Sorry, Paul came over. I beat Tales of Xillia 2 last week. Its existence exposes the first game's main flaw: It just simply wasn't finished. Let's compare it to Tales of Destiny: That was a full game that could've stood on its own; Tales of Destiny 2 just expanded the story. Xillia is like as if in Symphonia we had just discovered about Tethe'alla and about a dungeon later solved the problem of the mana tree and the exspheres. That's a lot of plot you're missing. Namco tried to throw the vestiges of the first together to create the second game, but it wasn't entirely satisfactory. The episodic system just seemed silly, and in particular having to pay off a 20,000,000G debt off the bat is just insane. I'd turn to Atlus if I wanted a lot of grinding.

But I feel Xillia 2's greatest flaw is its lack of expansion. Going back to that Symphonia comparison, if they made a Symphonia 2^* you'd expect it to be about all that Tethe'alla shit you missed. Xillia 2 did not give any of that: Only four dungeons and one town are original. That means literally you're walking through all the same shit you did in the first game; they didn't even change the graphics at all. I played the two back-to-back over the past couple of days with Paul, and it was somewhat frustrating for me to have explored a place and then finding myself having to do it all over again twenty hours later in another game.

If Namco had just gotten its shit together and made a complete game, I feel Xillia would've been one of the best of the series, but they fucked it up. That's why I gave it such a scathing review last time; they teased me with greatness only to fall short.

^* Okay, yeah, they did. But bear with me here.