Tales of Xillia Remastered

Genre: Action-RPG / JRPG

Players: 1

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Review:

Tales of Xillia, the thirteenth main installment in Namco’s Tales series, is an Action-RPG and JRPG originally released on PlayStation 3 in 2013, with this modern remaster, releasing in 2025 on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch, bringing with it improved visuals, new quality-of-life improvements, and all previously-released DLC content.

The presentation here is good, though this is a 10 year-old game and it wasn’t exactly pushing boundaries when it first released. The subtly cel-shaded 3D visuals are good, with some nice character designs, and both the voice acting and the anime-esque soundtrack is good (save for the overly-monotone performance of one of the deuteragonists, Milla), but there’s little here that I would say is extraordinary. Also, I should note that I did notice some slowdown at points, and there’s some pretty noticeable aliasing.

The game follows a pair of protagonists in the fantasy/sci-fi world of Rieze Maxia. Milla Maxwell is a defender of the spirits of the game’s world who aims to put an end to a dangerous new weapon being developed by humans only to have her mission go awry, and Jude Mathis is a medical student who finds himself pulled into Milla’s conflict and soon becomes a fugitive alongside her. Overall this is a decent story of war and environmentalist themes with mostly good characters (though, again, I’m not fond of Milla’s callous and condescending personality).

Of course, then we get to the battle system and… by now it should be clear, I’ve never been the biggest fan of the Tales series’ odd, clunky button-mashy real-time combat. This is probably the best attempt at it yet, and it gives the player more freedom of movement and more character interaction mechanics than prior games, but it’s still clunky, and combat can easily get hectic to the point where it’s difficult to follow.

Overall, I think Tales of Xillia is a good step forward for the series, and Tales series fans should absolutely get this one. That said, I think the lingering issues with its combat system and the problem with half of its pair of protagonists being somewhat unlikeable both keep this from truly rising to the heights of other entries in the genre.

tl;dr – Tales of Xillia Remastered is a remastered port of a 2013 PlayStation 3 Action-RPG and JRPG. This game improves on some of the issues I’ve had with this series over the years, making for one of the better entries in the series, but with the clunky, chaotic battle system and one of the two protagonists being pretty unlikeable, I don’t think this game rises to the level of the best games in the genre. However, series fans should be delighted with this one.

Grade: B-

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