Tales of Arise steps forward for the series with visual finesse visaged through grandeouse scale of environments and dungeons.
The Tales of series has for the last entries been aligning for new directions to modernise the formula, and while both Berseria and especially Zestiria had their merits and gripes Arise's standards is a huge distinction in comparance.
Staying faithful to both the new and old, Arise takes elements from its more traditional brethrens and converts them into its own defining battle system, while retaining the same style of easy 3D exploration as the two former entries in its series.
Both combat and exploration is as clean, flashy and intuitive as the UI for menuing and map navigating both through the story campaign and actual fun sidequests with a few easy fetch quests and otherwise mostly others presenting cool sub bosses and some neat extra dungeons.
From beginning to end Tales of Arise is a harmonic treat with a range of diversity and alignment between Motoi Sakuraba's orchestral pieces to his full on metal tracks. You get both of his good sides of calm and energetic wrapped into one package of consistently great compositions all the way through, it's simply some of his best work.
The story's biggest strength is as it usually is for the series its set of indepth characters bantering and developing their own individual arcs, the story itself is servicable and does build up for a lot of cool showdowns and set pieces, while a few mysteries lingers for some pretty out there revelations as it goes on, unfortunately at its tip end it does get a bit farfetched and hard to digest, it still carries itself out with nice individual arcs for all of the main characters.
Honestly 90 % of this game is just very difficult to put down, it's that damn good. It's too bad the end-game portion drops the ball with too much plot and repetitious dialogues crammed into a very flat and uninspired dungeon filled to the brim with sponge enemies, it is glaringly obvious the developers had to cram everything together on a dime due to some issue with the production. Regardless, the story itself is worthwile despite some jarry resolutions and the other 4/5 of the game is damn near perfect.
If namco follows the same production standards (totally ignoring the last portion of the game) as they did with this one, ooh boy...bring on the next big one soon please
The Tales of series has for the last entries been aligning for new directions to modernise the formula, and while both Berseria and especially Zestiria had their merits and gripes Arise's standards is a huge distinction in comparance.
Staying faithful to both the new and old, Arise takes elements from its more traditional brethrens and converts them into its own defining battle system, while retaining the same style of easy 3D exploration as the two former entries in its series.
Both combat and exploration is as clean, flashy and intuitive as the UI for menuing and map navigating both through the story campaign and actual fun sidequests with a few easy fetch quests and otherwise mostly others presenting cool sub bosses and some neat extra dungeons.
From beginning to end Tales of Arise is a harmonic treat with a range of diversity and alignment between Motoi Sakuraba's orchestral pieces to his full on metal tracks. You get both of his good sides of calm and energetic wrapped into one package of consistently great compositions all the way through, it's simply some of his best work.
The story's biggest strength is as it usually is for the series its set of indepth characters bantering and developing their own individual arcs, the story itself is servicable and does build up for a lot of cool showdowns and set pieces, while a few mysteries lingers for some pretty out there revelations as it goes on, unfortunately at its tip end it does get a bit farfetched and hard to digest, it still carries itself out with nice individual arcs for all of the main characters.
Honestly 90 % of this game is just very difficult to put down, it's that damn good. It's too bad the end-game portion drops the ball with too much plot and repetitious dialogues crammed into a very flat and uninspired dungeon filled to the brim with sponge enemies, it is glaringly obvious the developers had to cram everything together on a dime due to some issue with the production. Regardless, the story itself is worthwile despite some jarry resolutions and the other 4/5 of the game is damn near perfect.
If namco follows the same production standards (totally ignoring the last portion of the game) as they did with this one, ooh boy...bring on the next big one soon please