lend me 50,000 yen

aesthetically very reminiscent of jrpgs of its contemporary from the late 90s with a cool as fxck aesthetic ala racing lagoon. chapter select is depicted as dj deck cant get any cooler than that. the way the assets are put together throughout the vn with the portraits of the characters, backgrounds, and dialogue placed/layered throughout the screen gives off the feeling of a real time evidence board mixed with surveillance recordings; fitting for a story about solving crimes. plot being broken up by cases with an accompanying evidence report chapter is a good way for the story to maintain mystery while also delivering just enough information so the player isn't too lost. it is almost like the player themselves is also a detective trying to figure it all out. it got to the point where i became one of the characters with how seamless i would wake up and log on to the computer to read my emails and feed my pet turtle. dialogue got me actually laughing out loud and the ost is effective. however, its age shows with how clunky the controls were during the exploration and puzzle bits which took a bit to get used to but became second nature eventually. i welcomed how slow the game was sometimes but i do understand that it is not for everybody. imperfect game but the imperfect can be considered perfect by virtue of its imperfection (lol) so thank you Grasshopper Manufacture Inc. recommend if u wanna be cool tho cuz only cool people played this game

My brother who worked at Square Enix stated in his death bed that Square Enix will have the dragons unlocked via NFTs.

Also that 7R Part II will have sex between…

And then he died. R.I.P. Joshee Joe.

Well, we've found it. It's taken scientists and game developers decades and thousands of games of toil, but here it is. The exact middle of the road.

Arise is the perfect game for namco to release in the landscape of 2021. Extremely conventional, easy to digest storytelling which is just trope after trope, put together with a level of polish that other games haven't been able to achieve(COUGH deathloop COUGH), and has enough good elements and good enough marketing to catfish the local RPG fan into thinking they're getting next final fantasy or at least the next xenobalde.

Ok maybe that's a little rude. It's a competent game. Most notably, the combat is pretty good. It's well animated, has a great flow, and making long combos with various arts and boost break moves is good fun, though its very easy to fall into the same combo patterns (Especially since launchers are so ridiculously good on the MC), and any enemies that arent bosses are particularly unchallenging. But particularly with the different party members on offer it's pretty good. It's about on the same level as the modern Ys games albeit with less in the way of challenge and variety.

It's also a very pretty game. Character models in particular are fantastic and so are effects, and adapt an anime style into very high fidelity quite well. There's particularly nice details on little things, notably character eyes and clothing that just looks really nice.

And right there, i've ran out of remarkable things to say about Tales of Arise. The story and setting are so... bland and have nothing to them, particularly in the early hours that I just glaze over. Your amnesiac protagonist works with your pink-haired tsundere waifu who has a fancy fire sword to kill some lads, each of which resides in these tiny lands with no character or theme beyond "fire world, ice world".

The only real curveball Arise throws towards being the most boring thing ever is its slavery and racism (?) angle, which could have been and maybe does turn into a complete trainwreck down the line but by the time i was tuning out mostly boiled down to mistrust and some very tame stuff so its mostly just uninteresting and conventional. Count the times someone doesn't trust someone because they're renan of dahnan or whatever and then never proceed to poke the concept any further than that.

This is excepting the one thing, which is that the slaves in the first chapter, who are ostensibly mining for materials, are actually getting legitimately harvested for their will/life essence/magic by being beaten down... or something. It's some pretty damn charged imagery I feel they go with and I'm not sure if the devs recognise this. You eventually go and kill the bad dude and the sucked up will turns into a dragon or something and tattacks both of you and then you stop the dragon made from the power of the will of the oppressed by sucking up the energy into your waifu's fire sword.

Now that could be really fucking wild (though not neccessarily good or nuanced), but the emphasis in the game is never on it and it doesnt even seem to make those connections. So when i say "you suck up the manifestation of the life energy of an opressed people into your waifu sword,", whilst that's legitimately just connecting plot points, the game seems thorougly disinterested in it and you're immedietly onto the next bad dude woo!

And that's Arise in a nutshell. Making suggestions at being something more interesting every now and then but far more interested in being palatable, tropey, and digestible. It has absolutely no rough edges, nothing actually interesting to hook onto. And hey, I get that comfy, conventional JRPG plots like this can be nice to chill out to, but this game makes Atelier Ryza look daring.

The combat is good and it is pretty and it's consistently competent. But that's kind of all it is.