Came out of nowhere and completely rocked my world. Just filled with so much heart and care, one of the best modern homages to the golden era of JRPGs you will find.

A story that starts of as generic fantasy but actually has much much more to offer beyond that. I’m being as vague as possible here because I want anyone who plays to be as blind as they possibly can going into this.

My only criticism is the 2 main characters feel a bit lacklustre in comparison to the fairly strong cast, and the exceptionally brilliant, Garl who is the heart of this whole game. Just a fun jolly whimsical silly loving goofy guy, guarantee you’ll love him

Combat is simple but fun, encounters are sparse but difficult at times, but because of the scarcity I didn’t find myself getting tired of them. The difficulty balance is at the sweet spot for me, I need to think and use my brain but it’s rare a boss fight ever takes more than 2 attempts.

The music and visuals…. I don’t need to say anything you will see for yourself, and if you know you know. Wheels is the most fun mini game I’ve played since Triple Triad in FF8, encourage everyone to play when you can.

I’m just rambling atp man. Long story short, game takes a lot from other games and doesn’t do too much to expand on the core ideas or systems but it doesn’t feel like it’s trying to copy them, Sea of Stars has its own identity and stands up there with the best imo. I laughed and cried (a lot more than expected), 30-50 hours of brilliance. I love you Sabotage

someone said this was the FF16 we deserved 😭😭😭😭

I’ve said this a few times before but this time I am not joking. This is the worst gaming experience I’ve ever had. Hundreds of hours of solid build up, an amazing predecessor, all for this 100 hours of pure mouldy dick cheese.

I’m not even gonna tag spoilers because I genuinely hope I spoil you and put you off. Everybody you thought was dead, is still alive. Anybody that did die, alive. Anybody that was dead before the events of the first game, alive. Anybody that was evil, not actually evil they were just being controlled. Anybody that made a remotely bad choice in their life, it was the actions of some mystical dookie god fuck I hate this game oh my god

The game thinks it’s so much more mature and clever than it is, you have characters in these dire situations making decisions like 13 year olds it makes me physically sick. The only reason I picked up this entire franchise was because of the cover image of this game man I wanna die

Combat is so gas my favourite turn based system ever peaked here, Rean is gas too idgaf if I have to see Lloyd again after Reverie I’m ending it all

I sincerely believe everyone involved in the production deserves some form of punishment whether it be suspension from game development or jail time.

Thank you

spoilers

When this game was first announced I was excited, I had my concerns with Creative Business Unit 3 taking the lead but I had faith in them regardless. As marketing ramped up and more of the development team was revealed, my excitement rose but I kept my expectations level. With that being said, this game is the most fun disappointment I’ve ever played.

Unfortunately, this will be mostly negative so I’ll start by laying out the positives. First and foremost, the combat. The mechanics, encounters, and enemy designs are all flawless. Even with the repetitive nature of a lot of enemies, I never once found myself bored when in a combat scenario. The hunts are a lot of fun, and the main story boss fights, particularly the eikon battles, are out of this world. Some of the most brilliant spectacles I’ve seen in gaming, the sheer power you feel against Titan or the epic scale and emotion against Bahamut… it’s phenomenal.

There are some real loveable characters here too. With my favourites being Gav, Byron, Dion, Joshua, Clive and Cid.

The voice work is brilliant across the board, my only gripe is that I wish they assigned specific accents to regions rather than just having a congregation of like 30 different random UK accents.

That’s about all this game has for me in the way of positives, it does very very little else. In the cases it does something good, it will do 2 things bad to counter it. I’ll start with performance, in my first playthrough it was smooth unless I was in bustling areas but that’s not a problem. For whatever reason, on NG+ I found myself getting a lot more frame drops across the board and a few times it was actually jarring. The real issue lies with the motion blur, it’s insane that after over a week a patch hasn’t been put in place to toggle it, it’s even more absurd that in 2023 there are still game developers out there that think anybody wants motion blur. Stop it please I’m begging

Overall, I think the story is fine. Has some great moments for Clive but mostly it’s serviceable. I have no real complaints beyond the main villain being a bit pathetic, I won’t explain why I think that sorry he just stinks by the end.

As I mentioned earlier, the cast is solid, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some weaker characters in the main cast. The 2 standouts for me being Jill and Barnabas. Barnabas was the only character I had high expectations for, so I was VERY disappointed when it turned out he was nothing more than a puppet who showed his true self only in the last moments of the fight with him. Jill on the other hand was filled with potential, when we first encounter her in the Nysa Defile I was so eager to learn more about her but then she just takes a back seat until her very cool moment in the Fire and Ice main story quest. Which leads to her taking the backseat again until her and Clive’s beautiful beach scene. Not to mention the 2 times she gets kidnapped and rescued in between all this, I just wanted more from her because I still really like her.

Cutting this short because I’m bored… the sidequests. Awful, don’t waste your time. There’s about 10 out of 76(?) that give you meaningful payoff with a cutscene but the lead up to it is the most mind numbing, boring, brain dead gaming you’ll ever experience. Speak to person A, run (very slowly) to person B, to person A, to person C, to persona A, fight bandits, cutscene, end. It sucks. This was my main concern with MMO devs coming into this game, sadly it bleeds into the main story quests too. After every cool moment you’re met once again with menial, boring, fetch quests. It’s like they don’t want you to have any fun or keep any momentum going. Someone will say these are pace breakers and exist to give you a breather, go to hell. Cannot stress enough how much these ruined the experience for me.

The other worst offender alongside the quests.. the “exploration”. I swear you could cut out every open zone in between quests and the game would be no different. A complete waste of time running through empty open fields, no cool items to find (except the Masamune in Waloed but by that point you’ve already got a better weapon), no interesting side roads to explore, not a single point of interest, no memorable towns/villages. Valisthea is dead, one of the most lifeless worlds I’ve had the displeasure of playing in. I don’t wanna hear anybody rag on FFXV’s world after this. On the bright side the world looks really pretty! Or at least it does until you destroy the Mother Crystals on Storm and everything looks horrendous until you start a new game. I could go on for hours about how bad the world sucks

The “RPG Mechanics” (I don’t actually know what this means) are non existent. Not much to say. Swords, crafting materials, bracers or whatever else there is, all useless no point paying any attention to them. Every hour you’ll get a new a weapon that gives you 5 extra damage, just equip it and move on. It reeks.

A few comments on NG+, and specifically Final Fantasy mode… surprise surprise another disappointment. They boasted pre release about how different it would be when really all they do is swap a Minotaur for a Griffin every now and again, it’s boring. You will craft the exact same weapons and gear in the exact same order using the same materials you got from the same hunts. Even if you die mid fight, you will respawn with your health refilled and more or less exactly where you left off in the fight, FF Mode is a joke really. By mid game it’s just a slog, I’m only doing this for the Platinum there is nothing else to grind for since Ultima Weapon is an inevitability by end game.

The music… is ok. This is very subjective but for me it just didn’t hit. There’s a couple good songs but I really think Soken or whoever was directing him fumbled. Titan Lost is a really cool track and I wish there was more range like that, everything else felt like a grand orchestral piece which quite frankly got boring quick. Heard that same eikon fight song about 15 damn times, I already got bored of it before the game released. I don’t think the soundtrack is bad, but without playing every single other FF game I’m quite confident in putting this towards the bottom of the rankings. It’s a shame because I hear great things about FF14 music and I know Soken can do better.

Idk what else to say. I had a lot of fun also feel a little let down, a solid 7/10 definitely not game of the year for me. Please don’t let CBU3 near another mainline single player FF game again. Thank you

My dreams have disappeared

To be quite honest with you, this game shines the most with it's music and boss segments, outside of it it's pretty eh. It feels a bit too weighty and awkward when fighting groups of small enemies for my liking, it feels like this game should have been a boss rush like how furi was instead.

Very memorable though. Maybe we could get a sequel someday.

8.5/10

Ok so starting off I would like to go over the positives I have for this game. I love the exploration and sense of scale like with stormveil castle, sometimes it truly does feel like a cinematic on the grandness of it all, the addition of the horse, the art direction and atmosphere is stellar, Finding your way around the world/areas is super satisfying. I can definitely see the effort that was put into them and they are worthy of my praise.... When it isn't recycled.

I feel I am still encountering some of the flaws I find in other entries that I did with say, DS3. The enemy design/boss fights in this game are kind of a joke, one of my favorite things I recently realized about fromsoft titles that I feel is lacking in newer entries is the uniqueness/gimmicks, combat I'll admit in souls was never really that great, bosses being mostly boilled down to roll at a set of some patterns, hit a heavy (in this case jump) attack, maybe hope to stagger them, and run away, then rinse and repeat. and to be honest, that's fine, if the bosses are interesting in return. One of the things I LOVE about DS1 and even Demon Souls is how unique it was
approaching some of the boss fights. Lets take the four kings for example, The four kings have a really interesting scenario you are put in because of them, you have to equip a ring to drop down into a completely endless black abyss even to get a chance to fight them, and once you do the pressure is on you immediately, you have to kill them as quickly as possible or you'll get swarmed, while having no idea where one could pop up and attack due to their being zero depth perception in the pitch black room, because of this and the music you could feel dread/fear as well, this is what made the fight so memorable! I miss this design dearly. I can mention even more like the tower knight or the father of the abyss Manus, in a way this gimmick/wacky design made each boss stand out in their own way, it was how bosses could still be hard as hell but very interesting, now here the bosses are pretty boring and forgettable for the most part, its just the next Artorias/nameless king fighting style with none of the charm or gimmicks even they had. A shame really. Like for example Margit is, in my opinion one of the poorest designed bosses I've seen in a game. It felt like I was fighting a sekiro boss inside a game with DS3 movement and combat. He was more of a boss for a different game imo. He is how I would picture an obnoxious boss than a actual hard one, and that doesn't even scratch the surface with bosses like the Elden Beast, Godrick, Godskin Duo, and more.

I almost think the bosses were like a second thought, and the open-world was really the priority here

The tight interconnected world is something I will forever miss from early Souls games, through clever bonfire placements, shortcuts that had sooo many tricks and traps to them, and without much handholding it felt so much more engaging that way from an RPG title, some say it was too cryptic for their liking but hey whatever. But that isn't the glaring issue for me with Souls games now,

To top it all off with the exploration, once I reached the snow area, I saw very little reason to even go to the unexplored dungeons anymore, saw one dungeon before hand? Oh well lets copy and paste it and the bosses, if you saw one dungeon then you pretty much seen almost all of them in this game.

I want to talk about how absolute trash the damage scaling is in this game, espiecally when you approach endgame it starts to get obnixous instead of hard, hell even the common enemies like BIRDS can 2-3 tap you so easily, wtf?
To me, this games difficulty is not really "difficult" I see it as just artifical difficulty, an illusion of difficulty depth.

I'll give props to them fixing the weapon arts from DS3 this time, making them much more cool to use and interesting mechanically. The summons like the mimics are pretty cool additions that can change your playstyle but this doesn't fix the boss design and recycled content throughout the game, so many of the bosses like tree sentinel, or the dungeons having the same exact fights or design philosphies in the levels, its pretty ridiculous

There has to be balance, Sekiro did this perfectly and so did DS1 I don't know why they chose this approach here. Yes, Sekiro does indeed do the pattern stuff, but the thing is the game makes up for is its combat mechanics/parry system against the boss fights, the movement and ways you can use your jump, even the ability to jump off enemies with the combined prosthetic tools at your disposal really enhances it imo. It all meshes perfectly there.

I found more depth and interest fighting the optional bosses than the main ones honestly, I'm not sure how I feel about that, I think out of all the bosses I can name Renella, Radahan, Godfrey, and Makileth where ones I actually liked quite alot. The rest are pretty medicore, even boring I'd say which is unfortuante.

So, I like this game quite a bit but I still find the bosses lacking compared to earlier entries like Sekiro, Demon Souls, and DS1, not to shit on anybody who loves this game, I can see why but I guess some of this stuff just isn't for me. So I give it a 3.5/5, not sure if I'll even come back for the dlcs if they even happen.

Quantity does not replace Quality, Fromsoft. Best remember that.

(Lowered it to 3 .)

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

My new favorite game of all time. Ori and the Blind Forest was already a masterpiece to me and somehow this game just surpassed Blind Forest in literally every way. The level design was masterclass and was made even better with the addition of new moves that helped with traversal. The new combat was sensational and was extremely fun to experiment with. Don't even get me started on the new bosses man. The music was even better here, the story was just as emotional and engaging as it was in the first game, and the visuals were even more beautiful especially with the new environments in the game. There truly wasn't a single dull moment in this game man.

Peak gaming. 10/10 masterpiece.