Tales of Arise

Tales of Arise was one of my most anticipated RPGs of 2021. Just seeing the Ghibli look of the initial reveal, myself getting into Vesperia and seeing that they were really taking their time with it instead of the annual releases, I was really thinking that this would be THE Tales game of them all. Granted I have not played much in the series, but I'm not convinced that it actually is.

Tales of Arise has great graphics for sure, a colorful AAA look with big environments, lots of enemy design and just about everything is quite well represented. The best parts is some of the cutscenes going for a Ghibli look, but those are pretty rare in the game and perhaps only 10% of the cutscenes are like that. Still graphically this game really delivers and the developers really managed to push the Tales series into the next level when it comes to the looks.

The game features a massive storyline that is spreadout through more than 40 hours of gameplay, it took me 56 hours to complete the game and wasn't purposely trying to complete all the side quests even, just confident enough to tackle the final boss at the end. The story is perhaps on the higher ends of fantasy, it's well developed in that aspect and while you are still the hero trying to save the world, I think it does manage to avoid the basic tropes of JRPGs. There is a lot of cutscenes of stories and dialogue, and still has the optional dialogue stories that you can have when walking into the world. Those are not essential to hear, but it adds a little bit of comedy between the 6 protagonists which is nice.

The battle system is interesting at first, adding a few layers as you progress with combos with your teammates and even allowing you to use special attacks from the ones that are "benched" making it feel that everyone is really participating into this. However there is a big discrepancy between the regular enemies and the bosses, it's mostly a breeze plowing through the regular mobs and then you get to the boss and the difficulty ramps up very high. Especially in the 20 first hours or so, I just had to redo the bosses over and over again as they were really hard to beat. A lot of this revolves around how many restore CP gels items you have, those cost a little fortune to purchase and are absolutely crucial for longer battles (CP is cure points, which one of your members will use to cure the party. When you run out, you will most likely die)... so there's kind of a frustrating bad balance there, but in the 2nd half of the game you will most likely have tons of funds to buy multiple of those and the bosses will be much easier. Anyway the battle system, but it does get repetitive in the 2nd half of the game with nothing really new being introduced and all the enemies having a similar feel to previous ones you've encountered.

The exploration is mostly linear, going from one area to the next without really much choices. Side quests will make you backtrack (thankfully we have fast travel), but on the whole there's not much decision making when it comes to that. The dungeon design (while very beautiful and different looking from the others) is very similar all around, a "main" pathway and an "optional" one that will reward you good items or better gear. Thinking back the 1st half probably would have been less hard if I just knew that those drops were really essential to get, and re-doing the dungeons by fast traveling back and restoring your health and CP just to get all the treasures was the best strategy. But much like the battle system, the dungeons really overstay their welcome in the 2nd portion of the game with a big lack of imagination, it just feels like we are re-doing the same shit over again but with some new colors.

Overall I think the game was too long. I enjoyed it, but I don't think it's a masterpiece. I would rank this about on the same level as Scarlet Nexus (also from Bandai Namco Studios) as it uses a similar engine but for different purposes. This one does have a much better story however, but I think it misses the mark on great by a little. Side activities like the ranch, cooking and fishing are decent additions, but they all feel pretty limited and not really fully fleshed out. Still if you enjoy action JRPGs it's worth giving a shot, but be prepared to spend a lot of time on the game if you intend to finish... wasn't quite a chore, but definitely felt like it was dragging longer than it had to and probably could have cut 15 hours from the game with the same outcome.

Solid game with a fairly interesting plot and probably one of the best real-time battle systems I have encountered so far in an action JRPG. Combat feels a little clunky initially, but as soon as you get more than two characters in your party, it becomes pretty intense. Even though you can easily survive by button mashing and spamming heal items on normal, harder difficulty settings require strategy and proper dodging. Endgame content in particular was pretty hardcore, even on easy settings.

The story relies on the usual JRPG tropes, even though some interesting ideas start to come out in the latter part of the game. Even at its best it's still quite generic, but I thought it managed to find its own personality by the end. Characters are rather flat but tolerable for a JRPG.

The gameplay primarily consists in running across dungeons and maps while killing monsters. There are some classic fetch quests and "go kill five wolves" kind of submissions, but they are usually very quick, with most objectives very close to a fast-travel point.

While cel-shaded graphics and art direction are always on point, the level design is mostly dull and linear, with a lot of small empty rooms connected by long corridors. Especially when getting towards the ending, it felt like they were left without time or budget to expand the areas or add new enemies. I also experienced a lot of pop-ins even in the least crowded maps.

The direction on dialogues and cutscenes is pretty good, and hardly lets you notice the relatively low budget. Some anime cutscenes highlight the most important moments of the plot, but honestly, I thought the in-engine cutscenes looked way better.

The only thing that seriously bothered me is the amount of dialogue. A lot of it is optional just to expand the lore, but even the main storyline dialogues tend to be too long-winded and repetitive. It's like they are trying to explain the same thing in 20 different ways, just in case grandma didn't get it yet. It's all dubbed and spiced up by camerawork, but they could have told the same story with the same level of detail using 1/3 of the time.

This is my first Tales game and I really enjoyed the gameplay and the story.

Fighting enemies is very fun overall especially doing combos. Being able to switch characters you control and also being able to change the team composition mid-battle was so much fun it also makes every cast of character relevant instead of just chucking them to the side. Using character's assist on appropriate times also felt satisfying. While there are moments the camera pissed me off it wasn't much of a big deal.

The negatives of fighting enemies is the fact that towards the end of the game, enemies becomes tanky so much that it feels like doing a chore so much so I ended up lowering the difficulty in the final arc because it was getting in the way of me enjoying the story.

The side quest is kind of a mixed bag for me, the only side quest I didn't finish was finding owls and the DLC ones. Some side quest have fun dialogues and story/skits which compensates for the chore but others are just chores to do where you are just tasked to kill monsters and such.

The story was so good but really lacked at the villains and Lenegis. The main cast are so well written, they felt real, like for ex Rimwell struggling to accept Dohalim etc etc., the only problem I had with the main cast really is Alphen when he gets the MC syndrome (I am a weeb and some scenes still made me cringe) The villains aren't bad and the best way to describe them is lackluster, there is nothing of note to them. The race struggle was also well executed and beautifully written where they really expand on the problems and stuff. Lenegis' planet felt really empty compared to the regions which contained lots of details for its culture how the people there lived.

Overall a good experience I can see why you'd get turned off towards the end

I don't even fucking like Tales but I just got to basically play the plot of Gurren Lagaan as Vergil if he were a dark skinned metrosexual Power Pole wielding mage while looking at a bunch of eyegasmic painterly vistas and I guess I love Tales now. Ok.

Edit: This is a goofy way of saying I love this, so let me clarify. This is to action JRPGs as Persona 5 is to turn-based JRPGs and Fire Emblem: Three Houses is to strategy JRPGs. This is the new benchmark. Is it a perfect game? No! The back end was on some serious Anti-Spiral shit and that's not gonna be for everyone, though I loved how campy and extra it was. But no imperfection could bully its way into damping just how goddamn amazing combat feels once you dig in, how beautiful the landscapes were, how solid the characters were, the generally meaningful side content, etc. The idea of more Tales titles (or even remakes of older games that had good stories but weak combat like Abyss) in this vein makes me absolutely giddy. Probably my GOTY.

you just fight the same reskins of the same enemies over and over for 50 hours while the interesting class divide/racism conflict gets thrown out for dumb anime bullshit. awesome. i feel like im going fucking insane playing this. considering that the really intricate combat that Tales pioneered has become weirdly commonplace you're probably better off just playing Scarlet Nexus because somehow Arise has worse enemy variation.

or just play Rance VI -Collapse of Zeth- [Rance VI -ゼス崩壊-] because it does the class divide thing properly and has way better combat