I love/hate Tales games. I love certain aspects about them like the battles and characters, but I hate certain aspects about them like the cliche stories. Still, sometimes a team working on a Tales title is able to pull off both a great battle system and at least an above average plot, and then I'm entirely on the love side of the game (Abyss). OTOH though if the battle system is weak and the plot is weak I'll hate it (Tempest). Most of the time though the Tales games just land around middle ground with me, with loves and hates in the same title. Innocence is no exception from the norm.
Battle:
The battle system in Innocence is great. Created by Alfa System, who did the Tales of the World games, similar to those games ToI takes the latest battle systems from the mainline Tales entries (Abyss & Destiny Remake) and incorporates them into their own unique system. Battles are 3d on 2d planes but with a free run button like Abyss, and allow air combos by letting players use their special attacks in the air similar to Destiny Remake. The game always features the "dash through enemy" move from Legendia, which is very useful even in a 3d space with free run. In addition a nice new feature is the ability to switch between characters on the fly simply by hitting the L button. This lets you change characters mid-combo while your previous characters is still in his/her attack animation and then you can follow it up with something else. Also unique to ToI is the awakening system, which is a red bar that builds up with combo hits and when it's maxed players can release a custom-combo similar to SF Alpha 2 where they do attacks fast and switch between characters to create large and damaging combos, or they can do a hi-ougi that does a ton of damage (worth noting that hi-ougis here are not once per battle, but as many times as you can get them off).
The AI on the characters is pretty good. On their defaults they fight fairly intelligently and do decent combos both on the ground and in the air on their own. Even if you turn your character to "auto" and just let the cpu fight, they'll usually do fairly good and win most battles that the player could. Then there are scripts you can buy at the grade store, aka FFXII gambits, that let you be more specific about what you want the characters to do. It's not setup in a way like FFXII though where you basically are doing video game AI programming, but rather it's a slightly more detailed version of the old Tales AI like telling them to use "the spell that cures the most" when curing instead of a weaker cure spell. My only issue with the AI is that no matter what you put your healers on, I swear they will not heal you until you are almost in the red. Personally I like to be healed when I'm at 50% life, but the AI does not see it my way. Still, it's good enough to get by.
Overall the battle system is a lot of fun. Most of the characters are fun to play as (at least the physical ones), and there's a quite a number of attacks learned by all characters, so you can have some variety in your combos. Just the fact that they got an Abyss level 3d battle system working with no compromises on the DS is quite the feat. Playing good 3d Tales battles on the go is now finally a reality.
Graphics
The visuals in ToI are amazing considering the hardware they are on. Battles are 60fps fluid and smooth with good looking characters and lots of effects. Unfortunately they are so taxing on the hardware I actually crashed the game mid-battle once; but that seems like a rare occasion and normally it's fine. Cutscene graphics are great as well. Looks like a PS2/GC Tales like Symphonia or Abyss except pixelated and low-poly. Towns look fantastic as well, though you can't rotate the camera in them and their all very tiny with only stores, not houses, to enter.
Definitely the best looking 3d game on the DS. Good art goes a long way on top of solid tech to make it a standout.
Sound
I thought the music in the game was fine. It's not Sakuraba this time around. Just some small guy, but the themes all sound fine like most Tales music. The only downpoint is there aren't many tracks so you here the same ones over and over. Normally Tales games are 4 cds worth of music, but I'll be surprised if this is 2 cds.
Voice acting is great when it exists, as Namco Bandai went all out in getting some top name actors/actresses to flesh out these characters. But most of the game is text only due to cart size limitations. The game has thousands of pages of dialogue in hundreds of skits, but only about 1-2% are voiced as those ones are usually part of the main story. Now if you've been playing the US versions of Tales games you will feel at home with text skits, and will be happy that at least you can advance them at your own pace now, but if you've been playing the Japanese versions for the last 6-7 years where almost every skit had voice, it's a bit of a disappointment. The main storyline has voices for the major scenes, so basically the first and last 2 hours and a scene at the end of each dungeon between, but there's still a lot of main plot done in text only.
Sound quality is a mixed bag. Voices sound ok, but for instance the opening song by Kokia with headphones is really grating due to the realmedia level sample quality. Sounds better without headphones
Music sounds fine as it's all synth anyhow. Gameplay
World map - Decent size but nothing to do on it. When you eventually get transportation, it's a bit pointless since there's nowhere to go ^^; Graphically it looks fine, but the mapping makes it hard to find the next town without hugging all the walls until you get there.
Game structure - Linear. There are no sidequests in the game, which is a bit of a bummer for Tales as they always have all kinds of cool little side stuff to do. Instead there is a "gild dungeon" which is basically Tales of the World put in ToI. Every town has a guild shop and you go in and take a "quest", which are not actually quests but just "go find item/herb/fight monster in the 2nd screen of the dungeon" and then you go to the local guild dungeon which is randomly generated and very, very simple with just monsters, treasures, path branches, and is two screens long. At the end you'll find a red chest on one branch which is the item you are looking for, or a colored monster which is the monster you are looking for. After you get the item or beat the monster it'll warp you back to the guild shop and you'll get some money, grade, and your guild rank will go up. As your rank increases you can take higher ranked quests, which are just the exact same quests, but the monsters are higher level and rewards are better. There are infinite quests as it just keep recycling them and the quests at the guild shops in every town are all identical, though the random dungeons in every town are graphically different. Basically it's like the "item world" in Nippon Ichi s-rpgs but nowhere near as in-depth. It's just a place outside the main story where you can go and level up against ever increasingly stronger enemies.
Game balance - The result of the guild dungeon is that the designers have no idea what level players will be at during any particular point of the story. This means they have to do the game balance like N1 does game balance...just not have any. All they do is up the enemies about 5 levels per dungeon (levels take A LOT longer than other Tales to gain as the xp required is high. Took me about 10-20 mins per level) and figure if the player is not strong enough they can go grind guild missions until they are. So the pacing is basically: do a story dungeon -> go grind in the guild dungeon -> do a story dungeon -> go grind in the guild dungeon, which kind of kills pacing. Also because there's no balance tailored to the player's levels you'll find yourself either underleveled, having fights take a while, or overleveled, having fights end before you can finish a combo. Neither is just right.
Dungeons - If you've played Legendia you know exactly what to expect. Remember that last dungeon in Legendia that had long sprawling corridors to run through with branches that take you 1-2 mins of running to get to the end to realize they were a dead end and then back track to the last split? That's ToI's dungeon once you get the intro ones. No puzzles, just lots of running over long distances with maze-like branches. Also remember in Legendia how for many dungeons (at least in the character quest half) you had to run all the way back out after finishing it and re-find yourself out of the maze? ToI is like that too, where for the majority of the dungeons you have to get all the way back out which could take as long as it took to get to the end in the first place since you can still get lost on your way back. Everywhere also looks the same, which doesn't help much.
Encounters - Not helping the dungeon design of long straights is the encounter rate. Enemies are visible, yet they spawn every second and usually block your path or sometimes appear behind you and ON you so you can a battle with a back attack. In some dungeons there's room to run around and on the main world map it's easy to avoid enemies, but in most dungeons the encounter rate is a bit ludicrous. I had more battles by the end of ToI than any other Tales game to date.
Cooking - Worth noting for Tales fans, that recipes are in. But this time you find them in chests and there are no cooks (though strangely the boat people look like chefs). Also new to ToI are linked recipes where even though you've found one recipe, you can't "unlock it" until you've found another one that it's linked too. Don't really see any benefit from adding that system, but whatever, at least there's still cooking.
Nicknames - Worth noting for Tales fans, that titles/nicks are not in.
Style System - Similar to the ring things in Abyss and other rpgs with equipment that grows and give skills, in ToI you have styles. You equip a style on a character and it gives stat benefits and detriments like armor. As it levels while you wear it, the stats gain and decrease further. Meanwhile every few levels you get a skill from it that goes in your skill bank and you can equip 3-4 skills at a time. You can switch styles are any time depending on the situation. For instance putting on a decently leveled guardian style ups your max HP and DEF/M-DEF, but it will lower your ATK and INT. It's a useful system.
Weapon Synth - You can synth items with your weapons at weapon stores. For instance if you take a fire rock and synth it with a sword, the sword will now have a fire elemental property. Each weapon can hold three properties/abilities.
Length
Because at it's heart, the game is a Tales of the World style dungeon crawler with random dungeons there to level in until you hit the max 250, as well as there being a final 100 floor random dungeon, some players who just want to play and level with a fun 3d battle system will find almost endless hours in the game of leveling.
Others who just want to play it for the rpg portion, will get about a 30 hour game for the main story, though it's more of a 15 hour rpg padded to 30 hours with the required leveling and backtracking out of dungeons doubling their length. It's definitely longer than Tempest, but I'd put it around Eternia, Phantasia's length. No sidequests besides the guild dungeon might make it a bit shorter.
Story
Story is ok. If you've played a lot of Tales games, just think of a middle line between their good and bad stories and you'll have ToI. It's a shorter, smaller, tale that's made more for portable size than an epic console adventure. There aren't many antagonist or characters outside the main good guys and few villians, so it's more short and straight to the point, which is fine. There's still the usual anime cliches and the motivations for people are often terrible and change on a whim (a Tales specialty), but it's enough to keep you interested, though maybe not be enough to make you care about what's going on.
Characters are about the same. They aren't bad characters (few Tales characters are), but they aren't a particularly memorable cast compared to other Tales games. The antagonists less so. The main pair are not particularly likable, while the supporting cast are. Still better than most other rpg casts (like Tales casts usually are).
Overall
Tales of Innocence is a solid DS rpg as long as you know what you are getting into, which is a 50% dungeon crawler aka. Tales of the World and 50% normal Tales rpg. The 3d tales battle system has been transferred extremely well to the portable realm, and due to it, the fun battles should make the very weak/annoying dungeons and leveling/grinding ok. Those who hate grinding with a passion and play Tales for the story should stear clear, but those who play Tales for the exciting battles should feel they get at least their money's worth with ToI.
If you've been playing the JPN version of Tales games, B-
If you've been playing the US version of Tales games, B+
