YMMV / Tales of Crestoria

• Awesome Music:
  • The Normal Battle Theme. It may not be as hype as some of the Mothership Tales titles, but damn is it by far one if the catchiest.
  • The Boss Battle Theme and the secondary boss theme "Prepare Yourself!" are high-energy Jazz-piano numbers, perfect for throwing some hands, resolving some plot-points and maybe putting down the phone to jam out a little.
• Base-Breaking Character: Misella is easily the most polarizing character introduced to the game, on account of her Single-Target Sexuality Loving a Shadow personality towards Kanata. Some think she's a likable character, whose Loving a Shadow nature makes her interesting since the narrative often alludes to the idea that her love for Kanata is more so an idealized version of him, with many finding it to be interesting since it follows the series Deconstructor Fleet nature to do so, on top of thinking her design is cute, and her gameplay makes her worth using. Others dislike her for coming across as a Satellite Love Interest, whose only character traits are liking Kanata, being insecure about her bust size, and often resorting to threatening to burn people for comical effect, and she has had almost no character development in terms of moving past her Single-Target Sexuality, especially by the time the game ended, in comparison to almost the entire rest of the cast who have since their introduced in some way (Yuna being arguably the only exception). Pretty much any time she gets brought up in regard's to her personality and character, the topic becomes split between supporters and detractors.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: When it comes to Raid battles, the most commonly suggested, and picked, setup involves loading up on characters who have multi-hitting attacks, equip your characters with Torment Memoria Stones for increased crit damage, and have them unload as soon as the enemies break bar pops. Raid bosses easily fall apart to builds like it and it makes grinding raid bosses a breeze.
• Complete Monster:
  • Count Senegal of Northmine, the Arc Villain of Chapter 4, has a fiery hatred for the people of Southvein. Manipulating Luke fon Fabre into starting an avalanche that wipes out half of Southvein's population under the guise of a peace offering, Senegal arrives and has his army wipe out the remaining survivors—which include innocent children. Disguising it all as an act of justified retaliation, Senegal attempts to have the heroes and Luke killed for attempting to expose him.
  • Malcolm Sloat is a scientist who seeks to create a system where humans can change their appearance by swapping souls with each other. Testing this hypothesis on humans and monsters, Sloat has transgressors kidnapped, their souls forced into the body of monsters and vice versa, uncaring if the subjects are killed by his scientists. With children not being safe from his experiments, Sloat was also responsible for using Emil Castagnier as a test subject, injecting him with enough monster souls to create the toxic split personality Ratatosk, which he views as a personal achievement. With dozens upon dozens of body bags filling his lair, when he's encountered by the protagonists, Sloat can only brag about his intelligence before attempting to kill them with his prototype monster.
• Demonic Spiders: Katz. While fragile and not dealing a lot of damage, they have party wide hitting attacks that hit multiple times. Furthermore, as you start to increase the difficulty for whatever quest you are doing, they start to appear more and more, eventually becoming the normal enemies for Very Hard and above, meaning they will spend each turn they survive hitting your entire team with strong attacks. Light and Dark types are the worst of these, as because of how they deal effective damage to each other, these types of Katz go from relatively weak hitting, to being capable of taking chunks of your characters health in one turn.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: The gameplay has some fun elements, like trying to create unique teams based off weapon styles, elements, and Memoria Stones. But it's tedious due to limited EXP gains, poor Auto Battle AI, crippling bugs affecting the gameplay, and fights that ramp up in difficulty way too quickly to try and make the player spend money to skip the grind. By contrast, the story is generally seen very positively by players, even with some feeling it went a bit darker than some would have liked.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Kanata/Vicious was a more popular pairing than the heavily canon-hinted Kanata/Misella. Misella is a very contentious Base-Breaking Character whose Yandere traits made her hard to root for, whereas Kanata's befriending of Vicious had heavy Ho Yay undertones and read as a typical Love Redeems story with an Idiot Hero redeeming the game's Satanic Archetype, making it a very appealing ship for a great deal of fans.
• Fridge Brilliance: In Chapter 4, the reason Senegal falsely reports Luke as a hero instead of as a killer is because if he falsely reports Luke as a killer and Southmine's destruction, not only will Luke be branded as a transgressor, but it may lead to another war against Medagal or Luke's parents hiring an assassin to kill him. It makes sense if you know that Senegal has no intention of turning Luke into a transgressor.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Norma. Despite being a Super-Rare with the lowest attack of her rarity, she has two of the best skills in the game: a party-wide attack buff, and a party-wide heal. While the overall amount they buff/heal isn't that high, the fact she has two support skills that affect the entire party, alongside her max ascension skill giving the party around ten percent more HP, makes her the best support character in the game. This is especially true in Raids, as she can ensure parties last much longer than they otherwise could. She also has very high Defense and HP for an SR character, meaning she can survive long enough that the five-turn cooldowns on each of her abilities can wear off and allow her to cast again.
  • The SSR version of Forte, one of Those Two Guys from the story. While his partner Assid is far from bad, Forte is so much better that it's not even close. Forte's Acuteness ability causes Attack Up and Critical Hit Up on all allies for a few turns, which is useful in just about any party combination. Ghost Rush doesn't deal much damage, but it hits everything on the field at least eight times each, which racks up the combo chain like nobody's business; increasing the attack's level buffs this to as much as ten hits each. Also, he's a surprisingly good anchor, having nearly as much HP and Defense as fellow Stone Wall Estelle from Vesperia. Finally, Forte's Mystic Arte deals decent damage and is guaranteed to inflict Curse, which will deal a huge amount of extra damage after two more turns. This makes Forte invaluable in the PVP arena, as his high-combo ability, excellent Status Buff, high max HP, and useful Mystic Arte make him a blessing for his allies and a nightmare for his enemies.
  • The Wildfire status ailment, which deals 1.3x damage to the afflicted character when any of their allies takes damage. This applies to ALL allies (besides the affected character) at once, so any attack that hits an entire party of 4 units will see the Wildfire character taking almost FIVE TIMES the usual damage! Naturally, any character that can inflict this ailment has the potential to be a Game Breaker, with the most notable examples being Emil (who can inflict it with a skill on a mere 2-turn cool down) and Sorey (who can inflict it with his Mystic Arte, which he can potentially fire off every three turns). One Wildfire unit and three high-offense allies can wreck an Arena team in VERY short order.
  • For Raid battles, Burn. This status effect causes the enemy to take a good chunk of damage on its turn, as you would expect with Poison. However, while Poison deals damage as well, Burn increases the amount of damage inflicted by itself each turn it remains up. What this means is that its possible to inflict Burn, and by the final turn it's up, the enemy can take a large chunk of their health out thanks to its self-stacking nature. In Raids, this allows someone to easily break a boss's defense bar because the damage is applied to that as well, meaning if you inflict several Burn debuffs, you can potentially tank large chunks of the boss's health out, while still being free to attack as needed. While most Fire units have them, characters like Sorey and Cress can inflict it also, making it relatively easy to get and use. Lailah and Guy in particular are placed highly, the former due to both of her Artes having the ability to inflict Burn and the latter's Mystic Arte being guaranteed to inflict it.
  • Ascension Gift Boxes. If you ever get your hands on one, say goodbye to grinding for a character. An Ascension Gift Box contains all of the materials you need to raise an SSR character's level cap to 100, based on the type of character (Fire, Wind, etc). This lets you skip grinding Story quests over and over while letting you reap all of the rewards. While these Gift Boxes are relatively rare since they only show up in special events, just getting your hands on one will make completing most missions a breeze.
  • The Mid-Season Upgrade versions of Kanata and Vicious released for the first anniversary are considered very powerful in the arena. Kanata's Rending Tiger Strike deals more than double his attack to all enemies three times, and the survivors get hit with Debilitate. Vicious has Cursed Prison, which inflicts both Debilitate and a defense down debuff of up to 44%, the Debilitate lasts for five turns, while the arte itself has a three turn cooldown. There's also no way to avoid it; the only way to block the effects is to have an ability or Memoria Stone that prevents Debilitate from applying. Finally, both of them have Transcended abilities that allow them to deal up to 100% more damage to anyone with Debilitate, and up to 100% additional damage if they're in the arena. So that's triple attack power against someone in the Arena against someone who's Debilitated when maxed out. The two of them are dangerous enough on their own; together, they deal so much damage so quickly that battles in the Arena become a joke.
  • The Mid-Season Upgrade of Misella, "Everburning Resolve", is no slouch either. While she lacks raw power, she makes up for it with combo numbers. Her Blessed Heat at max power buffs the party's attack by 28% while also healing them. And her Embracing Flames does very little damage but hits 17 times at minimum and 35 times at max level. And then there's her Mystic Arte Hellfire Flood which buffs the party's attack by 35%, and does 35 hits at the lowest Awakening level and 70 at max Awakening. This means she can hit up to 105 times and buff the party's attack, all in one turn. There's also her awakening skill which buffs wind damage by 120% at 60 hits, which can easily be obtained by her alone. Misella has easily become one of the top healer units not just in Wind, but in general. Even though she lacks the survivability and durability to stick around for a while, the buffs and combo potential she has make her a force to be reckoned with.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Aegis being falsely accused of the death of Queen Rebecca, who had feelings for him but he did not return them, becomes a lot harder to look at after it was announced that Aegis' voice actor, Tatsuhisa Suzuki, had an affair with a fan of his, and it had led to his wife, the well known pop singer LiSA, going into a state of depression not unlike what Aegis goes through after he is falsely accused. Even worse when Suzuki himself goes through a similar bout of depression after the scandal broke news.
• High-Tier Scrappy:
  • Estelle was widely feared/despised in the PVP arena. Having a powerful single-target heal in First Aid is bad enough, but her Mystic Arte, Sacred Penance, hits the entire enemy team and heals up to 45 percent of every ally's HP (including her own). Factor in her Awakening bonus (which increases the max HP and Defense of Staff and Light-type allies respectively, both of which apply to Estelle herself), and you've got a character that's nigh-impossible to bring down. Estelle's high staying power is balanced by her offense being the worst in the game among SSR characters, with even her Mystic Arte dealing pitiful damage and adding only one hit to the combo chain. But since you automatically lose an arena fight if time runs out, all the AI team has to do is stall. Estelle-based teams are so infamous that some players will immediately forfeit the battle if matched against her rather than waste time trying to kill an effectively-immortal enemy.
  • The "Love's Fool" version of Zelos was hated in PVP for the same reasons. He's also got First Aid and a Mystic Arte that recovers HP to his side, but instead of damaging the enemy, it also casts Attack Up on all allies at the same time. The Memoria Stone he comes with restores up to ten percent of Dark-type characters' HP every turn, which also applies to him. And his Awakened ability has a small chance to not cause a Dark-type character's cooldowns to activate when they use an ability... which again, also applies to him. This means there's a small chance that Zelos can cast First Aid on an ally, then instantly be ready to cast it again. And using First Aid still charges his Overlimit meter. If both "Love's Fool" Zelos and Estelle are in the same PVP party, you've basically got no choice but to aim for them first and hope they go down before they recover enough damage.
  • "Living With Sin" Kanata was seen in arena teams after his release, even more of a threat due to his Transcend board giving him an Attack bonus if he was fighting in Arena, on top of the innate +200% Attack bonus the Arena grants all characters. This meant that if you ran into him in your arena runs and you didn't either have your own Kanata or a Water element burst damage, you can kiss your team goodbye if he decides to use Rending Tiger Strike. In fact, this version of Kanata was such a broken and frustrating character to deal with, that many stopped playing Arena because of him.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!:
  • One complaint leveled towards the Limited Events was this. All of them are the exact same format; five-six story missions that usually end with a fairly easy fight mixed in with some story missions that only are for plot, five-six free missions for grinding items, and lastly a three difficulty tiered raid battle that players can use if they have the special event currency needed to exchange for the fight. The events boil down to "grind enough raid currencies, then go raids for better event rewards" until the event ends. As a result, many find the events to be disappointing because they are so basic and samey, and the only real differences are bonus characters and rewards. The one event to notably avoid this was the "A Green and Swarmy Night" event, which instead had the free quests drop better rewards, and the raid boss was locked to one difficulty (Hard) but dropped better rewards too. The developers thankfully began mixing up the progression system for events after this, but the events still suffer from similar issues of feeling too similar in progression.
  • One complaint the game received was that the seasonal alts reuse designs that existed before in some form (either as alternate costumes in their home game, or are unique costumes made for other spinoff titles). Due to this, a number of players expressed annoyance that the developers didn't create their own alts for the game outside of the new characters, especially because anytime they teased a character, players can easily tell who it is just by looking up past spinoff designs and tell from a quick glance who the alt will be.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Critical Tech Memoria Stones were the worst Memoria Stones in the game. On paper increasing the chance of landing critical hits is good, but not only do most of the effects cap off at very low percentages (at full Awakened the highest percent they increase is only 20%), but their outclassed by Torment Memoria Stones, which give a flat crit damage percent buff instead and and usually scale well as they are Awakened more. Since breaking a HP bar means all attacks become crits, this means its more beneficial to simply focus a team around Torment stones, use base attacks to break the bar, and then unload Mystic Artes onto the boss since they also become boosted by the Memoria Stone's effects. To add to it, the SSR Tech Memoria Stones are the only ones of value if you do try to use them, where as many R and SR Torment Memoria Stones are able to be used over SSR ones, simply because they act as a backup if you lack a specific Torment type.
• Magnificent Bastard: Assid and Forte are twin scientists under King Gadel with a fanatical loyalty to the goddess Kasque. Finding faith in the deity after a dark period in their lives involving the brutal murder of their parents, Assid and Forte performed brutal gambits, including forcing a bandit to kill a child then broadcasting it on Vision Central, in relentless attempts to summon Kasque. Happening upon Kanata Hjuger and the Transgressors, Assid and Forte quickly earn their trust with feigned niceties and appeal to their common sensibilities. Whisking away Sonia, Kanata's sister, to Yednark, Assid and Forte plan to use the girl's grudge against Kanata to either destroy the city or have Kanata kill her and frame the disaster on Vision Control—with either result favorable for them. Strong-willed, faithful, yet cruel and manipulative, Assid and Forte responded to Kasque's descension with Tears of Joy and undying servitude.
• Narm: The otherwise-serious first encounter with Kasque gets quickly made hilarious when she calls Vicious a himbo (a portmanteau of "him" and "bimbo", referring to a man who is polite but dumb). Not only is that not what she says in Japanese, but the use of slang from what's supposed to be a god sounds awkward.
• Obvious Beta: The game upon release was plagued with constant crashes, poor performance on the Android version, softlocks, the inability to use the chat feature without the game crashing, and laggy Raid battles. Rewards from gameplay were often lost to the void and never entered the player's inventory, and time-based missions were often locked for more than half the day for unknown reasons. Patching eventually fixed all of this.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The brief glimpse we get of what happens to transgressors who are taken away by enforcers. When an enforcer touches Kanata, he sees a dimension of nothing but empty space and the screams of the condemned. The only other noise present is that of howling winds.
  • The fanatical devotion most of the populace has towards the Vision Orbs and Enforcers, and near-mindlessly adheres to their judgments, no matter how unfair it seems to sensible people, is more than a little offputting, and is eerily similar to the blind devotion found in real world cults and dictatorships.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Having to play forty arena matches to claim arena rewards each week. The player is given five arena tickets at a time to use, and they refill very slowly — the player only gets an arena ticket back once every two hours. Furthermore, rewards reset each week, meaning the player will have to do more than five matches a day every day for a week to get the rewards in the first place. This was especially bad in the Western version of the game, where the developers forgot to include this detail, leading to players not getting rewards until they found out about the feature by looking at the Japanese version. It's widely hated for all these reasons, and seen as a mode designed to draw money from a player because of the fact that you can pay gleamstones to refill the gauge instantly, which can be purchased with real-world money.
  • Auto-Battle is disliked due to the Artificial Stupidity it runs on. Characters engage in silly behavior when Auto-Battle is on, ranging from wasting Mystic Artes on enemies that could easily be killed with a normal attack, to healing a near-full HP character over someone lower on HP, to the game having characters attack the leftmost target unless manually diverted. It's helpful for farming on weak enemies, but for anything else, it's not very useful.
    • This is a reason why Arena battles that a player should lose on paper are winnable, since the enemy party runs on similar AI during Arena matches. The issues with healing and Mystic Artes remain, and the AI just attacks the player's characters without regard for HP or type-advantages, seemingly picking random targets for each move.
  • Raid battle lock out. If a player fails to complete a raid they opened within the time limit, the game automatically marks it as a failure and requires the player to go in and accept the loss. While its easy to do so, because of a borderline Game-Breaking Bug many players experienced that prevents raid battles from launching but still count as having done so, it means players can't even close it out, meaning they have to wait three days to be able to initiate raid battles themselves, and not because they made a mistake but because of the game's programming flaws. In events, where raid battles are the best way to get the event currency, this means players have to either join other players to even get more reward currency and points, or they have to grind the normal quests which drop barely any points or currencies.
  • You can't have more than one of the same-named character in the party, which is something of a frustrating restriction. For instance, you can't have Asbel from Tales of Graces and the Halloween-exclusive Count Asbel in the party at the same time; you can have one or the other, but not both. This seems like an arbitrary restriction to many players, especially since you can have the same-named character (or even the same character, period) by selecting them as a Guest-Star Party Member before a quest starts. Why you're allowed to do this with someone else's characters but not your own is generally seen as a confusing and needlessly-frustrating restriction.
  • Required Guest characters, especially for quests with Bosses in them. While it makes sense in a Story perspective, in practice it can lead to loads of otherwise avoidable deaths. This is especially true if the guest characters in particular are weak to the boss' element, as it makes getting all three missions completed on that quest all the harder to get. Worse yet? They stay even when you complete the mission (though thankfully, only on Normal difficulty), so if you want to fight the boss again to get the gleamstones you missed, you'll have to find a way to work around them.
  • You can only select ten Memoria Stones each time you want to convert them, upgrade them, or adorn a character with them. It becomes a slog to do this only ten at a time, particularly when grinding materials in story levels as you accumulate Rare stones, which do little more than take up space. One of the biggest requests from players is increasing the max number of stones that can be selected or the ability to auto-convert Rare stones in these instances, but there's been no plans to change it.
• That One Boss: The Wind Titan from Velvet's Side Story 5-5. The Titan is a durable and hard hitting enemy who has several multiple hit attacks alongside having a break bar like other bosses would. What makes it a frustrating fight is that you are forced to have an NPC Velvet and Presea in the party, two characters who are not earth element^note Velvet is water, Presea is fire. Velvet being a water element means she's at a disadvantage and will likely just die in one-hit. It also means the "no casualties" bonus object is virtually impossible to get unless you're so over-leveled that you can kill the boss in only one turn with just two characters. ^note Though you can just pay twenty Gleamstones, revive and claim the bonus that way, that would require you intentionally lose the fight to get the option to do so. Thankfully, a later patch changed the NPC Velvet's element to Earth, but the fact you're forced to use the two NPCs can still be a problem for newer players.
• That One Side Quest:
  • Dark and Light Power-Up Quests. They have roughly the same enemies and difficulty overall as the other elemental quests, but due to the Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors nature of the game making both deal effective damage to each other, both quests become far more frustrating then they should be, since it means you can't simply tank through the damage like you can other elemental quests. Once Katz start appearing more as well, expect to see your front line nearly completely wiped out by them due to the damage boosts and party wide attacks they do. In fact, its safer to just bring along other elements simply because its better to take neutral damage rather than buffed damage.
  • The Alliance Quest sidequest. The reward being a free SSR copy of Sorey is a good reward for those liking him or wanting another SSR water character, but the sheer amount of time needed for the sidequest borders on insanity. The player needs to complete several Level-Up Quests to unlock Sorey, and then complete ten quests of each element several times in order to fully max him out. The quests take a lot of AP to do, and while the fights aren't very hard, the fact you need to complete almost 200 quests just to unlock a single character, one who is a Palette Swap of an already in game character, really makes the reward seem just not worth it. The only rewards besides it are free Gleamstones, but they come only when you level Sorey up to different points, making the quests simply too grinding and timeconsuming to be worth unless you very periodically do them.
• Tear Jerker: Orwin strangling Naya to death as a Mercy Kill, which includes a special CG of the couple looking into each other's eyes with tears streaming down their faces. Orwin doesn't even bother telling his daughter the full story when she regains consciousness and puts her dad on Vision Central out of despair. He fully embraces his fate until Vicious talks to him.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Not a lot of people are happy with the crossover characters being removed from the manga adaptation.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The game's story falls into this. The world the story is set in is incredibly bleak, with all authority figures being apathetic at best and flagrantly evil at worst and things constantly going badly for the protagonists due to being framed for crimes while the truly monstrous villains get away scot-free over and over again. The very first chapter of the game opens with Kanata having to save his childhood friend Misella from being sold into sexual slavery by his own father and being Marked to Die for it. Said Misella is a Yandere who routinely attacks and abuses the rest of the party. The party also contains the universe's equivalent of Satan. Even the citizens aren't much better, with most of them being Black Shirts who turn on innocents on a dime. While there were various reasons the game was shut-down, some have noted that the darker story played a role in why they stopped playing the game; after a certain point, it became hard to care for the characters as things continued to feel dark.
• Unexpected Character:
  • Mieu of all characters became the third EX Summon, and thus a playable character. Not only he was just the mascot of his base game, he came before three of the main characters, namely Tear, Natalia, and Guy, were playable themselves, with Tear not even making an appearance in the story, whether main, side, or event at his time of release.
  • Mecha-Asbel was also added in as an EX Summon, and thus a playable character. In the Updated Re-release of his home game, he was nothing more than a side-character/attack for Pascal, who wasn't even in Crestoria at the time of his release.
• The Woobie: Pretty much everyone in the party can qualify, although Vicious leans more towards Jerkass Woobie. All of the heroes (save Vicious) are good people who are labeled Transgressors not because they did something inherently wrong, but because other people took advantage of the system to frame them for something.

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