>survivor AI pathfinding is a mess
>gunplay is pretty lackluster all things considered
>forced cutscenes can potentially separate you from the survivors you’re leading, making them sitting ducks for a horde of zombies
>tons of little jank all around

Yet, despite all of that, it’s still one of the best games ever made.

Dead Rising 1 is an unusual game, to say the least. In most games, you beat the game, get everything, then you get to fool around with everything the game has to offer. It’s a tried and true method and certainly one that works. However, Dead Rising is different in that it’s the complete opposite. You're supposed to fuck around, look everywhere, learn and evolve, THEN try a serious run after you're good. Your character is a total shitter at first, you don't know anything and will most likely fail.

And you know what? That’s perfectly okay.

When I was younger, I was way too much of a dumb fuck to appreciate how much the timer in DR1 adds to the experience but replaying through it now, I can finally appreciate what it does. It constantly changes up the gameplay to not make it stale on subsequent playthroughs and adds unpredictability and tension throughout the game. It also encourages you to get more and more familiar with the mall and its layout in order to save time and find the best shortcuts possible, giving you a supreme sense of satisfaction when you get the survivors back to the rooftop with next to no trouble at all.

I find it funny how people tend to complain about weapon durability in games when Dead Rising had one of the best implementations of it all the way back in 2006. Weapon durability is fine when the arsenal is massive and it's encouraging you to make more varied use of it, and when weapons respawn anyways, you don't have to worry about permanently losing out on any weapons. Not to mention that you can buff the durability of the items with certain books and you don't even need weapons to be effective against zombies at a certain point.

The timer turns the zombies from punching bags you can casually beat up for fun into an ever-present obstacle you always need to be planning the fastest route through, while still giving enough leeway for them to turn back into fun punching bags at points. The courtyard is the fastest way to get to and from certain sections of the mall so in order to counteract against this possibly abusable strat, the game throws in the convicts to try and shake things up and force decisions upon you; do you take the shorter yet more dangerous route in order to save time under the possibility of death for both yourself and the survivors around you or do you take the lengthier yet relatively safer route with the hordes of zombies by going around the courtyard? It’s game design like that which adds so much to the experience. Combine this with the fact that your stats carry over everytime you choose to start over, the game's relatively short run, and the fact that you can just let the timer run out and go wild and Dead Rising makes for an endlessly fun and replayable experience. Plus, it’s just fun to disabowel a zombie with your bare hands and do a double lariat to them like you’re Zangief.

Another thing I want to touch on is how the game integrates Frank’s role as a photojournalist within the setting and I don’t just mean that in how it translates into the photography mechanic (though said mechanic is pretty cool.)
You only have a limited amount of time to find out and snoop around for whatever leads you find. It’s up to you to find out the truth and expose it for the world to see and if you’re candid with how you choose to spend your time, the truth WILL eventually become lost forever and you’ll be back to square one. Frank’s job isn’t just there as an excuse for what he’s doing there; it’s perfectly integrated within the world of Dead Rising itself.

The amount of little details in this game is also a sight to behold. From using a toy laser sword in your inventory to help you see in the dark after the lights go out, to blinding zombies in the face with pie, to setting a frying pan on the stove to heat it up and then burn zombies and psychos for a ton of damage, to running on the treadmills and destroying sandbags for a ton of PP and more. You can even fucking spit on your enemies if you’re unequipped and use said spit as a weapon with the Spitfire drink buff. Dead Rising to me is what a next-gen game should strive to be: it doesn’t just push the hardware to its limits graphically but it pushes for gameplay innovations and experimental mechanics that wouldn’t be possible on previous consoles in order to create a more fulfilling experience and to me, that’s pretty fucking cool.

I’ll admit that Dead Rising isn’t for everyone. Its mechanics can take some getting used to and there is quite a bit to jank you’ll have to get used to when it comes to the overall experience. But once it clicks, you’ll get something that you can’t get much elsewhere and that, to me, is the mark of a truly special game.

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.