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.

Well, what was the point of all that?

I have been racking the question in my head occasionally for bordering on two months now.

There is enough "good stuff" in FFXVI to carry 5 different games on their own. The performances, especially Ben Starr's exceptional turn as clive, are pretty universally excellent. I like the characters, as dirtily done as basically any woman is by the plot. Soken's score is excellent and the sheer level of bombast in it's action scenes is top tier. It is in many ways, a game where a bunch of top-tier creatives are putting out their best work.

And I feel nothing!

Final Fantasy XVI might have a bunch of good shit in it, but it's overall creative direction is very poor. The first half of the game gets carried hard by being focused Clive, who is so brilliantly portrayed (and often, improvised) that when the focus of the game shifts to the larger scale conflicts, and some of the other good characters get less time, it just meanders around towards an eventual ending which might have been good had the back half of the game not just, completely failed to make compelling stakes and interweave this conflict with the characters at all well. This has been a problem with FF before - when the character focus basically departs from FF9's final disc the game limps to the line, for instance - but XVI feels like it has even less of a point and it's lull lasts the majority of the runtime.

This leads to the back half in particular becoming a game of awesome peaks - usually in the Eikon set pieces where it feels like all the talented people in development were actually on the same page - amid a sea of mediocrity, especially on retrospect. I am currently talking to a friend who's playing through FFX and even though it's not my favourite, seeing just a scant screenshot or two of "filler" scenes from Luca or Zanarkand, and I feel right there. With XVI it's been like a month and I had to google the name of the main antagonist of the second half, and that guy has like, a really obvious name too.

Another thing comes out of FFXVI in the end is how... careless it is, to put it nicely. The game's poor direction and failure to make it feel like it's trying to make a point or idk, be art, makes its borrowing of tropes from game of thrones feel all the more egregious. Carelessly throwing about implied sexual violence and its whole slavery thing without having, like, a point - at best it's just weird and uncomfortable and unneccessary, at worst its very suspect, lets just leave it at that. The game's treatment of women in particular ends up as an extremely bitter note that is probably a result of a piling up of uncocious biases rather than malice, but that's not good either!

This is to say nothing of the continually weak sidequests and questionable game structure, that it should have culled way more RPG elements, that its way too easy on the first run and more! But these are incidental problems in a game that just fails to make me feel anything when that was clearly what the intention was.

I love parts of XVI. I love Clive, Gav, Cid, Mid and Jill even if the game doesn't. I love the Eikon fights. I love the music. I can't love the game they're in, which in poor direction just wastes what good it's got.

It really should not be the case that Final Fantasy XVI, a game produced by a development team of legends with a nigh-infinite budget and all the time in the world should not be a legitimately more careless and harder to love game than Wanted: Dead, the follow up to devil's third where a lot of the creative decisions were made by an eccentric Swiss billionaire who has probably defrauded the russian state and really likes Stefanie Joosten. But here we are.

I've had a lot of story with this game
First time I played it I suffered enough with Naraku so I dropped it
Second time I got to Tokyo and dropped it immediately cause it was too boring
I don't know how many times I've tried playing this shit, I've always dropped it cause it's so fucking boring, exploration is a kill-off, gameplay is hell in Naraku and then gets piss easy in Tokyo to the point it's just sleep-inducing, overworld exploration is one of the biggest reasons I'm abandoning this and never playing this again cause I'm not using Google Maps to patch some bad game design, and story just wasn't doing anything to me

My current playthrough ended with Xi Wangmu (longest I've ever gotten to) and I suppose I'm just going to delete it from my 3DS, watch a gameplay and play Apocalypse to see if it's actually digestible
This game just isn't for me

You would think having experienced this game across 3 separate iterations, 4 movies, a (brief) skim through the latter half of the manga, and an unhealthy amount of revisits of the game's strongest moments in the span of 2 months would result in just being sick of what the story has to offer at some point, or at least a temporary burn out and move on to another series for a time. Instead I came out of this even more confident in the feelings FES had already brought out by the time the credits rolled.

I already held Persona 3's story, tone and characters to a higher standard than the other two modern games, with the only real problems I had being the sheer amount of dead time during day and night and the eventual feeling that despite the randomized nature of Tartarus, every visit felt the same. And that wouldn't be a problem if the gameplay loop for the first half of FES is some of the most exhausting shit ever as a result of the fatigue system paired with the nigh incomprehensible AI decisions that disregarded any tactics you employ under certain circumstances. That aside its still hard for me not to recommend FES before or even after playing reload for the sake of noticing the subtle (and not so subtle) differences between the two. The main thing to really consider about Persona 3 Reload is that it is not a remake of OG, FES or Portable; its an amalgamation of every official version of this story that even takes liberties from the movies and the Femc route of Portable. I'd go farther to say that Reload's biggest issue is something brought about by Portable's existence: cutscene direction. While it doesn't hurt the narrative in the long run, I can't help but wonder why these changes had to exist in the first place. The immediate scene that comes to mind is Aigis' resolution in December. Aigis is a character I am completely normal about and totally have not formed a confirmation bias regarding the structure of her character and shared fate with the main character being turned on its head by November into being the most natural and heartwarming relationship between a silent protag and party member in the series. That aside, while her awakening is still fine when it comes to the back and forth between her comrades (I'd even go as far to say her new voice actress kills these scenes and especially her social link), the tone and shot direction of the original is axed in favor of this static conversation on the couch with the most expression being Aigis standing up and sitting down (but eventually smiling so I again I can't fully hate the scene lol). In comparison OG makes use of the cramped setting of the dorm to give this inherently dramatic composition paired with an emotionally distant Aigis who isn't looking any of her teammates in the eyes, all the while holding her wrist close to her chest (something she does in Reload eventually but again the problem is THIS scene specifically), eventually leading to her outright falling to the ground, paralyzed in fear of death, not of her own concern, but because of everybody that has allowed her a chance at life, despite her contradictory existence. Again this point gets across in Reload as well, and at the end of the day this is pretty nitpicky considering how many cutscenes are revamped to give more dynamic expressions and animations for the cast, Strega and the social links especially are noticeably given love in this area, as well as them now being fully voiced for every rank.

Brainrot aside, the gameplay side of Reload is something I was expecting to be more mixed about. Instead I just had a good ass time making stupid ass builds no different from FES and Royal. Of course Reload may be a bit overtuned for the player if you aren't on merciless but like, so was FES if you put in enough time in those tartarus visits. I was especially confused as to the discourse around Nyx's difficulty, which I probably don't have the right to speak on as I was overleveled every time I fought them. Point is I don't see the same problems in the scaling as FES fans do, its all up to your agency to grind in advance to hitting the eventual wall or just saying fuck it and beat your head against every wall until you've gotten past everything on your own terms, a mindset that will most likely be carried on to this games version of The Answer, which day one content aside, I hope is handled well.

The daily sim of these games was always something I'm pretty indifferent to overall, mainly due to how much dead time can build up for the sake of giving the player time to rationalize the situation at hand (October through December). Social links have always been hit or miss in all of these games, Akinari and Aigis being the only ones I could confidently call great in FES, and still honestly believe after accidentally doing a max social link run this playthrough. However, voiced social links through every rank did wonders for characters like Bebe, Yuko, and the party members, especially when paired with platonic routes that alleviate how awkward the transition towards romance is handled in this series, even if Yukari should have enough chemistry with the mc in the main story to negate this, it still ends up not landing for me most of the time personally. Naturally this also means the jealousy system is gone entirely and with it Fuuka is automatically much better for not bricking my save file by October and forcing me to drop two entire social links in fortune and strength like she did in FES. Linked Episodes are also a welcome addition but not really something you can implement naturally without there being prior knowledge of who even is a social link in the main game. Overall an improvement from prior games but can be infinitely expanded upon if Atlus so wishes.

The main story is mostly untouched, outside of the aforementioned changes in direction, and animated cutscenes (and lack thereof in certain places) that pairs with the more familial bond SEES has throughout the game that FES had more than enough time to expand on. Strega is given much more attention, with Chidori specifically getting just a bit more to do with Junpei in her closing moments (disregarding the revival event which I still like) and explicitly mirrors the main character's final moments on Graduation Day, somehow making this entire stretch hit even harder than it did any other time previously.

I'm sure there's much more to mention but I'd just be recounting all of the best moments these games highlight enough in a given playthrough, so I'll just close with the soundtrack honestly containing my favorite tracks in any game I've played so far. Memories of the School was given so much justice to the point it outright surpasses its original composition to me, Color your Night is just peak and nobody should question it, and this game's version of Burn my Dread Last Battle adds a more somber tone from the perspective of the mc alongside the swan song feeling the original gave from the perspective of those that gave him life.

Overall an amazing remake given form by its predecessors, not made for the purpose of replacing any version previous regardless of your opinion on it, but instead made to stand alongside its roots while hopefully paving a new standard for the future games to inevitably not follow up on.

COLD STEELLLLL 2!

CS2 has alot of similarities between SC which i find to be pretty cool in terms of presentation, structure and even somewhat the direction of the story (Albeit 2 different things) which i liked seeing. The only downside of CS2 is the pacing in act 2, funny enough reminded me of the section in SC which made you walk around the whole of Liberl lmao.

But i think this was a good step up from the first game in alot of respects and provided some good development for Rean and Class 7! The shock factor of Trails cliffhangers needs to be studied honestly.

Had fun with it and im looking forward to the second half of cold steel.

The Deconstruction of the Light vs Shadow trope, and a magnificient story, everything is so well written, it really shows XIV's true potential.

The setting, ambient and problematique are absolutely charming and captivating, the music is also absurdly iconic and masterfully composed, just bravo.

On the other hand, it has some pacing issues, but that's the only con i can find.

It's such a masterpiece and gives us one of the best villains in the whole franchise.

this game did the impossible for me. it PEAKS so much i loved every second of enjoying this masterpiece and was honestly dumfounded by how much Cold Steel redeemed itself and became such a phenomenal arc and jump in quality

my favorite lore in the series and so many long-awaited moments in this came this was a gift for anyone who started all the way from the sky arc and didn't skip any arc. this is comfortably my second favorite Trails game

the end of the saga

Lotta fans will tell you this the "worst" of the series, or an uninspired end...do NOT listen to them crybabies dude. Like most games it does stretch the game out a bit more than it should in the middle, but also there's just so much side content that if you're doing a completionist route it slows the narrative even more. Rean Schwarzer, I do this for you. Juna Crawford, you are the second coming. I got Erebonia on my back man. Crazy send off for class 7 and boy did they pull out everybody for their goodbye party.