Pretty good JRPG with a nice cast of characters. The gameplay is pretty fun with a nice mix of abilities and party members, although it struggles to hold up long term and by the end of the game I was not really interested in experiencing more of it. Difficulty and boss design is very all over the place- some hard, some easy, some fun, and some boring/annoying. I played a majority of the game on its highest difficulty (Hard, not the stupid one) and I felt as time went on more and more bosses started entering the "annoying" department, which is unfortunate. Gameplay also feels repetitive after about 30-40 hours and party members don't feel different enough from each other to make it refreshing.

Has a good OST, though it doesn't have many stand-out tracks. The game also has great visuals all around, every region and location honestly looks quite good, especially the interiors of the games' various castle locations- lots of intricate details and great uses of color. Even more impressive is the fact that this game is very well optimized and runs perfectly on PC, which seems to be something many Japanese developers normally struggle to achieve when it comes to PC releases.

As for the story...well, it's very much your standard corny JRPG story with very blunt and in your face dialogue + messages and an overall cheesy-ness that often accompanies these games. It is endearing though, and it did at least maintain my interest, with some neat twists towards the later quarter of the game

Tale of Arise is good, but it's not amazing and probably a tad bit overhyped by its fans. It's probably only worth playing if you take a heavy liking towards modern JRPGs, but even then I personally would not consider this game to be a must-play.