Tales of Arise is a complete JRPG package polished from start to finish unlike many others. The battle system is carried by incredibly varied and fluid animations and playstyles while being hindered by finicky menu management of loadouts of your AI companions, the story is interesting throughout even if it played it a bit too safe in the end and the characters are lovable and have great dynamics... Okay this out of the way, I wanted to talk about something weirdly specific that stood out to me about this game:
The economy of ressources and rewards is amazing. On Normal difficulty I always felt like I was just scraping by in terms of money, right until the point where I was mentally getting ready to wrap up, at which point the tight grip loosened, which was remarkable to me and felt perfectly balanced.
Another aspect of that are the skill points. So you unlock a lot of small skill trees by doing side quests, achieving certain milestones with a character or progressing the main story, but by default regular fights really don't give you that many points to invest. This is where side quests come in, which almost always have a hefty skill point reward in addition to other rewards, which made them absolutely addictive to me, since you could essentially choose your reward and the balance being such that it always felt great to be able to finally afford a new attack or stat bonus or complete a skill tree for the completion bonus. Even when mostly clearing out all the side quests in the game available in the first playthrough I still didn't finish all the skill trees but ended up at a point where I was satisfied with my characters. All that with barely any grinding required. That is honestly an incredible feat and something to be studied for its game design balance and a hook that drew me deeper into the systems of Arise. And this is not even mentioning other rewards like recipes or cosmetics, which I also really enjoyed.
Tales of Arise was my first Tales game as you could probably tell if any of the systems I described are series staples refined over decades, but this game certainly made a great impression and while other entries in the franchise never looked appealing to me, I am definitely keeping an eye out on the future of the series.
The economy of ressources and rewards is amazing. On Normal difficulty I always felt like I was just scraping by in terms of money, right until the point where I was mentally getting ready to wrap up, at which point the tight grip loosened, which was remarkable to me and felt perfectly balanced.
Another aspect of that are the skill points. So you unlock a lot of small skill trees by doing side quests, achieving certain milestones with a character or progressing the main story, but by default regular fights really don't give you that many points to invest. This is where side quests come in, which almost always have a hefty skill point reward in addition to other rewards, which made them absolutely addictive to me, since you could essentially choose your reward and the balance being such that it always felt great to be able to finally afford a new attack or stat bonus or complete a skill tree for the completion bonus. Even when mostly clearing out all the side quests in the game available in the first playthrough I still didn't finish all the skill trees but ended up at a point where I was satisfied with my characters. All that with barely any grinding required. That is honestly an incredible feat and something to be studied for its game design balance and a hook that drew me deeper into the systems of Arise. And this is not even mentioning other rewards like recipes or cosmetics, which I also really enjoyed.
Tales of Arise was my first Tales game as you could probably tell if any of the systems I described are series staples refined over decades, but this game certainly made a great impression and while other entries in the franchise never looked appealing to me, I am definitely keeping an eye out on the future of the series.