Tales of Graces Has a Groovy Sort of Chat System

Namco Bandai shared details today on two Tales of Graces game systems, one with a typical RPG system name, the other not so typical.

First up, a system with the typical name of "Critical Gauge." During battle, your characters have a blue gauge below their HP gauge. This gauge fills up as you strike your foes and evade incoming attacks. Incur damage, and the gauge drops. Filling the gauge up allows you to perform a critical hit. Let the gauge drop to zero, and you end up taking a critical hit.

And now for the less conventionally named system. One of the trademark features of the Tales series are the dramatic skits that characters break off into as you run about on the fields. Graces features a slight twist on this: the Groovy Chat system.

The chats in Graces look like this:

I presume it's groovy because of the chibi characters. But it could also be groovy because one of the screens shared by Namco Bandai shows the mabo curry item floating around: