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.

Beat this while sipping coffee on a sunny Sunday morning and life couldn't be better. The platonic ideal of a Sega arcade title. Luscious spring and summer sound effects complementing an ear-grooving and slap-bassing OST that features narration from an earnest announcer-man who will helpfully guide you through a core gameplay hook that's simple enough to pick up in the first twenty seconds but will still challenge you enough that you'll wanna slip another virtual 50p into the slot to hear the coin jingle noise each time you miss out on TIME BONUS! (+5 sec).

The final boss is straight out of Dragon Quest and proves cheeky little Sega AM1 knew exactly what they were cooking up with this game. The credits are... surprisingly beautiful! Heading over to YouTube after the game to cop some more Bass Beats and finding out that there are young fisherman out there playing the soundtrack while they go out and catch real fish was the icing on the cake.

This game is a certified classic! And it's 89p on Steam right now! No excuse! That's basically the price you'd have paid for a single play of this in the arcades back in 1997!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_SUODbCgb8

The biggest stain on the integrity of videogame journalism and the the most beloved unplayed gem in every single gamer's backlog. Being what's probably the only direct translation of the beat 'em up genre into the 3D realm worth playing and talking about, God Hand is one of the most uncompromised and unique entries in the combo oriented pantheon of action games. Incredible that I'm saying this about the game that shutdown any chances of Mikami ever being able to fully go off ever again.

The stiff and constricted movement controls in God Hand force the player to be aware of every surrounding enemy and pick each fight wisely, while still allowing direct confrontation and proximity through a dynamic and anime as fuck dodge system that has you bobbing and weaving between flurry of punches before delivering an uppercut. Expanding on Resident Evil 4's dynamic difficulty, God Hand increases it's challenge the better you get at it, which while being a make or break for some folks out there, makes it stand out from the standard difficulty options from other games and provides immediate feedback to the player on how better he is getting at the game.

God Hand ditches out combo memorization in favor of an easy to understand set of options that reveal their complexity through their success on parrying, guard breaking, stunning or tripping the enemy, which varies depending on who you dealing with it at that moment, and instead let's players express themselves by allowing them to choose their own sequence of combos to perform from a vast list of Bruce Lee like moves that, if set up properly, will have your enemies all flying into a concrete wall at mach speed from one single twirling kick.

Framing all of this insane action is one of the most out there and bizarre universes ever seen. God Hand wears it's 80s/90s action anime influences on it's sleeve, but even if you have gotten familiar with Jojo's Bizarre Adventure these past years, you will still have a hard time making sense of the design and personalities of some of the enemies and bosses in here. God Hand takes the aesthetic of 2D beat 'em ups and just amps it up to 11, clearly having no interest or care for consistent and well thought out world building and presentation, and going for a humorous and visionless dumb as fuck story.

Which is awesome, because what other game has you fighting a wrestling Gorilla that chases bananas mid combat, sparring against a fat Elvis mexican impersonator, or spanking a succubus that turns you into a dog, all in the span of a few hours?

The fast pacing of Bayonetta is probably the biggest selling point of this game, but after a fair amount of practice, working your way through the combos should be enough of a breeze. But if there's anything else that makes Bayonetta work as well as it does, it never really punishes you after dying but another case of trial-and-error battling in which you're made to find another fighting combo that works best for you. It always keeps you on your feet, it's very addicting, and above all, the title character is always a blast to play as, whether it just be from her design or her one-liners.

It takes a lot of time to get used to the nature of those quick time events, because if you end up messing those ones up, they cause dire consequences - from losing a bunch of your health or in other cases, instant death, but thankfully they're not severely punishing to that point it ruins the game. Unfortunately, the fact that some of them are so frequent can be a bit of a drawback for some, yet it feels nice to be quick on your feet.

As someone who was never big on hack-and-slash games, this was a nice refresher.