The difference indeed is that Ubisoft seemed to push you towards the microtransactions through content bloat, level gating the main story and in-game UI decisions (like having the premium store next to the regular inventory/skill/etc. menus and even some blatantly psychological fuckery, iirc) with the Assassin's Creed games (or at least that's how I remember it being), whereas Tales has very obviously never been actually affected by the dumb DLC at all--the games have easy difficulties and don't encourage grinding in any way, the EXP boosters and whatever have never been mentioned in-game so unless you go LOOK for DLC in the platform storefront, you won't even know they exist, etc.
Like, it really should be pretty obvious to anyone what the difference here is, but I guess we're throwing all semblance of nuance and actual conversation out the window so we can be fucking mad about this. Yall do you lol.
This part. Ubisoft games feel like mobile games with all of the meters and monetization.