Not sure why people praised it to the moon. It's just a decent jRPG at best. Not even in the top 5 Tales of games.
Tales of Generics. Yes, everything in this game is so generic. Generic story, generic characters (except for Milla), generic soundtracks, etc.
The graphics are very poor. Doesn't look like a PS3 game at all. It kinda look like a Wii game or even Final Fantasy XII on the PS2. Maybe Tales of Graces f has better graphics in term of brightness and contrast, everything in Xillia looks very dark and blurry.
The Lilium Orb system is a shameless rip-off of the Sphere Grid from Final Fantasy X, and it's worse than the Sphere Grid. It's like an easy version of the Sphere Grid for newbie players.
The battle system is worse than Graces f, just a button mashing fest.
Milla, one of the best characters of Tales series. Holy cow, this series always make bland characters that nobody cares but when they created a good one, she's a Lightning + Yuna rip-off for god sake.
and the voice actress of Milla... holy crap!! Bandai Namco or Namco Bandai... whatever your company name is, why did you chose this actress to voice Milla? it ruined this good character big time.
The soundtracks are forgettable, same as the previous Tales games. They barely made any good theme that I can remember after I finished that game. I don't know why they gave me a soundtrack CD in the limited edition package. As if I'm gonna listen to it.
Believe me, if this game has "Final Fantasy" on its name, people are gonna bash it to the abyss and gave it a 5.0 or lower than that but since the modern Final Fantasy are terrible, we need to worship the other series to teach a lesson to Square Enix, don't we? so let's give this game a 9.0.... No! I'm not that stupid.
6.0... It's a decent game. If the graphics look better than that and Milla has better voice actress I might gave it a 8.0.