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REVIEW: Tales of Zestiria the X Season 1 Limited Edition BD/DVD


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belvadeer





PostPosted: Mon Mar 05, 2018 11:03 am Reply with quote
This anime, good as it is at doing a better job of moving the plot along, still won't change my mind about how awful the game was.

Last edited by belvadeer on Fri Mar 09, 2018 12:51 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Merxamers



Joined: 09 Dec 2013
Posts: 720
PostPosted: Mon Mar 05, 2018 11:17 am Reply with quote
Is this something i could get into if i know nothing about any of the games? I recall maybe watching the first episode of this a couple years back, is this the one that had animation by ufotable?
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GoldCrusader



Joined: 25 Apr 2017
Posts: 1023
PostPosted: Mon Mar 05, 2018 11:45 am Reply with quote
Merxamers wrote:
Is this something i could get into if i know nothing about any of the games? I recall maybe watching the first episode of this a couple years back, is this the one that had animation by ufotable?

Yes and Yes. It's great.

I really liked how this adaptation turned as a big fan of the game. They really nailed the seraphims as true forces of natures and of course many of the key scenes are superbly animated. They also really nailed the dynamic between the main cast and mainly the one between Sorey and Mikleo. My two favorite Tales characters. I am also a big fan of the Lunarre moments in the first half with is very looney toon style

The anime is also way more positive in its tone compared to the game. Zestiria was a very very dark game. It heavily braches out of the game's story in the second half too.
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Vaisaga



Joined: 07 Oct 2011
Posts: 13242
PostPosted: Mon Mar 05, 2018 12:03 pm Reply with quote
The best thing about the anime is that it finally gives Alisha the justice she deserves after being so badly shafted in the game.
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Eddy564



Joined: 14 Sep 2008
Posts: 340
PostPosted: Mon Mar 05, 2018 12:12 pm Reply with quote
This show had some really nice female characters that really grounded the plot. And they were actually interwoven in the narrative effectively without ever being relegated to anything less than subordinate roles. I enjoyed that.

I’d give the animation an A, personally. It was fantastic. So many wonderful fight sequences saturated in beautiful colors and particle effects.

Overall I do agree that this half does deserve a B. The second half is even better if you can tolerate the climax.
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SonicFanA



Joined: 12 Jul 2017
Posts: 159
PostPosted: Mon Mar 05, 2018 1:08 pm Reply with quote
Thank you for reviewing Tales of Zestiria the X. I consider it one of my top ten anime. I know it is not perfect but I can't help but love it. I love the scenery and colors (Mikleo's eyes are so pretty and he often looks like he is glowing). I also agree that Sorey and Mikleo's relationship is a nice one.

I have been wondering if the manga is going to get reviewed in full.
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xchampion



Joined: 21 Jan 2009
Posts: 370
Location: Idaho Falls, Idaho
PostPosted: Mon Mar 05, 2018 2:42 pm Reply with quote
I watched this series dubbed on FunimationNow and really enjoyed it. It's vastly superior to the Tales of Zestiria video game which is usually never the case. The two Tales of Berseria episodes did make me go and play the video game of the same name so in that regard those episodes did exactly what they were suppose to. Ufotable made the anime so of course it looks amazing. I do recommend watching this series.
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Generations



Joined: 21 Jul 2016
Posts: 206
PostPosted: Mon Mar 05, 2018 5:21 pm Reply with quote
I was looking forward to watching this show because I liked the IDEAS in Zestiria but, like most Tales Of games, they are never fully realized in a badly-told unecessarily-complicated plot.

This is where my opinion seems to deviate from everyone else's in that I somehow dislike this adaptation even more. It completely ignores all of the ideas and ideals the game was at the very least trying to tell in favour of a very generic 'if optimism was enough' shounen plot.

The two positives I can say about the show is that it's really pretty, the locales definitely do the lore of the game more justice than the game itself. The other is that Alisha is given a larger role, which she definitely deserves as she is far moe interesting and more complex than Rose.
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wolf10



Joined: 23 Jan 2016
Posts: 931
PostPosted: Mon Mar 05, 2018 8:11 pm Reply with quote
Generations wrote:
This is where my opinion seems to deviate from everyone else's in that I somehow dislike this adaptation even more. It completely ignores all of the ideas and ideals the game was at the very least trying to tell in favour of a very generic 'if optimism was enough' shounen plot.
I disagreed with where Game!Zestiria took its themes, if only because so many of the darker elements later on just felt tacked on. They were at odds with the story's own initial optimism without actually being reconciled in any meaningful way. It's fine to tell a dark story, but much less so to take a light story and make it dark because you changed your mind 2/3 of the way in when the budget ran out. With Zesty-Cross, Sorey feels much more like the messianic figure he was meant to be.
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Animegomaniac



Joined: 16 Feb 2012
Posts: 4161
PostPosted: Tue Mar 06, 2018 5:27 am Reply with quote
Merxamers wrote:
Is this something i could get into if i know nothing about any of the games? I recall maybe watching the first episode of this a couple years back, is this the one that had animation by ufotable?


Yes, this is all I know about it myself, it was a Video game adaptation by ufotable and I made it though the first episode.. which is kind of a record for me as I dropped Fate/Zero after four and UBW after it hit the length of the movie and it was .. still.... doing... exposition. I think it was three episodes but two of them were double length so...

Anyway, Zestiria. I played one Tales game and I thought it was very much an anime game but the only thing I remember about the first episode of Zestiria was sweeping CG shots of the background that looked like the CPU wasn't quite processing the graphics, like you had to upgrade your video card in order to smooth it out. What did turn me off from continuing because that was obviously intentional...

From Funimation's site, the first episode is Episode 0: Tales of Chaos... of rather the actual episode title is "00 Prologue, the Age of Chaos"... thanks for reminding me, these are the same guys who did Fate/zero. It felt like it was going to be another extended series of expositing plot rather than doing an actual story with characters that are involved throughout. You know, like a "Tales" game.

An aside: I've never seen such low user ratings on their site before. The first episode is usually the lowest rated one because of all the people who gave up on it get their own biased rating to it but for the second episode to go from 2 and a half to 3? That's some dedicated dislikers.
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Greed1914



Joined: 28 Oct 2007
Posts: 4669
PostPosted: Tue Mar 06, 2018 10:09 am Reply with quote
I read up on the game after watching the series to see if I wanted to play it, and came away with the opinion that watching the anime was sufficient for me. The Bersaria episodes definitely took me out of it briefly. I know that "the X" meant that it was partly going to serve as a promo for that game, but it felt pretty tacked on.
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Kadmos1



Joined: 08 May 2014
Posts: 13626
Location: In Phoenix but has an 85308 ZIP
PostPosted: Tue Mar 06, 2018 10:26 am Reply with quote
BTW, Robbie Daymond has said in some YT videos that the reason why he was not the voice of Sorey for part of the 2nd season because he was on vocal rest for 6 weeks.
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Vaisaga



Joined: 07 Oct 2011
Posts: 13242
PostPosted: Tue Mar 06, 2018 12:34 pm Reply with quote
Mikleo's VA was sick for an episode or two this season as well. But those things'll happen with a tighter simuldub schedule. I just don't know if it's common practice or not for them to re-dub those sections for the disc release.
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SailorPluto1313



Joined: 26 Jan 2016
Posts: 118
PostPosted: Tue Mar 06, 2018 1:52 pm Reply with quote
Vaisaga wrote:
Mikleo's VA was sick for an episode or two this season as well. But those things'll happen with a tighter simuldub schedule. I just don't know if it's common practice or not for them to re-dub those sections for the disc release.


Just in case anyone is wondering, I bought the Limited Edition box set for this anime and they did redub those few episodes when Mikleo and Sorey's voice actors were sick.

That was something I was concerned about too, but I'm glad they took the time to fix it for the final release.
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skywardprincessoftime



Joined: 14 Dec 2015
Posts: 11
Location: USA
PostPosted: Tue Mar 06, 2018 2:08 pm Reply with quote
The episodes where either Robbie (Sorey) or “Phillip” (Mikleo) were out have already been redubbed and are on the Funimation app if anyone wants to hear the episodes again with their proper voice actors without waiting or purchasing for the two Blu Ray releases.

Zestiria will always hold a soft spot for me, if only for the characters. I’ve been critical of the anime for doing some things right and some things wrong. While I enjoy Alisha’s story I can’t help but feel Sorey gets robbed in his own story, especially in the second half. They took out everything that made him interesting and turned him into a generic cookie cutter messiah figure who doesn’t want to kill or harm anything and is stupidly stubborn about it. The game actually had him come to terms with the darker side of reality, and how he chose to overcome that.

The characters and how they interact with each other, in my opinion, has always been the appeal of the series, be it the game or the anime.
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