Tales of Graces f Remastered PS5 Review. I’m of two minds when it comes to remasters: I either want a full overhaul or the exact same experience on different hardware. Naturally, these are relative preferences depending on the game in question. For stylized games, they benefit the most with a remaster that simply upscales visuals. This is the approach that Bandai Namco Entertainment took with the release of Tales of Graces f Remastered.
Tales of Graces f Remastered Review (PS5) – Breathing New Life Using Thoughtful Adjustments
All Content In One Place
To everyone’s benefit, this release of the game also includes all of the additional DLC that was released after the initial launch in 2012. In particular, major story DLC called Lineages and Legacies adds some additional bits of time to hang out with the team five years after the events of Graces. In fact, Sophie’s circumstances relative to the rest of the team truly come forward. Since I didn’t play this DLC when the original game came out, I will spare and spoilers for it here. However, I will say that it gets pretty somber.
It’s also worth mentioning that this DLC comes with a caveat. The additional story adds a nice bit of extra story, but you spend most of the game crawling around in dungeons you’ve seen before. It may not sound like much, but the majority of the 5-10 hour runtime will be in said dungeons.
With that said, the core content from the original PS3 release of Tales of Graces f remains mostly the same. This is for the best. Tales of Graces f released back in 2012 to a decent Metacritic of 7.7. However, Tales of Graces f is one of the many examples of a game that ages very well. Before Graces, combat was mostly a linear affair. Sidestepping made its first appearance in Graces, and this technique has been a staple in the franchise ever since.
Hindsight 20/20
In fact, Graces made the sidestep almost fundamental to successful combat. Unlike most Tales of games, Graces provides you with limited Combat Points (CP) with each representing the use of an attack or ability. This is opposed to CP in other franchise entries behaving more like mana. The game limits your combos based on how many Combat Points you accumulate. Yes, certain gear you craft increases your CP.
That said, the real magic of this game’s combat comes from the proper use of sidestepping. If you time sidesteps to evade attacks, you regain CP. Theoretically, as long as you have attacks to sidestep, you can chain combos forever. Hypothetically, executing said theoretical combo chain requires enemy familiarity as well as perfect timing. I manage to pull off a successful sidestep that also generates CP about a quarter of the time, but it feels awesome every time it works.
Another thing that makes a good remaster is how it balances modernization while maintaining the original experience. Graces f does a handful of things to bring the game into the modern light without going too far. One handy feature is that the game identifies where time-sensitive events are located near you. The only thing that would make this addition even better is if it showed all time-sensitive events no matter where you are on the map.
Improved Navigation
In my experience, the indicator does not appear unless you are a zone or two away from where the event starts. While not perfect, this addition does help you find extra content without intentionally taking you too far away from the story beats. Another similar addition is the constant marker that shows you where you need to go to progress the story. Anyone who knows the Tales of games also knows that these titles regularly create situations where you don’t always know where you need to go right away.
Personally, the most user-friendly addition to this remaster is including the Grade Shop from the very beginning. In many Tales of entries, the game provides you with a litany of options, allowing you to transfer most of what you earned and upgraded in your playthrough into a second playthrough. In those cases, the amount of points you can use depends on how much of the game you completed and explored.
In this remaster, the game offers the entire store to you immediately. To boot, you receive enough points to buy everything available to you. Naturally, you won’t have any gear or titles unlocked on a first playthrough, but you still get increases to earned experience and skill points as well as boosts to health and damage output.
A More Enjoyable Grind
After writing out the previous paragraph, these boosts definitely come across as game-breaking. In some ways they are. At the same time, they provide options for players to experience an older game. All Tales of titles provide difficulty levels, and Graces f is no exception. With that said, these boosts make the harder difficulties more accessible right away.
Plus, the increases to experience and skill points allows you to farm more readily and see results more frequently. To be frank, this game requires a great deal of farming to max out all titles and level up each character. Even with these boosts, leveling everything still takes a good while. However, much of that can be done while playing through the game organically while using these boosts. Even with the boosts, this process takes a long time, but seeing results more regularly helps make the process more digestible and enjoyable.
To top it all off is the retry option. The original release allowed you to retry boss fights when you lose. In this remaster, retry is available in any battle where you lose. Combine this with the boosts and the more accessible difficulty, and you find yourself with many more ways to enjoy this game without many of the old-school consequences.
Modest Yet Effective Touchup
Tales of Graces f Remastered maximizes its own potential by utilizing many options that already existed in the game. By adding boosts to practically everything, players can customize their experience to cater to their wanted playthrough. In addition, this release includes almost all of the DLC that was released on the PS3 version, both in the Japanese release and the localized release. Ultimately, Tales of Graces f Remastered remains the same in terms of core gameplay. With that said, if you have ever had even the most remote curiosity in this outing, this is the perfect version to play.
Tales of Graces f Remastered is out now for PS5 and PS4.
Review code kindly provided by publisher.