4, 8 :P, 10, 14 (Zaveid or Eizen not applicable answers for obvious reasons), 15, and 16 <3
These got long so I’m gonna put them under a read more just so I’m not flooding people’s dashes.Thank you for them though. xD
4. Favourite party setup?Early game I think it was Sorey/Mikleo and Alisha/Lailah if I had her as a partner. Later game after picking up Rose I ended drifting a bit more to Dezel and ended up favoring Edna as Rose’s partner to exploit enemy weakness I believe. I stilled used Mikleo a fair bit when I need more ranged with the armatus though.So: Sorey/Mikleo & Alisha/Lailah early gameSorey/Dezel & Rose/Edna mid to late game
8.Favourite attachment?I didn’t actually use any attachments or costumes in my first playthrough so I don’t really have any favorites. Maybe second playthrough. xD Although if I had a certain dlc then Sorey would have a certain gosh darn whale on his back the whole time, clipping or silliness be darned.
10. Favourite boss fight?Ooooooo, this is a hard one. Mmmm. Probably the Sergei fight honestly, he beat me several times but I really enjoyed how I had to get creative and really read into his movements and patterns to beat him with just Sorey. And honestly I never really got frustrated with this fight, just more determined to actually beat him and honestly it was a really rewarding fight. Runner ups would probably be the Zaveid fights and also all the different battles against Heldalf at the very end of the game. There were some darn good fights in this game in my opinion.
14. Anything you wish we could have learned more about?Fiiiiiiiine. Honestly I’d loved to have seen more about Heldalf and Michael, either their connection or just them individually. Like they both had important parts in the history of why certain story events happen, but I don’t feel like we got more than just below surface level on either of them, and I feel like there would have been a lot of potential to explore who they were and tie into deeper into the story itself. Maybe that’s just me though.Also Dezel’s relationships with either Lafarga or Zavied. I want it darn it. Give me.
15. The game’s theme is “passion”. What part of the game are you most passionate about?Oh gosh, I don’t even know where to start with this one. I guess one of the biggest things is just the characters. Sorey in generally hit me really close to home as I find him incredibly relatable and through the whole game a lot of his struggles and also victories hit me really hard because of it. They might not be the most well written cast of a game and some of them are stagnate or a bit backtracking in the character development department at times, but none the less, and it’s hard to explain, but for me the cast had some kind of spark that stuck with me through it all and left me really in love with them in the end. Maybe it was skit interaction, or just the idea of the armatization stuff with trusting someone enough to be able to trust them with a true name and then pair up like that, and maybe a lot of it is just my interpretations of some things but I don’t care. And I love them. I don’t know if that made any sense honestly but hey that’s my answer.
16. Free prompt: just talk about your personal ties to the game, go goI could write a novel. I really could. But I’ll try not to. I mean I think I touched on a lot of the game elements that I really love already so I’ll go with something a little different.So I got my start in Tales with the Symphonia anime with a certain friend, :P terrible idea or not that’s how I started and I don’t regret it in the slightest. I got hooked and ended up picking up both Symphonia and Zestiria for cheap in a steam sale at same friend’s suggestion, and to start I tried playing Symphonia. And I’ll admit I got burn out and a bit bored after a while for various reasons so I which I won’t discuss here because it’s not relevant to where I’m going with this and I kinda stopped playing. During this burnout was about the time the Zestiria anime was airing and I was seeing various harmless gif sets and images I had spoilers blocked across my dash and it got me kind of curious, so I said heck with it and started up Zestiria not entirely sure what to expect but hopeful that it wouldn’t be a drag like Symphonia had become.And let me tell you I fell in love immediately and just burned through it. I was dumping countless hours in on my weekends after not playing during weeks due to classes. I can’t count the number of nights I stayed up till like 2 or 4 in the morning just to get up the following more and dive in again. Again I can’t explain exactly what it was but something between me and the game just clicked and I poured my heart into it, just loving every minute. Even the frustrating boss fights weren’t enough to make me stop for longer than a couple hours at most to regain my head or make my hands stop shaking.I cried several times in this darn game Dezel had me going for at least a couple hours and then kinda hollow at times for days after I’ll be honest and have spent countless hours analyzing and headcanoning since. I haven’t really wrote much in the way of fic yet but that because I’m waiting to understand how Berseria plays into everything. But I guess what makes it stand out is that at the time about a year or so ago I think actually is that I don’t think I’d been so into a game with that much vigor in quite a while. I’d played a few other things off and on of course, but with school and other things eating up my time I just hadn’t let myself really get invested into much, nor found much that allowed me to. After beating the main game I walked away with feeling I hadn’t felt in quite a while and honestly it felt amazing.I’ve found the feeling again more recently with a few other games I’ve played, Abyss being one of them, but as silly as it sounds in some ways I like to think Zestiria was kinda a reminder to me that even with getting busy and having a dozen things to do for various things that sometimes its fun to just step back from the classes, creative writing, whatever and just let myself have a good time with someone else’s story and just enjoy myself. And honestly I think I’ve played more games and read more books since because of it.I ended up writing a short novel anyways but hey, it is what it is. If you’ve read all this then applause for you and I’m just gonna end this with saying no matter what anyone else thinks of the game whether it be good or bad I’ll always love it for what it is and what it brought me, and I’m grateful for all that is.