Tales of Arise

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.