>>717871341
When a game loses its traditional overworld map, that's usually a good indicator. So in this case, it was Graces. Even with good gameplay, it was the start of putting less and less effort in each new game.

Xilia didn't have a world map and was mostly linear hallways with no dungeon design at all. Even Graces had dungeon design.
Xillia 2, even though it's a much better game than Xillia 1, still had a mostly linear layout and was reusing a lot of the same areas from the first game.
Then came Zestiria, such a blatantly unfinished experience with cuts everywhere with a terrible battle system, a terrible story, and one of the least interesting group of party members in the series.
Which they then had to course correct with Berseria by actually trying to release a good game, which unfortunately had to be tied to Zestiria's plot by association of taking place in the same world.

Then there's Arise, which was so stripped apart of the usual Tales of traditions that it felt like it might as well not have been a Tales game. A weak story, a terrible cast, incredibly downgraded combat, and the least noticeable music in the franchise outside of the second battle theme that you can't even hear because they couldn't program an options menu that lets you adjust the voices in-battle.

You wanna know why people always talk about the earlier Tales games and suck them off? Because they were genuinely better video games.