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".