Tales of Heroes Unite

I’ll preface this look into Tales of Crestoria by saying I typically do not look forward to mobile releases, however, this one was an exception. I have been playing Tales of Crestoria since its western release, this review will also be from a completely free-to-play (F2P) perspective.

Story

I won’t spoil much about the story here, rather I’ll address one of my main fears when patiently awaiting the release of this game. Would this game simply be a gacha hero collector? I’m happy to say, its definitely not! The story has the feel of a mainline Tales of game, and in my opinion could even be made into a console game if they desired. Now its different in certain aspects as it is a mobile game, there is no free world exploration or anything like that, your menu systems wont be anything groundbreaking to those of you who have played gacha style games. But when you do dig into the story portion it has a gripping feeling that gives you the feel they really cared about it.

Game Modes

Tales of Crestoria has multiple game modes, missing from the above picture are the PvP Arena battles. Power-Up, and Gald Quests are pretty much exactly what you would think, battles to obtain either power-up items or gald. Limited time quests are great opportunities to get extra items as well, they are not overly difficult and can have generous rewards, especially for the free-to-play player.

Gotta Gacha Them All

Time to address the elephant in the room, the Gacha system.

Now there was one thing they did with this title that I thought was absolutely awesome. When you start a new game you are given the option to pick one SSR Character to receive so that you can start the game with one of your favorite Tales of characters.

Moving forward from that, the Gacha system can be quite rough at times. The rainbow border characters you see above are all of the SSR units that I have acquired since release as a F2P player. There is a noticible power gap between an SSR and SR unit in the game, and as of the time of writing, only SSR units are able to use Mystic Artes (the games strongest techniques). Which does make it feel bad in a way when you do a 10 time summon a few times in a row without getting an SSR. Which by the way from my experience I defeinitely recommend saving your stones (the red stones youll see at the top under the gald/coins) for 10 times summons as they guarantee atleast an SR unit or higher.

They have released banners to address this issue partly, they recently had a one-time banner that guaranteed 3 SSR units in a 10 time summon. The part that proved to be partly difficult for me is that the majority of my first SSR units were all of the same type (Wind, and Water) which limited how effective I was in raids where I needed a different element.

Now to be completely clear, you can 100% clear the story, the difficulty I speak of was when trying to go through Raids of “Very Hard” difficulty.

Now beyond the story and casual play, if you are looking to climb the PvP ladder then thats where things become less friendly towards the F2P players as it becomes increasingly difficult to get characters past a certain point.

But especially if you are like me and just looking for a way to spend some more time in the Tales of Universe then I really believe you will get a lot of enjoyment out of this one.

That’s all for JRPGnow’s quick look into Tales of Crestoria. The devices used to play include: iPhone X, iPhone 11 Pro Max, and iPad Pro where the game ran very smotthly. It will be a heavy battery drainer, however that is partly to be expected with the gorgrous visuals.

Stay tuned to JRPGnow for more details on the Tales of series and Tales of Crestoria!