One really cool trend we saw back in the last decade is formerly underground franchises breaking into the mainstream. Persona, Yakuza, Monster Hunter, Fire Emblem, and Xenoblade all had dedicated followings before but are now bringing in more fans than ever. Among these is Balan Wonderworld which blew people away with its frenetic action, deep characters, and philosophical storytelling. Its success led to many people checking out the game’s predecessor, Nights: Into Dreams. And let’s just say that the early installment weirdness is strong with this one.
The biggest issue with Nights could be summed up in four words: Creative ideas, Weird execution. Nowhere is this more evident with the game’s main protagonist Nights. Nights is a character we are supposed to straight up despise. You’re supposed to see them as a mass murdering psychopath. They’re supposed to be the embodiment of the player who kills all the clearly sapient enemies to power up and show what that person who actually be like. In other words, they were the original Chara. Heck, they even got the same pronouns. The game really wants you to hate them and constantly has the other characters as well as the very narration itself call them out.
(Clip of Elliot saying “Full of bloodlust, as always.)
But the problem is that nearly every one of Nights’s murders are completely justified. The game seems to forget the fact that Nights is a soldier fighting a war where the other side wants to destroy seals to release an eldritch abomination upon the world. Also, the enemy soldiers are almost always portrayed as nothing more than simple video game enemies for you to kill. As mangled as the phrase has become, Nights is just doing their job.
The one silver lining to all this is that Yuji Naka learned from his missteps. Balan Wonderworld did a far better job at linking story and gameplay together while Shot2048 gave us a far superior villain protagonist. I’m DestroyerOfMid and I’ll see you in the comments… again.

Minstrel Song is an old skool rpg where you get into lots of fights with monsters to level up and learn techniques for your characters weapons as well as entirely new game mechanics, killing monsters is also the only way to advance the in game timer, the monsters will be replaced with stronger monsters at a rate faster than you will improve, on top that it will cause quests to time out, and new quests to become available, so actually you want to avoid combat as much as possible to keep the timer from moving forward and instead to focus on quests for character progression, only carefully incrementing it when you run out of things to do but monsters in the overworld spawn in huge numbers and are highly aggressive, so you can't totally avoid combat, but if you get into a fight you can just retreat to avoid advancing the timer, but retreating costs crucial resources so actually you need to run around like scooby doo with a trail of monsters chasing you while trying to progress quests, but the locations where you can find new quests are unmarked, and where you need to go to progress quests is unstated, so you need to run around the overworld getting chased by monsters like scooby doo so you can find quests to level up because there's no main quest, and you don't even know if you've done everything you can do before making the call to kill some monsters to advance the game clock, eventually you'll do this enough to get multiple quests that specifically tell you to go out and kill shitloads of monsters and they're really important so to do the most important quests you need to ignore everything you've learned about playing the game and potentially time out dozens of quests that you don't know how to do because they don't tell you where to go or what to do never mind the quests that you don't know about because they could be handed out by any of the dozens of NPCs who had nothing to say to you an hour ago, who are potentially in locations you haven't discovered because the only way to discover locations is either to talk to people or to recruit new party members, but you can only have a limited party size so to see if a new party member will give you a location (which they may not) you need to kick out an existing party member first if you are full, the removed party member will later reappear in potentially any one of the many pubs, one per city, scattered around the dozens of cities in the game, including ones you haven't discovered, after doing all that for a while the final boss shows up and you are probably not strong enough to kill him even with all that effort. This anti-lesson on game design could only be enjoyed by criminally deranged perverts.

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.