I have never played that game, can you go more in detail why they suck?
I played as Jude, the guy, because the female protagonist has less personality than a plank of wood. His whole thing is that he's a young, naïve idealist. This is fine at first, but becomes retarded when the same party member (Alvin) has betrayed us for the 8th time, including shooting your childhood friend in the back.
The female protagonist is Milla, who's got no personality and spent my whole game bitching that I never used her in combat. She kind of starts to have an arc in that she goes from being robotic and emotionless to more human, but then keeps disappearing from the plot (because they hide parts of the story behind who you pick to encourage replaying it and repeatedly split the party up) and by the end has really not changed at all outside of "friends are cool I guess".
Elize is a 12 year old and the only one to wonder why we keep inviting the traitor back every time. Unfortunately she's also a child character in a video game so she's just generally annoying and her ending was unsatisfying.
Alvin is a spy who betrays the party more times than I remember but is welcomed backed shortly after every single time with next to no consequences. They try to paint him as tortured but it just comes off as if they weren't sure what they wanted to do with him and his motivations are never clear. Apparently there was a whole novel written that fleshed out his character but none of that made it into the game so it doesn't matter and I was yelling at my screen every time Jude would say "I trust you, I know you won't fuck us again".
Rowen is an old man spellcaster and probably the only character that didn't actively piss me off. He was okay.
Leia is Jude's childhood friend and is the stereotypical tomboyish archetype but outside of obviously having a crush on Jude she has no real reason to be involved in the story and barely affects it with her presence at all. Her part of the ending amounts to "after we beat the big bad I became a waitress". That's all.
By the time Alvin had betrayed me for the 50th time I was just rushing to finish the game and the final stretch was lazy, unfinished and boring. For a franchise known for its cool final dungeons it was a short, boring wet fart. The ending was unsatisfying. Not even the combat made up for it because they decided difficulty = giving bosses super armor and near impossible to react to counter attacks if you hit them too much. It's easily down there in the bottom 3 of the franchise for me.
Xilia and Zestiria are terrible games saved only by having sequels that are (at least for me) some of the best Tales has to offer. At least I hope you chose the male protagonist side, because the female one literally skips the last third of the game.
I laughed when Milla reappeared at the end of the game and nobody told her that Alvin had tried to murder them while she was gone.
I hear that Xillia 2 butchers the characters from 1 and basically makes a lot of their struggles pointless after the fact which sounds frustrating to me. I do like the way the protagonist looks vs. Jude, and I've heard it's a mechanically better game despite reusing tons of assets from 1, and I plan to play it eventually. I agree with Zestiria and Berseria though, I couldn't even finish Zestiria. The combat and characters were just so awful.
For me the gold standards for the franchise are Abyss, Destiny 2 Remake, Rebirth, Vesperia and Berseria.
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