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.