i dont know a shit about tales games but this has women and i like women so its good
what the hell are these reviews
my buddy killbutt (he's the biggest tales fan in the world) told me it's the best game he's ever played. normally I wouldn't believe him (he's the biggest tales fan in the world), but he's friends with kanye west, and I really liked his work in the sopranos. so I'm inclined to agree; tales of arise is the greatest game in the
In a perfect world, Tales of would have died with Symphonia and Star Ocean would have been the franchise to survive and prosper.
No, I will NOT take my medication.
In a perfect world, Tales of would have died with Symphonia and Star Ocean would have been the franchise to survive and prosper.
No, I will NOT take my medication.
Kisara :flushed:
Tales of Arise is a criticism of the narrow human perspective & a love letter to all who struggle with their individuality in the form of a video game
‘’Only living for the sake of dying is no better than being a slave’’
This quote sums up what Arise covers thematically & its a story that’s best described as eloquent & unbiased in its portrayal of slavery, racism, & how it uses its premise as a backbone to tell a tale about what it means to be a slave & what it means to be free figuratively. Are we free of slavery if we aren’t wrapped in chains, being ordered around, & tortured over the slightest mistakes? When can we tell if we’re free or chained down by worldly trivial desires? The answer is simple: The change that we desire & aspire to achieve, can only happen within us & we are the ones who decide that ourselves. Instead of staying in our comfort zone, doing what’s expected of us, & roaming randomly in life, making an effort to achieve self discovery, no matter how scary the truth is, is what decides the value of our lives & whether we are chained by this phenomenon called ‘’destiny’’. This message is very simple on paper, but the way Arise presents it is nothing short of special since it actively goes out of its way to show the hardships of trying to break free of the chains of destiny that binds us as much as it shows how rewarding it is to free your heart of its darkness by achieving connections & holding onto them. There are various plot points in the story that show how hard achieving connections is & how narrow minded the human perspective is even from the mcs’ pov & how as a consequence of that, hatred & conflict are everlasting. Alphen fights the lords not knowing that each of them hold a philosophy and much like him, are fighting for people they cherish & ideals they champion. That sort of contrast & the exploration of said contrast creates an intricate narrative that forces the cast into a corner, causing them to question what they initially believed to be right, & undergo a change in their individuality to cope with the challenges presented against them. Dohalim accepts that self loathing may be the easy way to go about your conflicts, but facing said conflicts head on & seeking the truth is far more rewarding than it could ever be. Law realizes that his purpose in life & his Father’s dying words both of which he struggled to uncover so much, could be solved by merely finding someone you can love & taking care of them, & chose to be his own person instead of endlessly agonising over becoming what his father wanted him to become. Rinwell, upon seeing what hatred caused dedyme to do to his own people, realized that indulging in hatred will only breed more and more hatred, until she herself gets consumed by it, & it’s better to walk down the path of life carrying your hatred and using it as your strength instead of allowing it to define you. The best showcase of the theme of individuality & connection mentioned before is none other than Alphen’s dynamic with Shionne, & how they both pulled each other out of their darkness & brightened each others’ lives. The deepest, most fragile, & vulnerable bonds we have, are the ones that cut us the most & cause us the most amount of pain cause of how loosely tied they are to our identity, but it’s because of that, that we risk everything we have to protect them & bottle up our emotions to keep them from cracking down. That kind of bond, that kind of intimacy, is what’s shared between Shionne and Alphen. A bond formed through acceptance, undiluted love, & loyal affection, results in what’s one of the most human representations of connection & how we view them. Connections & love are necessities in our lives, we form bonds to feel complete, to feel needed, to feel loved & wanted, & to feel understood. But at the same time, losing that bond means losing what gave us hope & the ability to live, so the idea of attaining said love, only to lose it, drives us insane with trust issues & anxieties. We wish bonds weren’t needed so we wouldn’t have to feel so regretful about having them & the possibility of losing them, or not attaining them at all. It’s a complex, intricate emotion, yet it’s perfectly captured in this scene where Shionne, a character who’s been closed off & disconnected the entire series, buckles up under the weight of her regrets & sadness over her fleeting bonds. Breaking down in tears, Shionne confesses her rawest feelings with the honest belief that they’ll be rejected, only for Alphen to give her what she deeply yearned for yet rejected cause of a lack of a sense of self worth. This scene impacted me on a personal level & left me speechless since I, on a day to day basis, struggle with the same thoughts, regrets, & depression, so to see such an insecure part of myself represented in media…it breaks my heart but gives me a sense of comfort. Ironically enough, Alphen never truly understood the weight of being able to hold Shionne's hands & how much it means to both of them until he regained his sense. of pain, which puts an emphasis on the idea of connection & communication. It's strange how in a game about slavery, i felt a sensation of liberty & inner peace that I yearned for for so long, & it was fulfilling
‘’Only living for the sake of dying is no better than being a slave’’
This quote sums up what Arise covers thematically & its a story that’s best described as eloquent & unbiased in its portrayal of slavery, racism, & how it uses its premise as a backbone to tell a tale about what it means to be a slave & what it means to be free figuratively. Are we free of slavery if we aren’t wrapped in chains, being ordered around, & tortured over the slightest mistakes? When can we tell if we’re free or chained down by worldly trivial desires? The answer is simple: The change that we desire & aspire to achieve, can only happen within us & we are the ones who decide that ourselves. Instead of staying in our comfort zone, doing what’s expected of us, & roaming randomly in life, making an effort to achieve self discovery, no matter how scary the truth is, is what decides the value of our lives & whether we are chained by this phenomenon called ‘’destiny’’. This message is very simple on paper, but the way Arise presents it is nothing short of special since it actively goes out of its way to show the hardships of trying to break free of the chains of destiny that binds us as much as it shows how rewarding it is to free your heart of its darkness by achieving connections & holding onto them. There are various plot points in the story that show how hard achieving connections is & how narrow minded the human perspective is even from the mcs’ pov & how as a consequence of that, hatred & conflict are everlasting. Alphen fights the lords not knowing that each of them hold a philosophy and much like him, are fighting for people they cherish & ideals they champion. That sort of contrast & the exploration of said contrast creates an intricate narrative that forces the cast into a corner, causing them to question what they initially believed to be right, & undergo a change in their individuality to cope with the challenges presented against them. Dohalim accepts that self loathing may be the easy way to go about your conflicts, but facing said conflicts head on & seeking the truth is far more rewarding than it could ever be. Law realizes that his purpose in life & his Father’s dying words both of which he struggled to uncover so much, could be solved by merely finding someone you can love & taking care of them, & chose to be his own person instead of endlessly agonising over becoming what his father wanted him to become. Rinwell, upon seeing what hatred caused dedyme to do to his own people, realized that indulging in hatred will only breed more and more hatred, until she herself gets consumed by it, & it’s better to walk down the path of life carrying your hatred and using it as your strength instead of allowing it to define you. The best showcase of the theme of individuality & connection mentioned before is none other than Alphen’s dynamic with Shionne, & how they both pulled each other out of their darkness & brightened each others’ lives. The deepest, most fragile, & vulnerable bonds we have, are the ones that cut us the most & cause us the most amount of pain cause of how loosely tied they are to our identity, but it’s because of that, that we risk everything we have to protect them & bottle up our emotions to keep them from cracking down. That kind of bond, that kind of intimacy, is what’s shared between Shionne and Alphen. A bond formed through acceptance, undiluted love, & loyal affection, results in what’s one of the most human representations of connection & how we view them. Connections & love are necessities in our lives, we form bonds to feel complete, to feel needed, to feel loved & wanted, & to feel understood. But at the same time, losing that bond means losing what gave us hope & the ability to live, so the idea of attaining said love, only to lose it, drives us insane with trust issues & anxieties. We wish bonds weren’t needed so we wouldn’t have to feel so regretful about having them & the possibility of losing them, or not attaining them at all. It’s a complex, intricate emotion, yet it’s perfectly captured in this scene where Shionne, a character who’s been closed off & disconnected the entire series, buckles up under the weight of her regrets & sadness over her fleeting bonds. Breaking down in tears, Shionne confesses her rawest feelings with the honest belief that they’ll be rejected, only for Alphen to give her what she deeply yearned for yet rejected cause of a lack of a sense of self worth. This scene impacted me on a personal level & left me speechless since I, on a day to day basis, struggle with the same thoughts, regrets, & depression, so to see such an insecure part of myself represented in media…it breaks my heart but gives me a sense of comfort. Ironically enough, Alphen never truly understood the weight of being able to hold Shionne's hands & how much it means to both of them until he regained his sense. of pain, which puts an emphasis on the idea of connection & communication. It's strange how in a game about slavery, i felt a sensation of liberty & inner peace that I yearned for for so long, & it was fulfilling
This review contains spoilers
While it sounds crazy enough to write a review about a game thats not even OUT LMAO. I why I can 100% confirm that this game will be my favourite game ever when it releases.
Tales Of Arise from a series I'm genuinely not that familiar with. beside playing Tales Of Vesperia on the 360 10 years ago. Having played a few hours of Tales Of Abyss on the 3DS and having watched like 7 episodes of Tales Of Zesteria and then dropping it out of boredom. You would genuinely be insane from a series where your intertest was never fully captured nor grasped to have the latest entry be your FAVOURITE GAME EVER?! Well here I will try to concretely enough explain my "My insanity" or for some of you guys "Stupidity" I'm assuming.
I found out about Tales Of Arise pretty late actually the game was revealed at E3 in 2019. I accidentally stumbled upon the game in march pure on whim. I was watching videos about JRPGs and I saw the games Trailer in my recommendations. I didn't even wanna click on the trailer nor did I want it to play YouTube Autoplayed it for me when I went to the toilet lol... but when I came back I was like "fuck it why not" and pressed replay and my mind was blown away... to most it's a standard trailer nothing outstanding or experimental enough for someone to lose their shit over it but man... I WAS IN. From the SFX of Shionne her heel the silent build up and the narrator to the strong fantasy athmosphere but with a striking distinct visual style. It reminded so much of every favourite Fantasy series I love and it happens so rarely that I ever have such a strong sense of nostolgia from past of something in the present that I have no strong knowledge. But from the previously mentioned things and flashy gameplay and strong and striking character designs. I just knew it was the one. The Fantasy genre is a VERY important genre to me because it helped me allot as a person throughout my life and I honestly watched allot of fantasy media but super rarely has this same feeling been matched before. I literally searched up every information about the game since and don't think I've ever been as hype for something as this game. The latest Info dump just made me even more confident in my feelings. I rewatched each trailer over 10x and watched the gameplay showcases over 10x. Did as much research as I can on the people working on it. Theorize heavy about future characters , environments and potential story beats. I genuinely have 100% trust in this game and don't think I can get dissapointed really.
So it really a case of pure feelings of nostolgia , charm and trust that makes me so sure. I know this seems goofy asf to write this but I know myself the best so I know best what my true feelings on the game will be.
( P.S I've done this before and know how my expectations work so I really cannot be dissapointed. also I will do a follow up in September on this when I play it.
Okay the follow up I already played the demo and wanted to follow up this but backloggd got scared and locked the ability to write reviews that haven't been released yet understandably 💀. Anyway
So yea coming out to yea I loved this game and it's my favourite video game of all time now I'm going to explain why.
First is just following this game was an experience harder than I expected I've been hyped for games and such but at most I had to wait a few months or I could just play it instantly after watching some videos or trailers on it. But for this game I had to wait 2 YEARS bro it was torture waiting. Constantly rewatching the trailers and seeing all the intriguing stuff , gameplay sections , environments and the characters. Reading every blog or info dump prior to release of the game in MULTIPLE LANUAGES. Like I was reading shit in Korean or Japanese using Google translate to get info about the game I was so hyped about it. Each trailer and new released stuff just got me more excited and it the more I heard about the game the more reassured I was about it being what I wanted. Which led to me playing the demo ( I touch upon that later ) and then finally the reviews of the game coming out which basically was just a last confirmation for me about the game. But just following a game for so long and looking crazy because you were hyping it up so early on with barely any footing on it just felt so rewarding which I never experienced with a game before nor do I think that is ever going to happen again. Also seeing the tales of series while me not being a person with a huge connection to the series I guess see the series get genuinely good reviews and reviewers not referring to the series as "jrpg fastfood." Or "jrpg comfort food." made me happy for my friends and the fans who have been long apart of franchise. Now about the game tho ( finally. )
First off the visual presentation of the game. I REALLLY BUT REALLLY LOVE how the game looks perfect sense of an artistic style mixed with realism. From textures of close up rocks , stones and ice where all just amazing to look at. The sense of scale it also adds by far off locations looking like a watercolor painting as some sort of highlighting it to spark curiosity and mystery for the player which happened several times for me.
Now the gameplay
• Exploration
I really loved the gameplay loop of this game. Explore looking for ingredients find a chest or find a hidden pathway that leads to a secret location. With great level and environmental design made traversing the world tons of fun. My favourite JRPG series xenoblade is where I love exploring too but the characters walking speed ( not including X ) being the same as a crippled grandma kinda put me off sometimes exploring new areas because of some backtracking I had to do. Here that wasn't present for me at all the environments where big and wide enough when it was needed but it never felt like a slog for me to get thru them.
• Combat
Probably my favourite thing about the game easily. The way it's heavy combo based , rewards the player for experimenting allot , rewards the player for going the extra mile being extra flashy WHILE also granting super flashy 1 hit finishers to satisfying kill enemies. On top of that love the break mechanic of the game. Insanely satisfying fighting an enemy and committing to a move that could potentially lead to your death but destroying their core which downs them which gives me immense pleasure for taking that risky decision. I know people don't like the lack of arte and move cancelling which I understand the dissatisfaction and frustration of it completely but in return getting that reward of labbing with certain moves and combo latter's seeing them payoff for me fully committing too it was just a great feeling that I rarely get from playing games at all. Now onto Boss Battles which I also know most people aren't a fan of either but I honestly loved them. It is a shame that the human bosses that stagger constantly which leads to a limited combo celling sadly enough. I think it would've been ideal for some type of revenge value hidden mechanic for the bosses where if you spam too move or don't punish accordingly they reach their Overlimit easier or something. Either way tho I still really enjoyed them from the presentation , to the build up , hype and the fight itself. Especially Balselph fight caught me by surprise how great of a 1st boss it was. Him being one of the bigger human bosses which makes it possible for effective use of aerial dodges that don't eliminate the usage of your aerial artes in his fights. Also the summoning spirit appearance which added allot of hype which really made me realise yea... this game is going to be something big lol. Anyway a fight like dohalim I think would've benefitted from the hidden mechanic that I mentioned earlier either tho the satisfaction I felt from double counter edging his arts and seeing him stagger because of it felt so hype to me. With also the amazing QTEs which I didn't expect to see in the game in the slightest which added another hype factor into the fights for me. The usage in strategy the bosses emphasized for me which made them all so memorable to me aswell. Me getting frustrated and cursing the game out for some fufu or cheesy shit but then changing my AI strategy, changing my arte layout and tweaking my party members art usage to fully capitalize on the bosses weaknesses. From battle going from 10min + vs 5-3min for me. Also love the battle gauge mechanic when you for example finish a battle there is this gauge that rewards you if you continously keep doing them which encouraged me to do some fights I honestly would've skipped if it wasn't for that mechanic.
• Music
Now I won't lie and say this probably the most mixed bag for me off the game. Music is one of the most important things to me and so "bad" music bothers quite allot. Which was one of the worries I had with the game since from what I heard of Sakuraba can't lie that stuff wasn't pleasing my ears and it made sense to me why I never heard praise of this series OST beside the titles go shiina worked on sadly enough. Either way tho the music in arise to me is just "good." And emphasis of just. Like the overall ost a 7/7,5 which is honestly a bit dissapointing but the reason for it isn't because I think the songs are bad but more so a lack of variety and lack of distinctiveness between the tracks. I love OSTs with choirs , vocals and that bombastic grandiose feel. ( Apocalyptic Noctis one of my favourite OSTs of all time. ) but when that is basically the whole soundtrack it loses the weight and eventually some songs come off as "white noise." To me but I'm honestly happy tho that I still love the style of the OST which led to me enjoying a good portion of the tracks overall. I'm still satisfied tho that the OST isn't BOTW or DQ11 bad to me. BOTW ambient approach to its OST I understand but it just didn't do anything for me personally. dq11 has had enough slander for the ost I'm not gonna say anything about it lol. But yea arise was more so 1 that focused on ambience rather than songs you could listen too outside the game. It did its job and enhanced the scenes & environments where tracks where played so again I'm okay with that.
• Story/Characters
May come off weird to some but I didn't expect this game story to be the greatest thing to touch fiction. I more so expected a story where its themes intrigued even tho me already being quite familiar with them already. Also wasn't expecting a xeno type of series full of insane plotwists and such more so dramatic irony where I'd have a strong idea where its leading to but wondering how it's being executed and how the game handles the theme's. I can confidently say im satisfied never did a story made me think of "slavery is as much a mental thing as it is physical." I ofcourse heard the lines such as "everyone is a slave to something." "A slave to one's desires." Blah blah those stories usually mentioned it briefly and wouldn't explore it fully or just never touch upon it again. (Which that neccasary didn't upset since the story wasn't about that theme in the first place lol would've been dope tho but probs out of place.) But yea the game asking questions such as when are you a slave and when are you your master of something. Which mainly was explored thru the protagonist of the game. Alphen being a slave "raised" in a slave camp.(wooahh insane right you didn't guess that huh ) that led him develop percussions and certain perspectives of the race of his oppressors. Where he basically was so deep in it during a conversation he basically asked "if we just commit genocide against the renas will we be truly free?" Which is ofcourse because he saw nothing but tyrany and misery from them. Seeing Alphen develop from a slave who was in the mental slave that he only could be a slave -> to a slave who started fighting because of the opportunity being presented at him in the moment because of others -> where he blindly followed them and their order's -> then being told that he should be his own master & think for himself and then finding out the answer to ending the conflict he's stuck. A slave to his percussions, a slave to the ones his follows and being a slave to the desperate need of guidance in his life. The way it's explored in the 3rd area in the game and with the main party and antagonists is probably my favourite tho. Shionne a slave to the ideal that she could only live in solitude, Kisara a slave to her dream/ideal , the people in menancia being slaves to the belief just because they get treated on "equal terms." that they aren't any different from other slaves just because they get treated fairly for their labor and the antagonists being slaves to power. I know people think the antagonists either are ass or just whatever. I think their simplistic approach fits better into the narrative and beside Vholran (Which I touch upon later.) Don't necessarily need a moral ambiguity or a some super complex motive with the root of a tragic backstory. They where victims of the elitism and social views of the renan society where power and status is everything which lead them all to be chained to the concept of Power. We see it in Balselph remove before he dies where he's genuinely shocked on why Shionne doesn't care about power and betraying renans. Ganabelt desperately clinging to ideal of him needing to be powerful for his followers on Lenegis , amahoela ( don't remember her name ) her basically being the 2nd biggest victim of it by how Dohalim discussed on how lenegis she did everything in her power to rise to the top. On top of that Vholran one who grew up in a environment where he was believed to be the one most powerful of all by triumphing , dominating , ruling and conquering all and anything. 1st display of him showing dominance towards alphen and the party by killing all the zeugles , conquering the party in that duel after you leave menacia , ruling heartlessly over the people who devoted too him and finally trying to triumph Alphen in their last fight. He was the ideal Renan Lord based on the social views that the renans preach and reinforce but in actuality being the biggest slave of all nothing but a hollow person with no ambitions of his own , convictions of his own and Ideals of his own. A Dahnan slave throughout that never got to break free from his chain and being the perfect Puppet that the renans wanted him to be. While the story has multiple messages and social commentaries but this one just stuck with me the most. When is a person a slave , when is a person his own master? How much in control are you of your ideals that they don't chain you? How do you keep being your own master throughout and never get stuck into those chains again? I never gave it much thought nor did I personally need the message but it's one I always will appreciate. Also the main cast I love them all and it's my favourite jrpg main cast. Love their conversations , banter , dynamics and relationships. Both in just how fun it is to see and how they impact the game thematically.
• Ending
2nd act of the game sadly enough goes a bit downhill in quality in my opinion more so story wise rather than gameplay for me but it didn't upset or affect me enjoyment that much where It stopped making me love the game since I still enjoyed act 2. It's just act 1 was a 10/10 and act 2 a 7/10 with a 10/10 ending so yea. Some stuff I want to address tho. The forgiveness and understanding stuff doesn't come out of nowhere as much people try to make it seem. It comes off cheesy at first and you think it doesn't make any sense conclusion wise if you only look at it from face value but Alphen character was never going to be that he just "kills" every lord. The reasons for that is at FIRST and FOREMOST helping his FELLOW SLAVES to a better future. So him aim changing from the Lords to wanting to end the cycle of hatred what him and Zephyr discussed about isn't a weird or drastic change. It's inline to what his character was leading to so stuff like wanting liberate the renans on lenegis aswell isn't weird or out of character since they are practically SLAVES mental wise too. Also the answer he was searching for on was forgiveness and understanding. Not always out of sympathy but also out of NECESSITY. He wants to end the cycle of hatred and stop the clogs that shift the conflict. Vholran is the biggest one of it. Alphen being the only person that could understand him and which led to him have such a obsession with Alphen in the 1st place is why the forgiving isn't so out of place. Also forgiving doesn't mean FORGETTING it's neccasary to move forward to a new future. The game also hammers the point of there being a limit to how much forgiveness and understanding can reach. Vholran was the nail of that point. Him killing himself was a proper conclusion and fitting narrative wise. Other stuff of act 2 tho obviously needed more breathing room and just more time overall great spirit , summoning spirits etc. Game would've benefitted from better placement of some of the exposure dumbs in act 1 or just act 2 being much longer. Stuff I liked tho that Great Renan spirit felt fear and anger which lead to Hatred. Symbolizing the end of the world's potentially being the hatred the races have for eachother. Uh the last dungeon was not as bad as I expected from the way people spoke about it I assumed I was just going to keep walking straight like FFXV later half and just fight bosses the whole time. Also only 2 being mandatory and the others avoidable or fleeable not souring my experience as much as I thought it would have. Uh stuff like Dahnas will too it being introduced early would've definitely helped maybe it was foreshadowed haven't looked thru all the cutscenes of the game tho so maybe the issue isn't as big as it now for me. Also probably me playing the last few stuff in sessions because of IRL stuff made it probably not as bad as I assumed it would lol. Uhhh loved the ending overall tho shionne finally being able to touch the party and rinwell being the 1st one making it 1st much more endearing how hateful they where early on with eachother. Stuff like seeing Dohalim play the violin again for Alphen when he talked about making a promise to him for playing it again little stuff like that also the song ofcourse and just the icing on cake. But yea despite the rough edges in act 2 I still love the game.
• Conclusion
For me something being my all time favourite just means a really positive unique experience that I can't have with anything else. Personally it doesn't need to be the greatest thing to touch humanity objectively. It doesn't need universal acclaim nor the most ambitious and thing in the world. Never did I play a game this much back to back nonstop , having fun discussing it with my friends and just a game that appeal to me in every way and shape. It being from my favourite gaming genre , type of story and themes , type of cast , type of gameplay and combat, type of art direction and just my type of game. Confidently say that is my favourite game of all time and that is not changing ever. Not a perfect game by any means but it will forever be my most memorable one.
• Extra shit
Gripes and stuff I love I wanna say in short
Beyond me how nobody talks about the lack of configuration options genuinely shocked lmao but yea hopefully the game gets a patch like scarlet nexus or so.
Lack of proper audio mixing biggest issue with the game for me didn't happen allot but when it did? sheesh
Love the character designs of each character especially Alphen. He gives off a edgy vibe. But he's just a good willed person with great characterization. Playful Rivalry with Law like them role-playing student and master during combat. His old man dynamic with Dohalim because both of them being the oldest of the party. His bickering and snarky remarks towards shionne to the point it's childish meshing well with his mature attitude. Him being a geek for weaponry and armor. His love for spicy food because he compensates it with his inability of pain and his vagabond like nature because he never had the chance to explore so much so he takes of too interesting routes and paths. I wish his personality was more of a thing in the main cutscenes of the game seeing people write him off just as "haha hero guy go brrr." comes off a bit irritating but the game treats parts of his personality as side bits which makes it understandable.
Sidequests being surprisingly worth it both content wise and also the types of sidequests. Like there are fetch quests but them being based on pairs and which leads to funny dialogue made them worth it imo. Also some really character focused Sidequests like Law getting a letter from Zephyr or the pancake one where great.
Uhh pop in issue obviously but yea we already know that lol.
Vholran being a villain that fits his purpose but most definitely still a underbaked antagonist his dynamic with Alphen could've been great the biggest miss of the game for me.
Yea I love this game thank you bandai Namco for making me a enjoy like this for the 1st time and the only time.
Still nr 1 just XBC3 kinda goated with the sauce takahashi his strongest warrior my loyalty always resided with Xeno.
Tales Of Arise from a series I'm genuinely not that familiar with. beside playing Tales Of Vesperia on the 360 10 years ago. Having played a few hours of Tales Of Abyss on the 3DS and having watched like 7 episodes of Tales Of Zesteria and then dropping it out of boredom. You would genuinely be insane from a series where your intertest was never fully captured nor grasped to have the latest entry be your FAVOURITE GAME EVER?! Well here I will try to concretely enough explain my "My insanity" or for some of you guys "Stupidity" I'm assuming.
I found out about Tales Of Arise pretty late actually the game was revealed at E3 in 2019. I accidentally stumbled upon the game in march pure on whim. I was watching videos about JRPGs and I saw the games Trailer in my recommendations. I didn't even wanna click on the trailer nor did I want it to play YouTube Autoplayed it for me when I went to the toilet lol... but when I came back I was like "fuck it why not" and pressed replay and my mind was blown away... to most it's a standard trailer nothing outstanding or experimental enough for someone to lose their shit over it but man... I WAS IN. From the SFX of Shionne her heel the silent build up and the narrator to the strong fantasy athmosphere but with a striking distinct visual style. It reminded so much of every favourite Fantasy series I love and it happens so rarely that I ever have such a strong sense of nostolgia from past of something in the present that I have no strong knowledge. But from the previously mentioned things and flashy gameplay and strong and striking character designs. I just knew it was the one. The Fantasy genre is a VERY important genre to me because it helped me allot as a person throughout my life and I honestly watched allot of fantasy media but super rarely has this same feeling been matched before. I literally searched up every information about the game since and don't think I've ever been as hype for something as this game. The latest Info dump just made me even more confident in my feelings. I rewatched each trailer over 10x and watched the gameplay showcases over 10x. Did as much research as I can on the people working on it. Theorize heavy about future characters , environments and potential story beats. I genuinely have 100% trust in this game and don't think I can get dissapointed really.
So it really a case of pure feelings of nostolgia , charm and trust that makes me so sure. I know this seems goofy asf to write this but I know myself the best so I know best what my true feelings on the game will be.
( P.S I've done this before and know how my expectations work so I really cannot be dissapointed. also I will do a follow up in September on this when I play it.
Okay the follow up I already played the demo and wanted to follow up this but backloggd got scared and locked the ability to write reviews that haven't been released yet understandably 💀. Anyway
So yea coming out to yea I loved this game and it's my favourite video game of all time now I'm going to explain why.
First is just following this game was an experience harder than I expected I've been hyped for games and such but at most I had to wait a few months or I could just play it instantly after watching some videos or trailers on it. But for this game I had to wait 2 YEARS bro it was torture waiting. Constantly rewatching the trailers and seeing all the intriguing stuff , gameplay sections , environments and the characters. Reading every blog or info dump prior to release of the game in MULTIPLE LANUAGES. Like I was reading shit in Korean or Japanese using Google translate to get info about the game I was so hyped about it. Each trailer and new released stuff just got me more excited and it the more I heard about the game the more reassured I was about it being what I wanted. Which led to me playing the demo ( I touch upon that later ) and then finally the reviews of the game coming out which basically was just a last confirmation for me about the game. But just following a game for so long and looking crazy because you were hyping it up so early on with barely any footing on it just felt so rewarding which I never experienced with a game before nor do I think that is ever going to happen again. Also seeing the tales of series while me not being a person with a huge connection to the series I guess see the series get genuinely good reviews and reviewers not referring to the series as "jrpg fastfood." Or "jrpg comfort food." made me happy for my friends and the fans who have been long apart of franchise. Now about the game tho ( finally. )
First off the visual presentation of the game. I REALLLY BUT REALLLY LOVE how the game looks perfect sense of an artistic style mixed with realism. From textures of close up rocks , stones and ice where all just amazing to look at. The sense of scale it also adds by far off locations looking like a watercolor painting as some sort of highlighting it to spark curiosity and mystery for the player which happened several times for me.
Now the gameplay
• Exploration
I really loved the gameplay loop of this game. Explore looking for ingredients find a chest or find a hidden pathway that leads to a secret location. With great level and environmental design made traversing the world tons of fun. My favourite JRPG series xenoblade is where I love exploring too but the characters walking speed ( not including X ) being the same as a crippled grandma kinda put me off sometimes exploring new areas because of some backtracking I had to do. Here that wasn't present for me at all the environments where big and wide enough when it was needed but it never felt like a slog for me to get thru them.
• Combat
Probably my favourite thing about the game easily. The way it's heavy combo based , rewards the player for experimenting allot , rewards the player for going the extra mile being extra flashy WHILE also granting super flashy 1 hit finishers to satisfying kill enemies. On top of that love the break mechanic of the game. Insanely satisfying fighting an enemy and committing to a move that could potentially lead to your death but destroying their core which downs them which gives me immense pleasure for taking that risky decision. I know people don't like the lack of arte and move cancelling which I understand the dissatisfaction and frustration of it completely but in return getting that reward of labbing with certain moves and combo latter's seeing them payoff for me fully committing too it was just a great feeling that I rarely get from playing games at all. Now onto Boss Battles which I also know most people aren't a fan of either but I honestly loved them. It is a shame that the human bosses that stagger constantly which leads to a limited combo celling sadly enough. I think it would've been ideal for some type of revenge value hidden mechanic for the bosses where if you spam too move or don't punish accordingly they reach their Overlimit easier or something. Either way tho I still really enjoyed them from the presentation , to the build up , hype and the fight itself. Especially Balselph fight caught me by surprise how great of a 1st boss it was. Him being one of the bigger human bosses which makes it possible for effective use of aerial dodges that don't eliminate the usage of your aerial artes in his fights. Also the summoning spirit appearance which added allot of hype which really made me realise yea... this game is going to be something big lol. Anyway a fight like dohalim I think would've benefitted from the hidden mechanic that I mentioned earlier either tho the satisfaction I felt from double counter edging his arts and seeing him stagger because of it felt so hype to me. With also the amazing QTEs which I didn't expect to see in the game in the slightest which added another hype factor into the fights for me. The usage in strategy the bosses emphasized for me which made them all so memorable to me aswell. Me getting frustrated and cursing the game out for some fufu or cheesy shit but then changing my AI strategy, changing my arte layout and tweaking my party members art usage to fully capitalize on the bosses weaknesses. From battle going from 10min + vs 5-3min for me. Also love the battle gauge mechanic when you for example finish a battle there is this gauge that rewards you if you continously keep doing them which encouraged me to do some fights I honestly would've skipped if it wasn't for that mechanic.
• Music
Now I won't lie and say this probably the most mixed bag for me off the game. Music is one of the most important things to me and so "bad" music bothers quite allot. Which was one of the worries I had with the game since from what I heard of Sakuraba can't lie that stuff wasn't pleasing my ears and it made sense to me why I never heard praise of this series OST beside the titles go shiina worked on sadly enough. Either way tho the music in arise to me is just "good." And emphasis of just. Like the overall ost a 7/7,5 which is honestly a bit dissapointing but the reason for it isn't because I think the songs are bad but more so a lack of variety and lack of distinctiveness between the tracks. I love OSTs with choirs , vocals and that bombastic grandiose feel. ( Apocalyptic Noctis one of my favourite OSTs of all time. ) but when that is basically the whole soundtrack it loses the weight and eventually some songs come off as "white noise." To me but I'm honestly happy tho that I still love the style of the OST which led to me enjoying a good portion of the tracks overall. I'm still satisfied tho that the OST isn't BOTW or DQ11 bad to me. BOTW ambient approach to its OST I understand but it just didn't do anything for me personally. dq11 has had enough slander for the ost I'm not gonna say anything about it lol. But yea arise was more so 1 that focused on ambience rather than songs you could listen too outside the game. It did its job and enhanced the scenes & environments where tracks where played so again I'm okay with that.
• Story/Characters
May come off weird to some but I didn't expect this game story to be the greatest thing to touch fiction. I more so expected a story where its themes intrigued even tho me already being quite familiar with them already. Also wasn't expecting a xeno type of series full of insane plotwists and such more so dramatic irony where I'd have a strong idea where its leading to but wondering how it's being executed and how the game handles the theme's. I can confidently say im satisfied never did a story made me think of "slavery is as much a mental thing as it is physical." I ofcourse heard the lines such as "everyone is a slave to something." "A slave to one's desires." Blah blah those stories usually mentioned it briefly and wouldn't explore it fully or just never touch upon it again. (Which that neccasary didn't upset since the story wasn't about that theme in the first place lol would've been dope tho but probs out of place.) But yea the game asking questions such as when are you a slave and when are you your master of something. Which mainly was explored thru the protagonist of the game. Alphen being a slave "raised" in a slave camp.(wooahh insane right you didn't guess that huh ) that led him develop percussions and certain perspectives of the race of his oppressors. Where he basically was so deep in it during a conversation he basically asked "if we just commit genocide against the renas will we be truly free?" Which is ofcourse because he saw nothing but tyrany and misery from them. Seeing Alphen develop from a slave who was in the mental slave that he only could be a slave -> to a slave who started fighting because of the opportunity being presented at him in the moment because of others -> where he blindly followed them and their order's -> then being told that he should be his own master & think for himself and then finding out the answer to ending the conflict he's stuck. A slave to his percussions, a slave to the ones his follows and being a slave to the desperate need of guidance in his life. The way it's explored in the 3rd area in the game and with the main party and antagonists is probably my favourite tho. Shionne a slave to the ideal that she could only live in solitude, Kisara a slave to her dream/ideal , the people in menancia being slaves to the belief just because they get treated on "equal terms." that they aren't any different from other slaves just because they get treated fairly for their labor and the antagonists being slaves to power. I know people think the antagonists either are ass or just whatever. I think their simplistic approach fits better into the narrative and beside Vholran (Which I touch upon later.) Don't necessarily need a moral ambiguity or a some super complex motive with the root of a tragic backstory. They where victims of the elitism and social views of the renan society where power and status is everything which lead them all to be chained to the concept of Power. We see it in Balselph remove before he dies where he's genuinely shocked on why Shionne doesn't care about power and betraying renans. Ganabelt desperately clinging to ideal of him needing to be powerful for his followers on Lenegis , amahoela ( don't remember her name ) her basically being the 2nd biggest victim of it by how Dohalim discussed on how lenegis she did everything in her power to rise to the top. On top of that Vholran one who grew up in a environment where he was believed to be the one most powerful of all by triumphing , dominating , ruling and conquering all and anything. 1st display of him showing dominance towards alphen and the party by killing all the zeugles , conquering the party in that duel after you leave menacia , ruling heartlessly over the people who devoted too him and finally trying to triumph Alphen in their last fight. He was the ideal Renan Lord based on the social views that the renans preach and reinforce but in actuality being the biggest slave of all nothing but a hollow person with no ambitions of his own , convictions of his own and Ideals of his own. A Dahnan slave throughout that never got to break free from his chain and being the perfect Puppet that the renans wanted him to be. While the story has multiple messages and social commentaries but this one just stuck with me the most. When is a person a slave , when is a person his own master? How much in control are you of your ideals that they don't chain you? How do you keep being your own master throughout and never get stuck into those chains again? I never gave it much thought nor did I personally need the message but it's one I always will appreciate. Also the main cast I love them all and it's my favourite jrpg main cast. Love their conversations , banter , dynamics and relationships. Both in just how fun it is to see and how they impact the game thematically.
• Ending
2nd act of the game sadly enough goes a bit downhill in quality in my opinion more so story wise rather than gameplay for me but it didn't upset or affect me enjoyment that much where It stopped making me love the game since I still enjoyed act 2. It's just act 1 was a 10/10 and act 2 a 7/10 with a 10/10 ending so yea. Some stuff I want to address tho. The forgiveness and understanding stuff doesn't come out of nowhere as much people try to make it seem. It comes off cheesy at first and you think it doesn't make any sense conclusion wise if you only look at it from face value but Alphen character was never going to be that he just "kills" every lord. The reasons for that is at FIRST and FOREMOST helping his FELLOW SLAVES to a better future. So him aim changing from the Lords to wanting to end the cycle of hatred what him and Zephyr discussed about isn't a weird or drastic change. It's inline to what his character was leading to so stuff like wanting liberate the renans on lenegis aswell isn't weird or out of character since they are practically SLAVES mental wise too. Also the answer he was searching for on was forgiveness and understanding. Not always out of sympathy but also out of NECESSITY. He wants to end the cycle of hatred and stop the clogs that shift the conflict. Vholran is the biggest one of it. Alphen being the only person that could understand him and which led to him have such a obsession with Alphen in the 1st place is why the forgiving isn't so out of place. Also forgiving doesn't mean FORGETTING it's neccasary to move forward to a new future. The game also hammers the point of there being a limit to how much forgiveness and understanding can reach. Vholran was the nail of that point. Him killing himself was a proper conclusion and fitting narrative wise. Other stuff of act 2 tho obviously needed more breathing room and just more time overall great spirit , summoning spirits etc. Game would've benefitted from better placement of some of the exposure dumbs in act 1 or just act 2 being much longer. Stuff I liked tho that Great Renan spirit felt fear and anger which lead to Hatred. Symbolizing the end of the world's potentially being the hatred the races have for eachother. Uh the last dungeon was not as bad as I expected from the way people spoke about it I assumed I was just going to keep walking straight like FFXV later half and just fight bosses the whole time. Also only 2 being mandatory and the others avoidable or fleeable not souring my experience as much as I thought it would have. Uh stuff like Dahnas will too it being introduced early would've definitely helped maybe it was foreshadowed haven't looked thru all the cutscenes of the game tho so maybe the issue isn't as big as it now for me. Also probably me playing the last few stuff in sessions because of IRL stuff made it probably not as bad as I assumed it would lol. Uhhh loved the ending overall tho shionne finally being able to touch the party and rinwell being the 1st one making it 1st much more endearing how hateful they where early on with eachother. Stuff like seeing Dohalim play the violin again for Alphen when he talked about making a promise to him for playing it again little stuff like that also the song ofcourse and just the icing on cake. But yea despite the rough edges in act 2 I still love the game.
• Conclusion
For me something being my all time favourite just means a really positive unique experience that I can't have with anything else. Personally it doesn't need to be the greatest thing to touch humanity objectively. It doesn't need universal acclaim nor the most ambitious and thing in the world. Never did I play a game this much back to back nonstop , having fun discussing it with my friends and just a game that appeal to me in every way and shape. It being from my favourite gaming genre , type of story and themes , type of cast , type of gameplay and combat, type of art direction and just my type of game. Confidently say that is my favourite game of all time and that is not changing ever. Not a perfect game by any means but it will forever be my most memorable one.
• Extra shit
Gripes and stuff I love I wanna say in short
Beyond me how nobody talks about the lack of configuration options genuinely shocked lmao but yea hopefully the game gets a patch like scarlet nexus or so.
Lack of proper audio mixing biggest issue with the game for me didn't happen allot but when it did? sheesh
Love the character designs of each character especially Alphen. He gives off a edgy vibe. But he's just a good willed person with great characterization. Playful Rivalry with Law like them role-playing student and master during combat. His old man dynamic with Dohalim because both of them being the oldest of the party. His bickering and snarky remarks towards shionne to the point it's childish meshing well with his mature attitude. Him being a geek for weaponry and armor. His love for spicy food because he compensates it with his inability of pain and his vagabond like nature because he never had the chance to explore so much so he takes of too interesting routes and paths. I wish his personality was more of a thing in the main cutscenes of the game seeing people write him off just as "haha hero guy go brrr." comes off a bit irritating but the game treats parts of his personality as side bits which makes it understandable.
Sidequests being surprisingly worth it both content wise and also the types of sidequests. Like there are fetch quests but them being based on pairs and which leads to funny dialogue made them worth it imo. Also some really character focused Sidequests like Law getting a letter from Zephyr or the pancake one where great.
Uhh pop in issue obviously but yea we already know that lol.
Vholran being a villain that fits his purpose but most definitely still a underbaked antagonist his dynamic with Alphen could've been great the biggest miss of the game for me.
Yea I love this game thank you bandai Namco for making me a enjoy like this for the 1st time and the only time.
Still nr 1 just XBC3 kinda goated with the sauce takahashi his strongest warrior my loyalty always resided with Xeno.
have been coming back to this one lately after stalling out back in 2021 and wow is it disappointing that they don't do anything more interesting with the slavery plot. setting up a free excuse to go absolutely apeshit on the baddies and instead they do nothing with it, like the writers mistakenly thought that "slavery" is the name of a schoolyard bully or a big cartoon dragon and not, uh, something that is responsible for incalculable real-life misery. it's just... that's kinda a heavy concept to wield when the rest of the game is so ankle-deep. it feels like they were totally bored with the idea before you even make it to the second boss
i do sincerely like the combat though! as someone who barely touches JRPGs i had some issues with not being genre-savvy enough (mostly as it pertains to buffs/resource management) but other than that? i had an unreservedly good time with this chunk - dog, look at those boost strikes! pure shounen action schlock (i say this affectionately). shame that everything even tangentially related to the story is completely toothless!
i do sincerely like the combat though! as someone who barely touches JRPGs i had some issues with not being genre-savvy enough (mostly as it pertains to buffs/resource management) but other than that? i had an unreservedly good time with this chunk - dog, look at those boost strikes! pure shounen action schlock (i say this affectionately). shame that everything even tangentially related to the story is completely toothless!
I want to start this by saying that i really, desperately wanted to like this game. Genuinely. I was so excited to start it as I'm quite a fan of the series.
However, Tales of Arise slowly but surely began to wear me down due to a variety of reasons and finishing it left me with a pang of worry for whats to come for the franchise.
For the positives, the game's presentation is the best of the entire franchise. I would kill for a Tales of Berseria that looked as good as this game. The environmental design and graphical fidelity are gorgeous to look at. On top of that, I found the combat to be a decent step up for the franchise. I do enjoy the more classic Tales Of combat, but Arise's flashy combo system was a good evolution of the system, albeit with some additional faults that I will get into.
What started my growing dislike for the game was the characters. Tales Of games have very strong parties, and I found that Arise had the weakest of all the games in the series I've played so far. In terms of design, the entire party was painfully bland. Visually they were just uninteresting to look at, Chinese mobile game tier (not Genshin) bland design. I think Arise's biggest problem is its characters, I cannot stress how little I cared about any of the cast. That's not a good thing! How you go from Berseria to this is mind-boggling - where you understand and care about a character within the first 2 hours. This game had me struggling to give a shit about the entire fuckin party over a 30-hour runtime.
It doesn't help when a majority of skits are relegated to expository text and exposition about some geopolitical crap when ideally they should be used for fleshing out your party's interactions (like they used to be in other freakign games!!!). *side note, dont give me 3-4 skits in a row that sucks and breaks up the flow of things
It pains me when I look at comparisons of parties between different games within this same franchise, and I can understand a character's personality and what they might be like based on how they dress. But with Arise, I can't. Even my girlfriend who hasn't played a single Tales game couldn't figure them out. That's what we like to call, Bad Character Design.
This problem further develops within the narrative. I don't care about these characters, so the narrative completely suffers because I genuinely cannot bring myself to care about anything that's happening, because of how bland everyone behaves to what's happening. Alphen has no character development until the last like, 1/4 of the story, and is an extremely weak protag and feels more like an empty shell shounen protagonist for you to self insert to. Shionne is a bitch and the game expects me to care about this bland romance that feels incredibly forced (an aspect btw that was done way better and more believably in Symphonia and even Vesperia). Rinwell is a nothing character that could be deleted from the game and nothing would change, not even the story would be affected. Dohalim is boring and Kisara is almost as ineffective in the plot as Rinwell, I just think she's hotter. The only character I genuinely had an ounce of care for was Law. Law was fine, no criticisms for Law. Wish he was in a better game.
I was going to give this game a 3 Star rating but the final dungeon was so genuinely fucking garbage i had to dock it a point.
I hope to Christ the next game is not a sequel to Arise. I do not want to spend any more time with these characters.
OH I also like how it's lowkey a Star Ocean/Phantasy Star game i thought that was neato
TLDR; Bland. Its too bland.
However, Tales of Arise slowly but surely began to wear me down due to a variety of reasons and finishing it left me with a pang of worry for whats to come for the franchise.
For the positives, the game's presentation is the best of the entire franchise. I would kill for a Tales of Berseria that looked as good as this game. The environmental design and graphical fidelity are gorgeous to look at. On top of that, I found the combat to be a decent step up for the franchise. I do enjoy the more classic Tales Of combat, but Arise's flashy combo system was a good evolution of the system, albeit with some additional faults that I will get into.
What started my growing dislike for the game was the characters. Tales Of games have very strong parties, and I found that Arise had the weakest of all the games in the series I've played so far. In terms of design, the entire party was painfully bland. Visually they were just uninteresting to look at, Chinese mobile game tier (not Genshin) bland design. I think Arise's biggest problem is its characters, I cannot stress how little I cared about any of the cast. That's not a good thing! How you go from Berseria to this is mind-boggling - where you understand and care about a character within the first 2 hours. This game had me struggling to give a shit about the entire fuckin party over a 30-hour runtime.
It doesn't help when a majority of skits are relegated to expository text and exposition about some geopolitical crap when ideally they should be used for fleshing out your party's interactions (like they used to be in other freakign games!!!). *side note, dont give me 3-4 skits in a row that sucks and breaks up the flow of things
It pains me when I look at comparisons of parties between different games within this same franchise, and I can understand a character's personality and what they might be like based on how they dress. But with Arise, I can't. Even my girlfriend who hasn't played a single Tales game couldn't figure them out. That's what we like to call, Bad Character Design.
This problem further develops within the narrative. I don't care about these characters, so the narrative completely suffers because I genuinely cannot bring myself to care about anything that's happening, because of how bland everyone behaves to what's happening. Alphen has no character development until the last like, 1/4 of the story, and is an extremely weak protag and feels more like an empty shell shounen protagonist for you to self insert to. Shionne is a bitch and the game expects me to care about this bland romance that feels incredibly forced (an aspect btw that was done way better and more believably in Symphonia and even Vesperia). Rinwell is a nothing character that could be deleted from the game and nothing would change, not even the story would be affected. Dohalim is boring and Kisara is almost as ineffective in the plot as Rinwell, I just think she's hotter. The only character I genuinely had an ounce of care for was Law. Law was fine, no criticisms for Law. Wish he was in a better game.
I was going to give this game a 3 Star rating but the final dungeon was so genuinely fucking garbage i had to dock it a point.
I hope to Christ the next game is not a sequel to Arise. I do not want to spend any more time with these characters.
OH I also like how it's lowkey a Star Ocean/Phantasy Star game i thought that was neato
TLDR; Bland. Its too bland.
Every time I think about this game the more I hate it.
This is the most heterosexual game i've ever played
Kisara has a nice ass
Uma aventura de altos e baixos, mas que deixou uma boa impressão.
Este era um jogo que eu tinha uma certa expectativa, pois gostei da experiência que tive com a demo em 2021 e faz tempo que gostaria de experimentar a franquia Tales of. Agora posso dizer que essas expectativas foram atendidas parcialmente, e que pretendo jogar outros jogos da franquia.
História e personagens:
Eu gostei da party de Tales of Arise, todos os personagens me agradaram. Há aquela parcela de clichê neles, mas eu adorei a forma que eles interagem entre si, principalmente nos esquetes. Estas interações são mais curtas, relacionadas à acontecimentos que o grupo viveu ou alguma coisa aleatória, como por exemplo "como funciona usar sua arma?", "é muito difícil se aliviar usando essa armadura?" (essa e várias outras me renderam boas risadas).
Em relação à história, ela foi me ganhando conforme o jogo avançou. A expectativa aumentou conforme visitei novas regiões e vi o "problema" a ser resolvido em cada uma delas, porém começou a ir ladeira abaixo conforme os eventos finais se aproximavam por causa da exposição desnecessária. Infelizmente o jogo explica alguns assuntos importantes através de paredão de texto naquelas salas estilo "interaja comigo e entenda tudo que não consegui esclarecer no decorrer do jogo" :(
Gameplay:
Durante a demo, eu entendi absolutamente nada do que tava acontecendo nas batalhas kkkkk pra mim era só um action RPG com uma poluição visual que parecia divertida por algum motivo. Pegando o jogo completo, ele te pega pela mão e explica tudo timtim por timtim, então o que era considerado uma "bagunça" se tornou uma "bagunça compreensível" kkkkk. Além disso, quero enaltecer que não tem problema esquecer como faz algo relevante nas batalhas, pois a seção de ajuda do game é bem eficaz e organizada, assim como todo o resto dos menus.
Ainda em relação ao combate, há uma curva de aprendizado pra encontrar a melhor forma de confrontar os inimigos. Dominar o combate melhora a experiência nas batalhas, não deixando-as "fáceis", mas auxiliando em identificar o melhor comportamento para enfrentar os adversários.
As lutas de bosses e inimigos gigantes são ótimas. Várias delas possuem a grandiosidade necessária para o evento em questão, e os gigantes oferecem batalhas desafiadoras, só que às vezes rola uma exagerada. Eu senti que estava enfrentando algum monstro opcional de Final Fantasy XII em alguns momentos, pois quando os gigantes (bosses opcionais também) estavam próximos de morrer, eles entravam no modo apelão em que usam o especial com muito mais frequência, os ataques deles ficam mais difíceis de esquivar e as janelas de ataque diminuem... gosto desse fator quando aplicado na medida certa, mas às vezes eu empacava nos últimos 10% de vida do bicho porque conseguia fazer quase nada(faltou dedo mesmo hehehe).
Pra fechar com chave de ouro o combate, eu imaginava que seria divertido/eficaz jogar com 1 ou 2 personagens no máximo, mas felizmente subestimei o game. Cada personagem da party é agradável de controlar em batalha, e a arena em Visquinte incentiva a experimentar isso pra perder o receio de trocar de personagens no decorrer da história. Cansou de usar a espada flamejante do protagonista? Então troque para a Shionne e passe a usar rifles e magias, ou use algum outro personagem da party.
Ambientação e conteúdo opcional:
Os mapas de Tales of Arise são bonitos, refletindo bem o elemento (fogo, vento, etc) dominante de cada região ou o contexto daquela localidade. Eu achei os mapas pequenos e com muitas seções lineares, não senti a imersão que esperava ao jogar a demo... embora o melhor mapa seja esse que foi apresentado na demo risos. Como é meu primeiro Tales of, talvez eu tenha criado expectativas erradas pela falta de conhecimento sobre a franquia. Outro ponto que não me conquistou nos mapas é a falta de coisas pra fazer, isso é justificável pelo contexto do jogo, mas senti falta de mais atividades além de pescar e lutar na arena.
As sidequests foram interessantes pra mim por causa das recompensas e quando o objetivo era derrotar algum gigante ou boss opcional. Algumas sides mais pacifistas tinham diálogos mais relevantes ou engraçados, e poucas foram chatas ao estilo "me traga X unidades de tais itens" sem uma conclusão mais elaborada.
Embora o jogo apresente falta de variedade de coisas para fazer e a história tenha me decepcionado nos atos finais, eu continuei fazendo as sides no pós game e torcia para presenciar novos diálogos entre os personagens nos esquetes. O combate me divertiu horrores, a satisfação que eu tinha em criar combos enormes e aplicar as finalizações me impediu de cansar de jogar. Foram 60 horas bem jogadas, em que um jogo não precisa ser perfeito para proporcionar horas de diversão, risadas e desafios, basta ele atender seus requisitos pessoais mínimos.
Este era um jogo que eu tinha uma certa expectativa, pois gostei da experiência que tive com a demo em 2021 e faz tempo que gostaria de experimentar a franquia Tales of. Agora posso dizer que essas expectativas foram atendidas parcialmente, e que pretendo jogar outros jogos da franquia.
História e personagens:
Eu gostei da party de Tales of Arise, todos os personagens me agradaram. Há aquela parcela de clichê neles, mas eu adorei a forma que eles interagem entre si, principalmente nos esquetes. Estas interações são mais curtas, relacionadas à acontecimentos que o grupo viveu ou alguma coisa aleatória, como por exemplo "como funciona usar sua arma?", "é muito difícil se aliviar usando essa armadura?" (essa e várias outras me renderam boas risadas).
Em relação à história, ela foi me ganhando conforme o jogo avançou. A expectativa aumentou conforme visitei novas regiões e vi o "problema" a ser resolvido em cada uma delas, porém começou a ir ladeira abaixo conforme os eventos finais se aproximavam por causa da exposição desnecessária. Infelizmente o jogo explica alguns assuntos importantes através de paredão de texto naquelas salas estilo "interaja comigo e entenda tudo que não consegui esclarecer no decorrer do jogo" :(
Gameplay:
Durante a demo, eu entendi absolutamente nada do que tava acontecendo nas batalhas kkkkk pra mim era só um action RPG com uma poluição visual que parecia divertida por algum motivo. Pegando o jogo completo, ele te pega pela mão e explica tudo timtim por timtim, então o que era considerado uma "bagunça" se tornou uma "bagunça compreensível" kkkkk. Além disso, quero enaltecer que não tem problema esquecer como faz algo relevante nas batalhas, pois a seção de ajuda do game é bem eficaz e organizada, assim como todo o resto dos menus.
Ainda em relação ao combate, há uma curva de aprendizado pra encontrar a melhor forma de confrontar os inimigos. Dominar o combate melhora a experiência nas batalhas, não deixando-as "fáceis", mas auxiliando em identificar o melhor comportamento para enfrentar os adversários.
As lutas de bosses e inimigos gigantes são ótimas. Várias delas possuem a grandiosidade necessária para o evento em questão, e os gigantes oferecem batalhas desafiadoras, só que às vezes rola uma exagerada. Eu senti que estava enfrentando algum monstro opcional de Final Fantasy XII em alguns momentos, pois quando os gigantes (bosses opcionais também) estavam próximos de morrer, eles entravam no modo apelão em que usam o especial com muito mais frequência, os ataques deles ficam mais difíceis de esquivar e as janelas de ataque diminuem... gosto desse fator quando aplicado na medida certa, mas às vezes eu empacava nos últimos 10% de vida do bicho porque conseguia fazer quase nada
Pra fechar com chave de ouro o combate, eu imaginava que seria divertido/eficaz jogar com 1 ou 2 personagens no máximo, mas felizmente subestimei o game. Cada personagem da party é agradável de controlar em batalha, e a arena em Visquinte incentiva a experimentar isso pra perder o receio de trocar de personagens no decorrer da história. Cansou de usar a espada flamejante do protagonista? Então troque para a Shionne e passe a usar rifles e magias, ou use algum outro personagem da party.
Ambientação e conteúdo opcional:
Os mapas de Tales of Arise são bonitos, refletindo bem o elemento (fogo, vento, etc) dominante de cada região ou o contexto daquela localidade. Eu achei os mapas pequenos e com muitas seções lineares, não senti a imersão que esperava ao jogar a demo... embora o melhor mapa seja esse que foi apresentado na demo risos. Como é meu primeiro Tales of, talvez eu tenha criado expectativas erradas pela falta de conhecimento sobre a franquia. Outro ponto que não me conquistou nos mapas é a falta de coisas pra fazer, isso é justificável pelo contexto do jogo, mas senti falta de mais atividades além de pescar e lutar na arena.
As sidequests foram interessantes pra mim por causa das recompensas e quando o objetivo era derrotar algum gigante ou boss opcional. Algumas sides mais pacifistas tinham diálogos mais relevantes ou engraçados, e poucas foram chatas ao estilo "me traga X unidades de tais itens" sem uma conclusão mais elaborada.
Embora o jogo apresente falta de variedade de coisas para fazer e a história tenha me decepcionado nos atos finais, eu continuei fazendo as sides no pós game e torcia para presenciar novos diálogos entre os personagens nos esquetes. O combate me divertiu horrores, a satisfação que eu tinha em criar combos enormes e aplicar as finalizações me impediu de cansar de jogar. Foram 60 horas bem jogadas, em que um jogo não precisa ser perfeito para proporcionar horas de diversão, risadas e desafios, basta ele atender seus requisitos pessoais mínimos.
great combat, horribly wordy and bad pacing. lost interest after 25 hours but completed it anyway because i have a mental disorder
This review contains spoilers
This was my first Tales game, and I went in with zero expectations or anything to compare it to (just for context on the review).
I instantly found the story to be engaging. It was obviously a well thought out world and it's workings. I know some people hated the direction the story ended up going, but I more or less liked it to the end, and thought the twists provided a good endgame.
What I wasn't a fan of was the actual writing. There is way too much repetitive and redundant dialogue in this game. Everything feels like it has to be stated multiple times by multiple characters. It's worse if you count optional dialogue prompts. I swear to god every one of the main cast has a specific inner struggle and you will hear about it a LOT. Over and over. You'll hear exposition from one character only for the cutscene to end and a new cutscene to just have your party reaffirm the exposition.
This reaches its apex near the finale where you get about 3 hours straight of dialogue, cutscenes and exposition with maybe 10 minutes of actual gameplay between. It was torture even for someone who liked the story.
The blow was only somewhat softened by the fact I at least liked the characters. If I had to listen to overly drawn out exposition there's worst groups I could have spent it with. But I still have an issue or two with them, mostly regarding their derivative archetypes. The two leads are an obvious romatic set-up, yet they spend 90% of the game in that "I-it's not like I like you or anything!" mode. It gets old, fast.
my biggest is problem the games treatment of Law by Rinwell. They're also set-up as an obvious love interest to each other, yet spend the whole game arguing (and to be fair these two are teens, making it more excusable). But it not only doesn't complete its natural evolution to full blown couple, it's also massively unbalanced. While I'm not a fan of the "they like each other but insult each other" stuff, Alphen and Shionne take a lot of shots at each other on equal terms. With Rinwell and Law, the game treats Law like he's some kind of unforgiveable dumbass (which he can be at times), with Rinwell especially roasting him almost all the time. Yet Rinwell is hardly ever called out on the times she's a dumbass, so if you have two characters who insult each other constantly, but treat one of them as being much "better" than the other, it just feels like bullying. Law is a guy with a crush teasing a girl he likes and gets an appropriate amount of exasperation from the gang. Rinwell is a girl who just seems to despise a guy, even if disproportionally warranted, and gets backed up by everyone whenever she says anything bad about him. Law deserves so much better.
I liked the art style of the game. Very clean and stylish. Some of the locations in particular are beautiful, my favourites being Cyslodia and Elde Menancia. They also implement some full anime cutscenes, but these are paced rather awkwardly. There's I think 3 within the first major area of the game, then just don't show up until about half way through when another pops up, then there's maybe 2 or 3 more for the entire rest. It just felt skewed when the first 5-10 hours held half of these specially dedicated cutscenes.
The battle system of course deserves a mention, and I had a lot of thoughts on it that I probably couldn't properly express because it's a mess of jumbled thoughts in my head. I like a lot of the things in it, such as the amount of customisation you can have regarding your allies AI controlled actions, such as a full "strategy" sheet with prompts like "Do this action when meeting this criteria". It wasn't massively expansive, like you couldn't have one character make sure they combo a specific move when another character uses one of their moves, but there's a lot of control over when things like healing spells are used, when characters engage or run in a fight, when buffs are applied etc.
Each character plays completely different. Whether you like mages who attack from afar, lightning bruisers who want to get up close and attack with as many hits as possible but have to rely heavily on dodging due to their weak defences, or tanks who get up close and rely on blocking over dodging - there's a character in the game for your style, and switching between them in battle is as simple as 2 button presses.
There's a lot of flashy presentation with "boost" attacks too - unique cutscene moves that take any 2 members of your party doing a combo attack.
Each member also has a specific special move that works best against certain enemy types, like Shionne's on flying enemies, and Law's on armoured ones.
But I also had a lot of problems with the battle system. I found the majority of artes to be very unimpactful. You get so many abilities that are just different strings of your character model attacking the enemy and they just don't...seem any different from each other in the long run. Like one of them might have Alphen stab his sword at the enemy a lot of times, while another will have him slash it. But what's the difference? There are SO MANY artes and so few of them that seem to have a specific function in battle. It doesn't help that there's no power rating to these skills on the menu, so the only way to test them out is using them all in battle one by one and comparing them. That might not be too bad, except artes also power up the more you use them, up to 5 tiers, a new one being reached after using the move X times. Trying to find out if "stabby sword" at 2 stars is better than "stabby sword deluxe" at 0 stars is just not something I care to experiment with when you get a new skill every few minutes. And you'll have trouble seeing exact damage values even if you do want to test them, because the battlefield is absolute CHAOS when you have 4 members out at once. By the endgame there were so many spells and particle effects I genuinely couldn't tell which moves were mine or my opponents. I was trying to dodge tornado's that I wasn't sure were even coming from the enemy.
The game does let you set even your own character to be fully automatic though, and at a certain point I did just that, only taking over when I was bored, or for boss fights. The AI is actually surprisingly decent too, able to pull off some long combos. There's a few things they won't do by themselves, but for the most part you can rely on it. They also get access to their full arsenal of moves, while a player will only have the 3 (later 6) ground + aerial attacks assigned to buttons. This will mean if you want to distribute out those star tiers on your artes evenly, you're probably better off letting the AI control the characters anyway. Unless it comes to aerial skills... Because the AI NEVER jumps, it means the only way the characters will use their aerial moves is if they use another move that sends them into the air, and to be fair most characters have at least one, if not multiple. But Shionne specifically doesn't get a single one (unless I missed it), meaning she will never use her massive library of moves that can only be used in the air. She even gets perks on her "skill tree" specifically dedicated to air battle. Like I get that being player controlled is an option, but I don't think any other character has such a heavy emphasis on perks that straight up can't be used in auto-mode.
It really is the kind of game where almost every praise I have comes with a "but", even if the but is comparatively smaller. The amount of character and relationship-building dialogue during battles, in camp fires etc (aka dialogue that happens in the background so it doesn't take up game time) is very nice, but you'll hear the same lines way too much.
I could probably say a lot more about the game, but with the purpose of my reviews mostly being for myself to read back on when I want to know exactly how I felt about a game, I think I've said enough that if I come back to this in 3 years I can be like "oh yeah, that's why I didn't like Tales of Arise quite as much as I seem to remember".
I instantly found the story to be engaging. It was obviously a well thought out world and it's workings. I know some people hated the direction the story ended up going, but I more or less liked it to the end, and thought the twists provided a good endgame.
What I wasn't a fan of was the actual writing. There is way too much repetitive and redundant dialogue in this game. Everything feels like it has to be stated multiple times by multiple characters. It's worse if you count optional dialogue prompts. I swear to god every one of the main cast has a specific inner struggle and you will hear about it a LOT. Over and over. You'll hear exposition from one character only for the cutscene to end and a new cutscene to just have your party reaffirm the exposition.
This reaches its apex near the finale where you get about 3 hours straight of dialogue, cutscenes and exposition with maybe 10 minutes of actual gameplay between. It was torture even for someone who liked the story.
The blow was only somewhat softened by the fact I at least liked the characters. If I had to listen to overly drawn out exposition there's worst groups I could have spent it with. But I still have an issue or two with them, mostly regarding their derivative archetypes. The two leads are an obvious romatic set-up, yet they spend 90% of the game in that "I-it's not like I like you or anything!" mode. It gets old, fast.
my biggest is problem the games treatment of Law by Rinwell. They're also set-up as an obvious love interest to each other, yet spend the whole game arguing (and to be fair these two are teens, making it more excusable). But it not only doesn't complete its natural evolution to full blown couple, it's also massively unbalanced. While I'm not a fan of the "they like each other but insult each other" stuff, Alphen and Shionne take a lot of shots at each other on equal terms. With Rinwell and Law, the game treats Law like he's some kind of unforgiveable dumbass (which he can be at times), with Rinwell especially roasting him almost all the time. Yet Rinwell is hardly ever called out on the times she's a dumbass, so if you have two characters who insult each other constantly, but treat one of them as being much "better" than the other, it just feels like bullying. Law is a guy with a crush teasing a girl he likes and gets an appropriate amount of exasperation from the gang. Rinwell is a girl who just seems to despise a guy, even if disproportionally warranted, and gets backed up by everyone whenever she says anything bad about him. Law deserves so much better.
I liked the art style of the game. Very clean and stylish. Some of the locations in particular are beautiful, my favourites being Cyslodia and Elde Menancia. They also implement some full anime cutscenes, but these are paced rather awkwardly. There's I think 3 within the first major area of the game, then just don't show up until about half way through when another pops up, then there's maybe 2 or 3 more for the entire rest. It just felt skewed when the first 5-10 hours held half of these specially dedicated cutscenes.
The battle system of course deserves a mention, and I had a lot of thoughts on it that I probably couldn't properly express because it's a mess of jumbled thoughts in my head. I like a lot of the things in it, such as the amount of customisation you can have regarding your allies AI controlled actions, such as a full "strategy" sheet with prompts like "Do this action when meeting this criteria". It wasn't massively expansive, like you couldn't have one character make sure they combo a specific move when another character uses one of their moves, but there's a lot of control over when things like healing spells are used, when characters engage or run in a fight, when buffs are applied etc.
Each character plays completely different. Whether you like mages who attack from afar, lightning bruisers who want to get up close and attack with as many hits as possible but have to rely heavily on dodging due to their weak defences, or tanks who get up close and rely on blocking over dodging - there's a character in the game for your style, and switching between them in battle is as simple as 2 button presses.
There's a lot of flashy presentation with "boost" attacks too - unique cutscene moves that take any 2 members of your party doing a combo attack.
Each member also has a specific special move that works best against certain enemy types, like Shionne's on flying enemies, and Law's on armoured ones.
But I also had a lot of problems with the battle system. I found the majority of artes to be very unimpactful. You get so many abilities that are just different strings of your character model attacking the enemy and they just don't...seem any different from each other in the long run. Like one of them might have Alphen stab his sword at the enemy a lot of times, while another will have him slash it. But what's the difference? There are SO MANY artes and so few of them that seem to have a specific function in battle. It doesn't help that there's no power rating to these skills on the menu, so the only way to test them out is using them all in battle one by one and comparing them. That might not be too bad, except artes also power up the more you use them, up to 5 tiers, a new one being reached after using the move X times. Trying to find out if "stabby sword" at 2 stars is better than "stabby sword deluxe" at 0 stars is just not something I care to experiment with when you get a new skill every few minutes. And you'll have trouble seeing exact damage values even if you do want to test them, because the battlefield is absolute CHAOS when you have 4 members out at once. By the endgame there were so many spells and particle effects I genuinely couldn't tell which moves were mine or my opponents. I was trying to dodge tornado's that I wasn't sure were even coming from the enemy.
The game does let you set even your own character to be fully automatic though, and at a certain point I did just that, only taking over when I was bored, or for boss fights. The AI is actually surprisingly decent too, able to pull off some long combos. There's a few things they won't do by themselves, but for the most part you can rely on it. They also get access to their full arsenal of moves, while a player will only have the 3 (later 6) ground + aerial attacks assigned to buttons. This will mean if you want to distribute out those star tiers on your artes evenly, you're probably better off letting the AI control the characters anyway. Unless it comes to aerial skills... Because the AI NEVER jumps, it means the only way the characters will use their aerial moves is if they use another move that sends them into the air, and to be fair most characters have at least one, if not multiple. But Shionne specifically doesn't get a single one (unless I missed it), meaning she will never use her massive library of moves that can only be used in the air. She even gets perks on her "skill tree" specifically dedicated to air battle. Like I get that being player controlled is an option, but I don't think any other character has such a heavy emphasis on perks that straight up can't be used in auto-mode.
It really is the kind of game where almost every praise I have comes with a "but", even if the but is comparatively smaller. The amount of character and relationship-building dialogue during battles, in camp fires etc (aka dialogue that happens in the background so it doesn't take up game time) is very nice, but you'll hear the same lines way too much.
I could probably say a lot more about the game, but with the purpose of my reviews mostly being for myself to read back on when I want to know exactly how I felt about a game, I think I've said enough that if I come back to this in 3 years I can be like "oh yeah, that's why I didn't like Tales of Arise quite as much as I seem to remember".
This game is so fucked thank god slavery isn't real
this game deserves final fantasy xiii’s reception more than final fantasy xiii ever did
Well, we've found it. It's taken scientists and game developers decades and thousands of games of toil, but here it is. The exact middle of the road.
Arise is the perfect game for namco to release in the landscape of 2021. Extremely conventional, easy to digest storytelling which is just trope after trope, put together with a level of polish that other games haven't been able to achieve(COUGH deathloop COUGH), and has enough good elements and good enough marketing to catfish the local RPG fan into thinking they're getting next final fantasy or at least the next xenobalde.
Ok maybe that's a little rude. It's a competent game. Most notably, the combat is pretty good. It's well animated, has a great flow, and making long combos with various arts and boost break moves is good fun, though its very easy to fall into the same combo patterns (Especially since launchers are so ridiculously good on the MC), and any enemies that arent bosses are particularly unchallenging. But particularly with the different party members on offer it's pretty good. It's about on the same level as the modern Ys games albeit with less in the way of challenge and variety.
It's also a very pretty game. Character models in particular are fantastic and so are effects, and adapt an anime style into very high fidelity quite well. There's particularly nice details on little things, notably character eyes and clothing that just looks really nice.
And right there, i've ran out of remarkable things to say about Tales of Arise. The story and setting are so... bland and have nothing to them, particularly in the early hours that I just glaze over. Your amnesiac protagonist works with your pink-haired tsundere waifu who has a fancy fire sword to kill some lads, each of which resides in these tiny lands with no character or theme beyond "fire world, ice world".
The only real curveball Arise throws towards being the most boring thing ever is its slavery and racism (?) angle, which could have been and maybe does turn into a complete trainwreck down the line but by the time i was tuning out mostly boiled down to mistrust and some very tame stuff so its mostly just uninteresting and conventional. Count the times someone doesn't trust someone because they're renan of dahnan or whatever and then never proceed to poke the concept any further than that.
This is excepting the one thing, which is that the slaves in the first chapter, who are ostensibly mining for materials, are actually getting legitimately harvested for their will/life essence/magic by being beaten down... or something. It's some pretty damn charged imagery I feel they go with and I'm not sure if the devs recognise this. You eventually go and kill the bad dude and the sucked up will turns into a dragon or something and tattacks both of you and then you stop the dragon made from the power of the will of the oppressed by sucking up the energy into your waifu's fire sword.
Now that could be really fucking wild (though not neccessarily good or nuanced), but the emphasis in the game is never on it and it doesnt even seem to make those connections. So when i say "you suck up the manifestation of the life energy of an opressed people into your waifu sword,", whilst that's legitimately just connecting plot points, the game seems thorougly disinterested in it and you're immedietly onto the next bad dude woo!
And that's Arise in a nutshell. Making suggestions at being something more interesting every now and then but far more interested in being palatable, tropey, and digestible. It has absolutely no rough edges, nothing actually interesting to hook onto. And hey, I get that comfy, conventional JRPG plots like this can be nice to chill out to, but this game makes Atelier Ryza look daring.
The combat is good and it is pretty and it's consistently competent. But that's kind of all it is.
Arise is the perfect game for namco to release in the landscape of 2021. Extremely conventional, easy to digest storytelling which is just trope after trope, put together with a level of polish that other games haven't been able to achieve(COUGH deathloop COUGH), and has enough good elements and good enough marketing to catfish the local RPG fan into thinking they're getting next final fantasy or at least the next xenobalde.
Ok maybe that's a little rude. It's a competent game. Most notably, the combat is pretty good. It's well animated, has a great flow, and making long combos with various arts and boost break moves is good fun, though its very easy to fall into the same combo patterns (Especially since launchers are so ridiculously good on the MC), and any enemies that arent bosses are particularly unchallenging. But particularly with the different party members on offer it's pretty good. It's about on the same level as the modern Ys games albeit with less in the way of challenge and variety.
It's also a very pretty game. Character models in particular are fantastic and so are effects, and adapt an anime style into very high fidelity quite well. There's particularly nice details on little things, notably character eyes and clothing that just looks really nice.
And right there, i've ran out of remarkable things to say about Tales of Arise. The story and setting are so... bland and have nothing to them, particularly in the early hours that I just glaze over. Your amnesiac protagonist works with your pink-haired tsundere waifu who has a fancy fire sword to kill some lads, each of which resides in these tiny lands with no character or theme beyond "fire world, ice world".
The only real curveball Arise throws towards being the most boring thing ever is its slavery and racism (?) angle, which could have been and maybe does turn into a complete trainwreck down the line but by the time i was tuning out mostly boiled down to mistrust and some very tame stuff so its mostly just uninteresting and conventional. Count the times someone doesn't trust someone because they're renan of dahnan or whatever and then never proceed to poke the concept any further than that.
This is excepting the one thing, which is that the slaves in the first chapter, who are ostensibly mining for materials, are actually getting legitimately harvested for their will/life essence/magic by being beaten down... or something. It's some pretty damn charged imagery I feel they go with and I'm not sure if the devs recognise this. You eventually go and kill the bad dude and the sucked up will turns into a dragon or something and tattacks both of you and then you stop the dragon made from the power of the will of the oppressed by sucking up the energy into your waifu's fire sword.
Now that could be really fucking wild (though not neccessarily good or nuanced), but the emphasis in the game is never on it and it doesnt even seem to make those connections. So when i say "you suck up the manifestation of the life energy of an opressed people into your waifu sword,", whilst that's legitimately just connecting plot points, the game seems thorougly disinterested in it and you're immedietly onto the next bad dude woo!
And that's Arise in a nutshell. Making suggestions at being something more interesting every now and then but far more interested in being palatable, tropey, and digestible. It has absolutely no rough edges, nothing actually interesting to hook onto. And hey, I get that comfy, conventional JRPG plots like this can be nice to chill out to, but this game makes Atelier Ryza look daring.
The combat is good and it is pretty and it's consistently competent. But that's kind of all it is.
Um prato cheio pra quem gostas de animes e principalmente Shounens, acho q o jogo tem reviravoltas q não precisam e foram num caminho q eu não costumo gostar mas não chega a ser ruim
Os personagens são ótimos junto com a maravilhosa trilha sonora, a arte é linda junto com os cenarios, o combate é bem bom apesar de eu não ter conseguido dominar bem, e o jogo fica bem repetitivo se vc jogar por muitas horas no dia
Meu saldo é muito positivo e me fez ter muito interesse na franquia.
Os personagens são ótimos junto com a maravilhosa trilha sonora, a arte é linda junto com os cenarios, o combate é bem bom apesar de eu não ter conseguido dominar bem, e o jogo fica bem repetitivo se vc jogar por muitas horas no dia
Meu saldo é muito positivo e me fez ter muito interesse na franquia.
A complete shallow mess of an action game with a myriad of conflicting design choices.
>enemy and boss interactions are neutered compared to previous entries (artes have less distinct features among them, the amount of hit states you can potentially inflict on an enemy has been lessened, with even shit like downing enemies locking them down to the ground, unable to be comboed, bosses will flat out ignore hitstun entirely, even humanoid ones)
>you only get a max of 12 artes (6 for ground and 6 for air) when most modernish games allowed for at least 16
>artes are now separated into two categories, ground and aerial, vastly limiting your combo potential and leading to more repetition
>if you want to keep an enemy in its break state, you’ll find yourself forced into doing aerial combos even if you probably won’t want to, making the aerial and ground play feel even more homogenized
>Boost Artes/Strikes all have a singular answer and don’t particularly open up for interesting combo routes and gameplay applications
In most action games (the big ones at least, not counting the shoveleware stuff) you can change the status of a normal enemy pretty easily. There are multiple types of hitstun, stun, aerial status, downed status, pinned on a wall etc. These go a long way in making combat against normal mooks enjoyable, since they open up a lot of possibilities. Hitting an enemy and having it suffer just damage and hitstun is the most basic interaction and it's fine, but if it's almost all you ever do, then it starts to become a problem.
Tales games usually do a pretty good job with this, giving you a ton of artes with unique properties (pushback, launchers, downing, picking enemies up from a downed state, spinning, dizzying, relocating player characters behind the enemies, inflicting varying amounts of hitstun, comboing into themselves for multiple hits, and more) that not only had useful functions when it came to engaging enemies but made it satisfying as a result due to the amount of different hit reactions you can inflict. In Arise, however, there’s just not as many outside of knockdown with Boost Attacks, in which you can’t even pick up enemies from since it locks them to the ground, launchers, and some status effects here and there, which makes the combat feel less dynamic as a result.
There's not really any room for real creativity or interesting situations arising from what you choose to do, there's a very limited number of possible game states in Arise with very limited answers. When an enemy actually is responding to being hit they only have a single type of standing hitstun since things like basic OTG mechanics are no longer present, and a stun/stagger state where all you can do is wail on them while they sit in place. Of course that's when they're not just plowing through attacks with super armor. There's no room for actual variety in combat since everything you do will lead to the exact same outcome. I can't consider swapping out animations to do the same thing to be actual depth or variety.
As for the conflicting design choices, Arise wants to have you doing fast, flashy combos (which are really brainless to perform since you'll never create an interesting situation that you have to adapt to and you'll never have to think about what artes will go well together. Even something as simple as accounting for your arte choices causing knockdown is out the window.) yet it's also unresponsive with unnecessarily lengthy animations that can't be canceled, and spams super armor on every enemy. Generally having most of your moves be long animation locks is for games with slow, methodical combat (e.g. Monster Hunter, Souls) but Arise tries to have its cake and eat it too, unable to decide between being a poor copy of stuff like DMC or a poor copy of stuff like MonHun.
Then you get to the boss encounters which invalidate half of the game mechanics. It's like you're playing a whole different game when you fight these guys. Their super armor is permanent meaning the pierce system doesn't matter, you can't do the combos they clearly tried to design game systems around, and to top it all off since you can't get them into hitstun you can't knock them into the air, which makes half of your assigned moveset useless on most of them.
I like having options in action games. I like having a lot of different ways I can approach the same thing from the core systems. I like being able to find a lot of creative applications for a given tool. That's depth. None of this is present in these encounters where there is a single optimal way to approach them. If it's a big monster boss you dodge very highly telegraphed attacks and hit the flashing glowing weak point until it dies. For humanoid bosses, it's just dodge into attack, use your limited selection artes that come out fast enough, to reset and do it again. I tried the highest difficulty available and it was still so fucking boring and mindless.
Then there’s the fact that they removed co-op, a standard feature across the series, just so they could make it like every other generic ARPG Bamco already puts out. It doesn't have the LMBS, fighting game influence, or fleshed out combat you used to be able to expect of a Tales game. It's a "Tales" game with none of the defining features of Tales. And while it threw out a lot of established, unique features of the series the ones it does retain suffered dramatic regressions. The strategy menu only affects healing behavior now and Overlimit is back to the way it was in GameCube Symphonia where you don't have control over it activating and can't see how close you are to entering OVL state either. Outside of the combat I thought it was still pretty mediocre. It's very frontloaded to give you a strong first impression but the world and dungeon design drop off rapidly. It's full of recycling, you'll never stop fighting recolors of the same handful of enemies from the first couple areas, and dungeons are full of copypasted rooms.
The characters aren’t anything to write home about either. Alphen was just the standard heroic main protag with amnesia. Yeah, he has a bit of a dorky side and is a weapons nerd but that’s just about it. He doesn’t really have any major flaws he has to overcome since the mystery and set-ups around him are external rather than internal. Now, I would be fine with this if they actually made him funny or entertaining to follow, like, Lloyd or Yuri but he has nothing about him.
Shionne was the standard, prickly tsundere love interest. While she has her understandable reasons for doing so, it doesn’t make her any more compelling to watch, even when she does eventually defrost and that’s not even getting into how on-the-nose her relationship with Alphen is.
Law is the dumbass of the group and isn’t even particularly endearing with it and just comes across as obnoxious more than anything. Plus the whole “if you kill her, you’ll be just like her” thing that pops up at one point during the story annoyed the hell out of me.
>party is on a quest to kill all the lords and have already killed 2
>Introduce a new lord who just killed over 100 civilians in front of the party
>party member who already wanted her dead due to her past crimes tries to kill her
>another party member literally runs to block the spell from hitting the villain
>NOOOOO YOU CAN'T KILL THE PERSON THAT KILLED YOUR PARENTS AND WIPED OUT YOUR ENTIRE CLAN IN THE PAST YOU'LL BE JUST LIKE HER
>villain does nothing while all of this is happening and escapes
>OK NOW LETS GO FIND HER AND KILL HER
>find her after slaughtering her henchmen
>previous party member has a change of heart
>IF I KILL YOU I'LL BE JUST LIKE YOU
>party lets her go AGAIN
>bigger and badder villain immediately appears to kill her anyway
Just a complete mess overall.
Rinwell is pretty normal besides the racist mage thing but there’s not much to her outside of her flirting/bickering with Law.
Kisara has nothing to her beyond being the team mom, fishing, her ass, and "muh dead brother."
Dohalim felt like he did have nice development throughout the game though, especially with how he learns to see how his rule has affected the people under him. I like him.
Hootle is the team pet but he’s adorable so I’ll give him a pass.
The villains are also all lackluster as well, being comprised of little more than different flavors of mustache-twirling assholes, though at least the Sephiroth wannabe is the most entertaining with how much he yearns for his salty runback. And don’t even get me fucking started with the "it was aliens all along" twist. And the godawful skits, where the game has you stop every 10 steps to have a cutscene where everyone just slightly rephrases the conversation they just had for the sixth time.
>Law: Golly fellas, I’m starting to think racism is bad.
>Alphen: Interesting idea…
>Rinwell: But I love racism. Also, I hate you (please love me)
>Shionne: I don’t need any of you.
>Dohalim: Culture sure is interesting.
>Kisara: Which one of you can I nurse?
>-Walk outside and trigger another cutscene-
>Alphen: Guys, maybe racism isn’t the way?
>Law: Hmm, maybe you are right.
>Rinwell: I HATE RENANS, YOU IDIOT (Oh god I love you)
>Shionne: You are all wasting my time.
>Dohalim: Mmm, culture.
>Kisara: Seriously you guys are making me want to mom so hard.
>-Walk a little way down the road-
>Law: I just had this weird idea like maybe different races shouldn’t hate each other
And let us not forget how this absolute gem of a game really tried to show you a bunch of slave owners who horrifically torture and kill the people underneath them and go "you know, they weren't all that bad, they were just trying to do what they think was right."
Overall, Tales of Arise is the epitome of style-over-substance and I legitimately do not understand the amount of praise it has received. Yes, the game looks extremely pretty and some of the animations are quite nice to look at, but the actual game is a slog, both mechanically and narratively.
>enemy and boss interactions are neutered compared to previous entries (artes have less distinct features among them, the amount of hit states you can potentially inflict on an enemy has been lessened, with even shit like downing enemies locking them down to the ground, unable to be comboed, bosses will flat out ignore hitstun entirely, even humanoid ones)
>you only get a max of 12 artes (6 for ground and 6 for air) when most modernish games allowed for at least 16
>artes are now separated into two categories, ground and aerial, vastly limiting your combo potential and leading to more repetition
>if you want to keep an enemy in its break state, you’ll find yourself forced into doing aerial combos even if you probably won’t want to, making the aerial and ground play feel even more homogenized
>Boost Artes/Strikes all have a singular answer and don’t particularly open up for interesting combo routes and gameplay applications
In most action games (the big ones at least, not counting the shoveleware stuff) you can change the status of a normal enemy pretty easily. There are multiple types of hitstun, stun, aerial status, downed status, pinned on a wall etc. These go a long way in making combat against normal mooks enjoyable, since they open up a lot of possibilities. Hitting an enemy and having it suffer just damage and hitstun is the most basic interaction and it's fine, but if it's almost all you ever do, then it starts to become a problem.
Tales games usually do a pretty good job with this, giving you a ton of artes with unique properties (pushback, launchers, downing, picking enemies up from a downed state, spinning, dizzying, relocating player characters behind the enemies, inflicting varying amounts of hitstun, comboing into themselves for multiple hits, and more) that not only had useful functions when it came to engaging enemies but made it satisfying as a result due to the amount of different hit reactions you can inflict. In Arise, however, there’s just not as many outside of knockdown with Boost Attacks, in which you can’t even pick up enemies from since it locks them to the ground, launchers, and some status effects here and there, which makes the combat feel less dynamic as a result.
There's not really any room for real creativity or interesting situations arising from what you choose to do, there's a very limited number of possible game states in Arise with very limited answers. When an enemy actually is responding to being hit they only have a single type of standing hitstun since things like basic OTG mechanics are no longer present, and a stun/stagger state where all you can do is wail on them while they sit in place. Of course that's when they're not just plowing through attacks with super armor. There's no room for actual variety in combat since everything you do will lead to the exact same outcome. I can't consider swapping out animations to do the same thing to be actual depth or variety.
As for the conflicting design choices, Arise wants to have you doing fast, flashy combos (which are really brainless to perform since you'll never create an interesting situation that you have to adapt to and you'll never have to think about what artes will go well together. Even something as simple as accounting for your arte choices causing knockdown is out the window.) yet it's also unresponsive with unnecessarily lengthy animations that can't be canceled, and spams super armor on every enemy. Generally having most of your moves be long animation locks is for games with slow, methodical combat (e.g. Monster Hunter, Souls) but Arise tries to have its cake and eat it too, unable to decide between being a poor copy of stuff like DMC or a poor copy of stuff like MonHun.
Then you get to the boss encounters which invalidate half of the game mechanics. It's like you're playing a whole different game when you fight these guys. Their super armor is permanent meaning the pierce system doesn't matter, you can't do the combos they clearly tried to design game systems around, and to top it all off since you can't get them into hitstun you can't knock them into the air, which makes half of your assigned moveset useless on most of them.
I like having options in action games. I like having a lot of different ways I can approach the same thing from the core systems. I like being able to find a lot of creative applications for a given tool. That's depth. None of this is present in these encounters where there is a single optimal way to approach them. If it's a big monster boss you dodge very highly telegraphed attacks and hit the flashing glowing weak point until it dies. For humanoid bosses, it's just dodge into attack, use your limited selection artes that come out fast enough, to reset and do it again. I tried the highest difficulty available and it was still so fucking boring and mindless.
Then there’s the fact that they removed co-op, a standard feature across the series, just so they could make it like every other generic ARPG Bamco already puts out. It doesn't have the LMBS, fighting game influence, or fleshed out combat you used to be able to expect of a Tales game. It's a "Tales" game with none of the defining features of Tales. And while it threw out a lot of established, unique features of the series the ones it does retain suffered dramatic regressions. The strategy menu only affects healing behavior now and Overlimit is back to the way it was in GameCube Symphonia where you don't have control over it activating and can't see how close you are to entering OVL state either. Outside of the combat I thought it was still pretty mediocre. It's very frontloaded to give you a strong first impression but the world and dungeon design drop off rapidly. It's full of recycling, you'll never stop fighting recolors of the same handful of enemies from the first couple areas, and dungeons are full of copypasted rooms.
The characters aren’t anything to write home about either. Alphen was just the standard heroic main protag with amnesia. Yeah, he has a bit of a dorky side and is a weapons nerd but that’s just about it. He doesn’t really have any major flaws he has to overcome since the mystery and set-ups around him are external rather than internal. Now, I would be fine with this if they actually made him funny or entertaining to follow, like, Lloyd or Yuri but he has nothing about him.
Shionne was the standard, prickly tsundere love interest. While she has her understandable reasons for doing so, it doesn’t make her any more compelling to watch, even when she does eventually defrost and that’s not even getting into how on-the-nose her relationship with Alphen is.
Law is the dumbass of the group and isn’t even particularly endearing with it and just comes across as obnoxious more than anything. Plus the whole “if you kill her, you’ll be just like her” thing that pops up at one point during the story annoyed the hell out of me.
>party is on a quest to kill all the lords and have already killed 2
>Introduce a new lord who just killed over 100 civilians in front of the party
>party member who already wanted her dead due to her past crimes tries to kill her
>another party member literally runs to block the spell from hitting the villain
>NOOOOO YOU CAN'T KILL THE PERSON THAT KILLED YOUR PARENTS AND WIPED OUT YOUR ENTIRE CLAN IN THE PAST YOU'LL BE JUST LIKE HER
>villain does nothing while all of this is happening and escapes
>OK NOW LETS GO FIND HER AND KILL HER
>find her after slaughtering her henchmen
>previous party member has a change of heart
>IF I KILL YOU I'LL BE JUST LIKE YOU
>party lets her go AGAIN
>bigger and badder villain immediately appears to kill her anyway
Just a complete mess overall.
Rinwell is pretty normal besides the racist mage thing but there’s not much to her outside of her flirting/bickering with Law.
Kisara has nothing to her beyond being the team mom, fishing, her ass, and "muh dead brother."
Dohalim felt like he did have nice development throughout the game though, especially with how he learns to see how his rule has affected the people under him. I like him.
Hootle is the team pet but he’s adorable so I’ll give him a pass.
The villains are also all lackluster as well, being comprised of little more than different flavors of mustache-twirling assholes, though at least the Sephiroth wannabe is the most entertaining with how much he yearns for his salty runback. And don’t even get me fucking started with the "it was aliens all along" twist. And the godawful skits, where the game has you stop every 10 steps to have a cutscene where everyone just slightly rephrases the conversation they just had for the sixth time.
>Law: Golly fellas, I’m starting to think racism is bad.
>Alphen: Interesting idea…
>Rinwell: But I love racism. Also, I hate you (please love me)
>Shionne: I don’t need any of you.
>Dohalim: Culture sure is interesting.
>Kisara: Which one of you can I nurse?
>-Walk outside and trigger another cutscene-
>Alphen: Guys, maybe racism isn’t the way?
>Law: Hmm, maybe you are right.
>Rinwell: I HATE RENANS, YOU IDIOT (Oh god I love you)
>Shionne: You are all wasting my time.
>Dohalim: Mmm, culture.
>Kisara: Seriously you guys are making me want to mom so hard.
>-Walk a little way down the road-
>Law: I just had this weird idea like maybe different races shouldn’t hate each other
And let us not forget how this absolute gem of a game really tried to show you a bunch of slave owners who horrifically torture and kill the people underneath them and go "you know, they weren't all that bad, they were just trying to do what they think was right."
Overall, Tales of Arise is the epitome of style-over-substance and I legitimately do not understand the amount of praise it has received. Yes, the game looks extremely pretty and some of the animations are quite nice to look at, but the actual game is a slog, both mechanically and narratively.
Boring and het, a losing combination.
I want to have sex with the artstyle. I'm determined to find a way.
It's kinda baffling to me how this game can actually exist. I don't mean this in a sort of "my cup runneth with art degrees and snob" way that dismisses anyone that likes the game as consumers of the video game equivalent of fast food. There are reasons to like this game for sure. I moreso mean that there's so much that goes on in Tales of Arise where the developers thought, "yes this will make a statement" when all they really did was take a totally centrist approach to things that don't deserve more than a cursory glance and a second of consideration.
Slavery and oppression are the first things that come to mind here. As is typical with many jrpgs, the latter portion of the game spirals into a convoluted pile of jargon and plot devices, but fundamentally preaches safe and inoffensive platitudes and whatboutisms. That last part is a lie, though. I wish I could say that Arise takes the decisively bland but resolute answer to racism and oppression that many other stories do. In fact Arise did have some slightly interesting introspection into what it means to be a slave on a more philosophical level. It all goes wrong when it begins advocating for forgiving our oppressors; when it starts preaching that they are deserving of my sympathy.
The themes of Arise from this point on goes from shallow but acceptable to infuriatingly indecisive and laughable. To repeat myself again, i'm sure the writers of Arise believed they were making a point worth consideration here. In practice it leaves me wondering where the proof-readers during the QA sessions and war-room meetings.
Beyond fumbling the ball on slavery, there's also the issue of the mishandling of other themes like vengeance and co-existence, neither of which are as egregious. I think there is a statement to be made on how Arise attempts to handle isolation and loneliness. There are some dark implications on how this affected a certain character in the party and how developing the support network they needed led to more regret as they walk towards their inevitable demise. Once again, I lied. What I just said wasn't at all something you're shown, and something you're hardly even told through the story. This does not require reading between the lines, but filling between them with orange crayon and claiming it was there from the beginning. I bring this up because it is a bit insulting just how much characterization is conveyed through the characters' over-sensitivity or insufferable demeanor. There isn't re-contextualization, just a bunch of gotcha moments that portray awkward and vapid character interactions as foreshadowing.
I spent more time on the writing than this game probably deserved, and it's kind of laughable i'd give this much of a damn about a game I didn't enjoy. Pondering about and writing about this game might have been a waste of time, "it's just another mcdonald's ass jrpg" would have been a better review truthfully. I did try to enjoy this game though. Quite a few friends adore this game and I tried giving it multiple chances because of it.
One of those chances lies with the gameplay. Yet again though, Arise totally fumbles here. On the surface, Arise's mechanical depth is quite sound. It creates an inter-connectivity between the party and really sells the idea that everyone is contributing to make the team stronger. It does this through its boost mechanic, which is in your best interest to use to extend combos. These can also be used to one shot enemies before they've even reached half their healthbar. Using this mechanic ritually determines how often you can break an enemy's stance, opening them up to more combos. Once again, this is a lie. The issue with Tales of Arise combat lies in a completely static and awful enemy lineup.
Generic enemies tend to fall under 3 molds: dodgey and agile types like wolves and brutes, charge up and floaty enemies, and rolling sonic the hedgehog losers that hit just one second after you're ready to evade their attack. This enemy lineup, without exaggeration, ruins the combat of Arise. Once again, the game feels vapid and devoid of any sort of interesting combat moments because the situations you're put in are almost entirely the same for about 40 hours. The scaling challenge in this game's action combat comes from enemies that are higher level and will almost always body your AI party members no matter how well you plan in advance.
This issue is exacerbated with bosses. Suddenly, Arise stops being this game where challenge dissipates once you master the flowchart that is every combat encounter (a flowchart that never changes across its 40 hours). Now it turns into a realtime potion spamming dodge-rolling clown fiesta, except now you have a bunch of braindead party members that don't get the memo. Bosses aren't a test of skill but a test of how many consumables you've bought on your way to the boss. Let's not even get into all the havoc that the bloated HP bars and the near impossibility of breaking stance has on potentially skill based gameplay.
The inventory system and crafting system are insipidly pedantic and not worth an iota of genuine thought. The game tries to make these interesting by having every piece of equipment aspected to an element. In practice you're just mindlessly scaling up your equipment to go with what gives the biggest numbers. I'm not sure if I mentioned this yet, but number-crunching and stat-stacking ruins any kind of fun character action gameplay Arise is going for.
Sidequests are total filler but i'm not really sure if I should have expected anything less. What I can say though is that what goes on in sidequests are things you already do in the story on occasion. The story itself is peppered with grocery list tasks and obvious attempts to pad the runtime of the game. If Arise was condensed to only include interesting gameplay or story scenarios you'd be left with a pamphlet. This sort of padding applies to the character interactions themselves as so much of them are filled to the brim with useless conversations that don't add an ounce of insight to their personality or history. Though some of this lot can be fun, it never really shakes off the feeling that they are caricatures.
Once again, I could go on and list every single thing about this game. What I want you to picture however: think of every aspect that goes to making a narrative and a game's experience work. Plotting, theming, resonance, mechanics, bosses, combat scenarios, progression, exploration, the works. Now imagine if every single one of those aspects had the consideration that goes into marking off a box in a mindless day-job that pays pocket change. It's filled with grease but nothing of substance. These are the feelings i've had with Tales of Arise. Calling it a fastfood game is giving it too much credit. At least fast-food's convenience is handy when i'm on a crunch. With Arise, all I felt was that my time was neither respected nor given something useful to consider.
I dropped this game at least three times over the last year, but picked it back up hoping that I could be surprised. As I said, I've had many friends whose opinion I hold in high regard recommend and back this game's corner. Likewise I always had no idea what exactly my problem was with this game until I started writing for it.
What I think I had to realize was that Tales of Arise is emblematic of all my problems with many jrpgs. Between the flowcharty combat, the pointless inventory and character progression, the unrealistic and comedically unsatisfying characterization, nonsense plots that overuse jargon as a substitute for interesting narrative devices, and taking the centrist approach to blatantly awful aspects of humanity.
To go back to the slavery topic, Babylon 5, a story I quite enjoy, has a quote that was all Arise needed to say on the topic. If this quote was the only examination the entire narrative had on oppression, I would still find it preferable to what I got. "I can never forgive your people, for what they did to me. My people can never forgive your people for what they did to us. But I can forgive you." Now, was that so difficult?
Slavery and oppression are the first things that come to mind here. As is typical with many jrpgs, the latter portion of the game spirals into a convoluted pile of jargon and plot devices, but fundamentally preaches safe and inoffensive platitudes and whatboutisms. That last part is a lie, though. I wish I could say that Arise takes the decisively bland but resolute answer to racism and oppression that many other stories do. In fact Arise did have some slightly interesting introspection into what it means to be a slave on a more philosophical level. It all goes wrong when it begins advocating for forgiving our oppressors; when it starts preaching that they are deserving of my sympathy.
The themes of Arise from this point on goes from shallow but acceptable to infuriatingly indecisive and laughable. To repeat myself again, i'm sure the writers of Arise believed they were making a point worth consideration here. In practice it leaves me wondering where the proof-readers during the QA sessions and war-room meetings.
Beyond fumbling the ball on slavery, there's also the issue of the mishandling of other themes like vengeance and co-existence, neither of which are as egregious. I think there is a statement to be made on how Arise attempts to handle isolation and loneliness. There are some dark implications on how this affected a certain character in the party and how developing the support network they needed led to more regret as they walk towards their inevitable demise. Once again, I lied. What I just said wasn't at all something you're shown, and something you're hardly even told through the story. This does not require reading between the lines, but filling between them with orange crayon and claiming it was there from the beginning. I bring this up because it is a bit insulting just how much characterization is conveyed through the characters' over-sensitivity or insufferable demeanor. There isn't re-contextualization, just a bunch of gotcha moments that portray awkward and vapid character interactions as foreshadowing.
I spent more time on the writing than this game probably deserved, and it's kind of laughable i'd give this much of a damn about a game I didn't enjoy. Pondering about and writing about this game might have been a waste of time, "it's just another mcdonald's ass jrpg" would have been a better review truthfully. I did try to enjoy this game though. Quite a few friends adore this game and I tried giving it multiple chances because of it.
One of those chances lies with the gameplay. Yet again though, Arise totally fumbles here. On the surface, Arise's mechanical depth is quite sound. It creates an inter-connectivity between the party and really sells the idea that everyone is contributing to make the team stronger. It does this through its boost mechanic, which is in your best interest to use to extend combos. These can also be used to one shot enemies before they've even reached half their healthbar. Using this mechanic ritually determines how often you can break an enemy's stance, opening them up to more combos. Once again, this is a lie. The issue with Tales of Arise combat lies in a completely static and awful enemy lineup.
Generic enemies tend to fall under 3 molds: dodgey and agile types like wolves and brutes, charge up and floaty enemies, and rolling sonic the hedgehog losers that hit just one second after you're ready to evade their attack. This enemy lineup, without exaggeration, ruins the combat of Arise. Once again, the game feels vapid and devoid of any sort of interesting combat moments because the situations you're put in are almost entirely the same for about 40 hours. The scaling challenge in this game's action combat comes from enemies that are higher level and will almost always body your AI party members no matter how well you plan in advance.
This issue is exacerbated with bosses. Suddenly, Arise stops being this game where challenge dissipates once you master the flowchart that is every combat encounter (a flowchart that never changes across its 40 hours). Now it turns into a realtime potion spamming dodge-rolling clown fiesta, except now you have a bunch of braindead party members that don't get the memo. Bosses aren't a test of skill but a test of how many consumables you've bought on your way to the boss. Let's not even get into all the havoc that the bloated HP bars and the near impossibility of breaking stance has on potentially skill based gameplay.
The inventory system and crafting system are insipidly pedantic and not worth an iota of genuine thought. The game tries to make these interesting by having every piece of equipment aspected to an element. In practice you're just mindlessly scaling up your equipment to go with what gives the biggest numbers. I'm not sure if I mentioned this yet, but number-crunching and stat-stacking ruins any kind of fun character action gameplay Arise is going for.
Sidequests are total filler but i'm not really sure if I should have expected anything less. What I can say though is that what goes on in sidequests are things you already do in the story on occasion. The story itself is peppered with grocery list tasks and obvious attempts to pad the runtime of the game. If Arise was condensed to only include interesting gameplay or story scenarios you'd be left with a pamphlet. This sort of padding applies to the character interactions themselves as so much of them are filled to the brim with useless conversations that don't add an ounce of insight to their personality or history. Though some of this lot can be fun, it never really shakes off the feeling that they are caricatures.
Once again, I could go on and list every single thing about this game. What I want you to picture however: think of every aspect that goes to making a narrative and a game's experience work. Plotting, theming, resonance, mechanics, bosses, combat scenarios, progression, exploration, the works. Now imagine if every single one of those aspects had the consideration that goes into marking off a box in a mindless day-job that pays pocket change. It's filled with grease but nothing of substance. These are the feelings i've had with Tales of Arise. Calling it a fastfood game is giving it too much credit. At least fast-food's convenience is handy when i'm on a crunch. With Arise, all I felt was that my time was neither respected nor given something useful to consider.
I dropped this game at least three times over the last year, but picked it back up hoping that I could be surprised. As I said, I've had many friends whose opinion I hold in high regard recommend and back this game's corner. Likewise I always had no idea what exactly my problem was with this game until I started writing for it.
What I think I had to realize was that Tales of Arise is emblematic of all my problems with many jrpgs. Between the flowcharty combat, the pointless inventory and character progression, the unrealistic and comedically unsatisfying characterization, nonsense plots that overuse jargon as a substitute for interesting narrative devices, and taking the centrist approach to blatantly awful aspects of humanity.
To go back to the slavery topic, Babylon 5, a story I quite enjoy, has a quote that was all Arise needed to say on the topic. If this quote was the only examination the entire narrative had on oppression, I would still find it preferable to what I got. "I can never forgive your people, for what they did to me. My people can never forgive your people for what they did to us. But I can forgive you." Now, was that so difficult?
Joguei a primeira vez quando lançou e amei, mas decidi rejogar anos depois e me arrependo. Meu objetivo ao rejogar esta porcaria era fazer o conteúdo endgame que não fiz na primeira vez que joguei, além de ter as DLCs dessa vez, só não fiz a expansão, também fiz os chefes extras e todas as missões secundárias, mas só isso não foi o suficiente pra me prender no jogo, tive uma grande dificuldade em manter o meu ânimo pra rushar o jogo e zerar o mais rápido possível, pulando todas as cutscenes e skits, mas enfrentando todos os mobs do jogo, completei tudo com 28h53m, enfim...
História fraca com vilões ruins e desinteressantes
Gameplay extremamente enjoativa com mobs demorando um século pra serem derrotados, principalmente os chefes, que tem uma "super armadura" que impede você de ficar fazendo combos, nos mobs pelo menos isso é possível.
Não recomendaria.
História fraca com vilões ruins e desinteressantes
Gameplay extremamente enjoativa com mobs demorando um século pra serem derrotados, principalmente os chefes, que tem uma "super armadura" que impede você de ficar fazendo combos, nos mobs pelo menos isso é possível.
Não recomendaria.
I spent more time looking at Kisara's fat ass than playing the game
this game starts out very strong, and continues for awhile, falls off a bit in the last third or so, falls off even moreso near the end, but the very end saves it all and made me forget about it for a moment. one of the things i consistently didn't like about this game were the boss fights - they just wouldn't stagger ever, dealt like 1/3 of my hp every hit while i'm playing on normal, and maybe this is my fault but every time they would do one of their mystic artes i couldn't for the life of me figure out how to stop it despite the characters' dialog alluding to a way to stop it. i also didn't like the cp system, think it needs a rework, and the xp gain seemed very weird. i played on hard (minus boss fights) for like half the game and barely avoided encounters, even went out of my way for encounters a few areas, but nearing the end i seemed pretty far behind on levels. maybe i just avoided more encounters than i thought lol
alphen and shionne are fucking awesome though and i am very happy with my collector's edition purchase :)
alphen and shionne are fucking awesome though and i am very happy with my collector's edition purchase :)
It is indeed an excellent introduction for those who are unfamiliar with the franchise, as well as a great treat for long-time fans. The game raises the already established standards of the Tales series.
The story, as usual, will follow the most anime formula possible, in its first half showing the journey of a hero who needs to free the world, but it will shape itself into a much grander plot. Don't get me wrong, the initial part of the plot is really useful, especially in terms of exploring the kingdoms, however the second half disappoints by becoming excessively accelerated, where the lack of previous explanations combines into a final stretch that is more confusing than enlightening. .
Even with my appreciation for everything that Tales of Arise sets out to accomplish, it is undeniable that the game is not without flaws, quite the contrary, there are problems easily observed within the long hours offered to the player. Notable issues, such as the lack of a certain polish in some special animations, small bugs spread throughout the maps/combats, recycled enemies (to give you an idea, there are 25 base monsters that are repeated throughout the game, but with different skins, totaling more than 100 identical types, what changes are the colors), in addition to several empty areas that limit the interactivity of the world. Despite the flaws, many of these factors were particularly highlighted by me due to the excellent presentation of other aspects of the game, such as its extremely fun gameplay, its addictive combat system and its memorable Boss Fights, which add that epic layer full of positive exaggerations.
As for gameplay, which is its strongest point, the game innovates and improves on previous traditional battle systems, getting the customization of combos right. Combat is fluid, dynamic and strategic, avoiding any feeling of monotony due to the diversity of skills presented, in which each protagonist has a specific style to enjoy.
The characters enjoy an engaging development through the sketches, where the player can get to know each one better, although not deeply enough to become attached to their stories, they are standard but likeable characters. The striking soundtrack complements the atmosphere well (the openings are also sensational) and the beautiful graphics along with the art direction contribute to the overall immersion. It is undoubtedly a worthy title to celebrate 25 years of the "Tales of" series, being a rich addition to the JRPG genre.
The story, as usual, will follow the most anime formula possible, in its first half showing the journey of a hero who needs to free the world, but it will shape itself into a much grander plot. Don't get me wrong, the initial part of the plot is really useful, especially in terms of exploring the kingdoms, however the second half disappoints by becoming excessively accelerated, where the lack of previous explanations combines into a final stretch that is more confusing than enlightening. .
Even with my appreciation for everything that Tales of Arise sets out to accomplish, it is undeniable that the game is not without flaws, quite the contrary, there are problems easily observed within the long hours offered to the player. Notable issues, such as the lack of a certain polish in some special animations, small bugs spread throughout the maps/combats, recycled enemies (to give you an idea, there are 25 base monsters that are repeated throughout the game, but with different skins, totaling more than 100 identical types, what changes are the colors), in addition to several empty areas that limit the interactivity of the world. Despite the flaws, many of these factors were particularly highlighted by me due to the excellent presentation of other aspects of the game, such as its extremely fun gameplay, its addictive combat system and its memorable Boss Fights, which add that epic layer full of positive exaggerations.
As for gameplay, which is its strongest point, the game innovates and improves on previous traditional battle systems, getting the customization of combos right. Combat is fluid, dynamic and strategic, avoiding any feeling of monotony due to the diversity of skills presented, in which each protagonist has a specific style to enjoy.
The characters enjoy an engaging development through the sketches, where the player can get to know each one better, although not deeply enough to become attached to their stories, they are standard but likeable characters. The striking soundtrack complements the atmosphere well (the openings are also sensational) and the beautiful graphics along with the art direction contribute to the overall immersion. It is undoubtedly a worthy title to celebrate 25 years of the "Tales of" series, being a rich addition to the JRPG genre.
With shallow, unresponsive combat and bad enemy design that has you spending the whole game fighting walls of armor that rarely respond to being hit, from the onset it's already not a good Tales game, nor is it even good on the merits of the more typical 3D action RPG it abandoned the series' core to be. If you look outside the combat, however, there are things to like, or at least at first. The story is alright and the environment design is a step up from what Tales has been doing for years (the dungeon design, however, is not). Those things all get worse as the game goes on until you reach the irredeemable late game and struggle to continue giving a shit, between the story falling apart, the game's already heavy reliance on recolors of otherwise recycled enemies becoming even more prominent, and the asset recycling creeping into dungeon design with lots of copy/pasted rooms that maybe will be recolored. And don't even get me started on how they locked artes and their associated skill trees behind DLC costumes, or shit like the $16 Sword Art Online DLC
kisara (retweet if u agree)
que jogo LINDO. os gráficos e o estilo artístico são impecáveis e tem varias paisagens de cair o queixo pra serem admiradas. o maior problema do jogo entretanto... é que todo o resto dele é só "bom o suficiente" o que não seria tão ruim se ele não se arrastasse tanto. O combate é legal na maior parte, apesar dos inimigos extremamente repetitivos e batalhas de boss beeeem entediantes, os personagens também agradam mas a história é tão longa e bagunçada que acaba fazendo com que todo o resto não se sustente direito. é uma pena, por que eu estava animado pra jogar esse jogo desde o lançamento e realmente queria muito amar ele.
If you like Final Fantasy XVI dont play this game, If you dont like Final Fantasy XVI dont play this game