Like I said earlier, I enjoyed IU, more than Vesperia in some ways since Vesperia was just a minor step up from the other Tales games and the storyline, sidequests, achievements, etc. were pretty badly paced and bloated to try to push the game's length past the 100 hour mark. While IU was refreshingly brief, and I thought it brought a lot of interesting things to the table like big event battles with all the party members participating at once and winning conditions other than killing everything and even some bonus objectives and rewards. Also bear calvary, as impractical as it is.
But at the same time you can tell it was pretty badly rushed/unfinished. Like half the characters aren't fully implemented so they can only be assigned to tiny scripted bits during story events (early on it isn't bad like when you're fighting in that village, but it's a bit disheartening later in the game to just see them through a window clear a room that only has 2 or 3 enemies in it and that's all there is for them to do in the game), or that there was once a day/night cycle planned that got axed. And there's also some plot elements that felt orphaned like the Claridians.
You also only had a few special moves from what I recall, and the link system was sort of interesting but awkwardly implemented. Would have been easier to just switch characters, but that probably would have taken time they didn't have. Don't really have much AI control either and the lack of shortcuts is annoying. It's also possible in the post game to break the game mechanics so badly it's literally impossible for you to get a game over, but other than that, and the Gabriel Celestie fight glitching out, and the non inclusive difficulty achievements (1 lousy point for beating the Seraphic Gate on the hardest difficulty level? fuck you tri-ace) I still enjoyed the post game. I also find the Seraphic Gate boss incredibly amusing in a morbid/black humor sort of way.
As far as Agarest goes, well it's an Idea Factory game and Idea Factory games are Idea Factory games. Their audience pretty much consists of a. people who don't know any better and assume they're about the same level of quality (well as far as extremely low budget titles go) as NIS or Gust b. people who are desperate for anything even remotly anime/jrpg related c. masochists d. people who are absolutely dumbstricken by how bad their games get at times and keep buying them to enjoy them ironically as part of the whole kusoge phenomenon (and also maybe a little of c)
Some of their games such as
Chaos Wars, Neverland Card Battles, Trinity Universe, or the Neptunia series are tolerable, even acceptable in terms of gameplay mechanics if you don't have super high standards and don't mind the lack of story or the bugs or the poor balancing or scraping the bottom of the barrel budget audio/visuals or what have you.
After that it kind of spirals down into the abyss, a labyrinthine nightmare of grinding, item farming, and event flags. Trying to get the true ending in an IF game is hell. I'm not particularly proud to admit that I actually did about 90% of
this ( basically up to the part where you have to finish the Abyss Gate before fighting the normal final boss to unlock the Spectral Tower and the true last boss). That doesn't quite express how much time is spent grinding, or trying to solve obtuse puzzle maps to get to story battles or collect the dozens of shards littering the maps, or farming certain random drops needed for certain titles that are needed to solve some puzzle or to unlock some completely unrelated area just because, or how stat caps are higher than the previous game but each individual point is only about a third as effective, or how much time is spent synthesizing and how many thousand times you have to mash the confirmation button through menus to make one +999 attack/magic clay and every party member paricipating in battle needs four of them on their weapons to really be viable for the end game/post game content, or how pretty much every boss battle consists of racing to finish them off (and hopefully overkill them) before their SP bar fills up and they try to wipe your entire party out with one six square wide AoE attack.
I'm drifting way off topic but I'm bitter about it. Now I haven't played the Agarest games but while they have a bit of a following of people who stuck around after mistaking it for porn from the trailers, it sounds like they fall more into the "true ending clusterfuck" category. Spectral Force 3, too.
