inputted putting any kind of feeling to it.
Bad things: I talked a ton on that last section sorry but finally some dirt. Okay this game was a horrible idea to put on the DS port
really this game could have sold over 600k I bet if they waited for 3ds to finish because the DS was the slowest graphic and worst
to graphically design a 3d based game and it shows like LOTS of times on the World Map mostly. So basically what happened is
the characters turn heavily and I mean very heavily pixelated it looks like the half a square circle around their bodies. The Monsters
doe were some of the used models from previous games but in this they look unique in their own way...nevermind they look uglier
than moldy cheese and you saw this a lot considering monsters spawn randomly on the world map. Another let down was how
identical most the corriders of most of the dungeons could seem I mean rlly? I can't tell you how many hours I spent in this game
just getting lost because every room is almost exactly the same. And half of them were monotoned to perfection which can be bad
or good however you look at it.
Sound/Music 10: It's not a Deg, review until the sound/music is a perfect 10/10 :/. So instead of having some lame bad
instrumental interpretation of the original vocal song for the opening they give you they actually give you the original. The opening
and Final Boss theme yes, they use it as the final boss theme because it's so beautiful and dramatic and fits both of the situations
perfectly I mean seriously they couldn't have picked a better song to start and end the game off. The battle music was a mix of
emotions for me first it was, I want this as a ringtone the beat rocks and I just really can't describe it o.O it's just that Mr.Nakamura
composed the soundtrack for this game wonderfully it's just so perfect to me and considering he was a different composer he didn't
slack off he tried his best to best the others who worked for Namco. Though most of the dungeons owned the same theme it's just
that the music in the game was made for tons of situations it can fit almost anywhere. And the voice acting for the game it was just
great they fit the voices and characters greatly and there was no wait/lag when a character's mouth moved so it was timed perfect.
Now I'm not going to make a bad things section for this but make another paragraph for extra thoughts. Now even though this
game had most likely the weakest theme when it comes to Battle Music and most fans didn't care for it but I did because he was
trying to protray the feeling of the story itself or that's what I think. Now I want your thoughts on the theme tell me what you felt
from listenning to this.
[url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzXKiwaomCU[/url]
Difficulty 9: Do you like grinding? Do you like game overing a lot? Then I have the game for you! Bring it in folks, Tales of
Innocence was evilily difficult and annoying to navigate I can't tell you how many times I rage quit on this game from the massive
spikes. Ahem, okay so you get to choose between three settings easy, normal, and hard (Don't choose hard I'm not responsible for
you breaking the device or game I warned you) Okay so let's say you chose Easy the game is going fine you are racking good
levels and such but then out of nowhere a difficulty comes before one of the bosses in the game that are impossibly strong and you
need to backtrack because the World Map monsters are the only ones that actually give you Exp but guess what it's still low as
heck and you stay there for hours trying to grind and you finally beat the boss you think you got it down but the game says no the
difficulty just changed to normal mode but wait theres more the difficulty spikes up about 3 more times. I was practically level
maxed at the end and I still died to the final boss like 5 times. So lesson learned always choose easy mode. Another fun feature in
the game is that after you complete a dungeon you have to backtrack all the way through Mean? Yes? No, they wanted to help you
not annoy you but it came off as annoying, luckily the last few dungeons you don't have to backtrack probably because they are
long! One last thing is Monsters they spawn randomly and since dungeon floors are so thin you are basically fighting every minute
and sometimes they'll spawn on-top of you which activates a non-escapable battle. So they made this game annoyingly difficult that
you can't even buy darn weapons and armour either so yeah have fun.
Addictiveness & Depth 8: These two are close enough to be considered the same section. Now this is what you call an Action-
JRPG so basically we have our favourite instructions: 1.Dungeon Grind, 2: Items, 3.Inn/rest/save then finally rinse and repeat. This
game should take you maybe 25-30+ Hours to complete but maybe double that if you want to do everything you can complete,
but stop there and take a breather there is so much storyline enjoy the wonderfully scripted events and skits you can enjoy. A fun
thing you can do in this game is the FP-System basically this game added a Friendship system where you can have fun events and
skits with vertain characters and they get more friendship when you choose the right answer for the that situation or you use them a
lot in battles. There is also a big thing you should do in this game and it's the Guild no, seriously if you actually want to progress in
the game with Good weapons and money to actually buy that stuff please use the guild as much as possible like I said earlier due to
massive difficulty spikes weapon and armour cost grows massively if you don't want a game-over every battle do the quests.
Woohh I'm soo addicted on.... This game since we are farther up the family of Tales of we have a special feature called New+
Where you basically transfer everything exciting right guess what with this you can totally destroy this game made me cry happiness.
Deg? Are you alright in there? Quiet petty human! I'm remembering my past and destroying this pathetic excuse for a boss x10 exp
WOOT...yep :/ let's just say I had to stay away from video games for a while.... There aren't really any Mini-Games only thing
there was is Obtaining recipies then cooking them and Quests. A new fun feature that this game made was the Style System where
you could change your character's fighting style a good thing about this was you could even change the Ai's styles too there are six
style namely Guardian, Wisdom, Advance, Tech, Versus, and finally Innocent. They actually help you out in battle so use them
wisely and level them all up, Innocent is actually the last one to obtain and hardest if I remember because why not.
Bad: Seriously all that needs to be said is Mini-Games could have really been added but they totally made up for the lack of extra
gameplay so don't worry.
Camera and Controls 4: This game had a very understandable tutorials and instructions that you couldn't get lost in Battles so that
made fighting very easy and the fun thing is when you accidently click attack your character still moves straight to the enemy to cut
them up so no worries. Okay the camera work was also done very well with this game you got to have a large perspective of the
map and the character which made navigation not too hard the only problem with that was the Map.
Characters 5: Hmm I just thought I'd play around with this section and see if you guys would enjoy this or no. kk there are six
playable characters in this game and I'll give you some brief info on them. But first I have to say this game worked so well into
character development the whole game literially revolved around all the characters never really changed aspects there are moments
were it mainly focuses on one character but for a brief event like a memory or something but they made it focus on all of them
recovering their memories and why they exist today and how to better themselves and stop their differences and join together once
more as they were partners in the old life.
Luca Milda- 15, Male, weapon = Two Handed Broadsword - Luca is the main protag of the game he is a basically the Shy
Introverted Honor Student who is always picked on and used by other kids mostly two of his classmates. He was King Asura in his
past life
Iria Animi- 15, Female, weapon= Dual Guns- She is one of the main female protags, She is the Impulsive, Hot-headed, Quick to
anger girl who loves to tease Luca so he can man up. She was Innana in her past life Side-Note Innana was Asura's lover
Spada Belforma- 17, Male, weapon= Dual Blades- He is basically the snobby rich kid type butler who follows him everywhere
and such. Who just wants freedom from his rich life, he is very loyal and protective to Luca and is very Bold. He also teases Luca
with Iria sometimes. He was Durandel in his past life- Durandel is Asura's Loyal sword and best friend who can talk which is why
he has such a protective nature when it comes to Luca.
Ange Serena- 20, Female, weapon=knives and daggers- She is the Level-headed Logical one of the group she is also a priestess
and is very self-conscious about her body. She was Orifiel in her past life- Asura's Tactical right-hand man she was a man yes.
Ricardo Soldato-27, male, weapon= Rifles- He is the quiet wise mercenary who learns that he needs Luca's help. He was Hypnos
in his past life- The guy who was Asura's main enemy in the war but now wants to start over with him.
Hermana Larma-13, female, weapon= Knuckles- She is an Orphaned girl who is the youngest of the group but acts like a mother
to Luca a lot but sometimes the group can't take her seriously because she's still so childish and immature at times. She was Vritra
in her past life she was the caretaker of Asura basically like his mother.
Storyline 9: The story starts with you Asura fighting hypnos after you kill him you wake up as Luca Milda thinking it was another
dream not knowing it was a memory of him, today you leave your mother and father to "Play with friends" from class not knowing
they were going to be rude to him and they played a game where the purposely made him lose and he has to buy them lunch, when
he was going he finds Iria and Coda not knowing they haven't eaten in days and buys them food then they head to the school field
there his classmates get angry and start to bully him because he was supposed to buy them lunch, but Iria gets angry and stands up
for him they run away and she tells him he needs to fight for himself and she has go not knowing that soldiers are looking for them
so they all get trapped by the soldiers in the School field and Luca is awakened "which means his powers from asura wake up" and
they fight the soldiers and exit the City because the main Antag is looking for them and they need to find more Avatars and save
them.
Gamepla- Unlike most of the Tales of games this one was heavily influenced by Battles which contained lot's of players favourite feature of Real-Time action battles which were pretty fast paced and not slow and empty while containing enough difficulty so it isn't super frustrating to the player as most games have 4 allies in battle you only got to take 3 with you but you were able to switch whenever you pleased another new feature to add to the battles was Awakening where your characters obtains strong power and you can achieve great combos and take down the enemy way quicker, one pet-peeve most had were the save-points in the game you could save any time on the world map but in dungeons there was always only one save but what players didn't realize how helpful these were as they were actually usually placed next to the boss or a big scene just in-case the player needed to go back. They even graded your fights and dealt grade to that grade so you could figure out a new strategy for the next battle.
Pros- Great Music, Awesome characters and development, good storyline, lots of Depth and Addictive gameplay, great battle system
Cons- Very Difficult to complete,
Between- Beautiful but glitchy Graphics.
Final- This is a very well made game suitable for anyone who would want to test their skills against the difficulty of this game or for those who want fun and memorable characters and a wonderful soundtrack and a very unique and exciting battle system.
I hope you all enjoyed this review and have taken this game in your mind and if you could also cross your fingers for the remake to come out in English!
Graphics
8 Sound
10 Addictive
8 Depth
8 Story
9 Difficulty
9