This review contains spoilers
The patience required to finish this game was pretty unparalleled with any other game i've touched. I'm a jrpg fan and I can easily sink a hundred hours into a game with a great story and characters, unfortunately I felt like this game had neither. Perhaps i've been spoiled now with some fantastic rpgs but this game left such a bitter taste in my mouth that once I had finally finished it, it felt akin to being free from some heavy burden.
Why did you play it then? Why did you finish it?
LOL I don't even know, i've been quite hooked on jrpgs since the pandemic started and this won best rpg of the year at the game awards + i'd heard good things I guess. Sometimes you gotta take a risk and sometimes it pays off! Sometimes it does not. As for finishing it, I guess I just felt like I had some kind of obligation. I traded in a lot of games, got a ton of instore credit and so I decided to spend most of it on this. I've also had quite a habit of abandoning games too soon and was determined to get this one done no matter how tedious and mind numbing of an experience it felt.
Now with no offence to people that really enjoyed this game, i'm glad you got something out of it, truly, but to me playing this game felt akin to bumping into someone you used to know (and don't like) in the street. It's awkward, goes on for longer than it should and you want to just dismiss yourself but for some reason you can't. The entire experience from first locking eyes to finally getting away from it are an experience that you would rather just forget about.
Now, with that said, this game does have a few things going for it in my opinion! Visually it's a treat, one of the best looking and detailed anime games on the market - the presentation is stellar with its fluid, gorgeous menus & interface and the game runs and plays with buttery smoothness. Plus there are hints in this games' combat and narrative of something that has the potential to be pretty worthwhile, but unfortunately it all just left me feeling unfulfilled and like i'd wasted 50 hours of my life. Frankly if this game didn't look as good as it does, it would be a full star lower in my ranking I think.
Combat in tales of arise feels quite awkward to me - with so much going on onscreen it often just feels like chaos, with animations going off all over the place and a complete overload of voices, sound effects, blaring music, micromanaging items and skills - and on top of all that the characters love to have entire conversations that you can barely make out over the sheer NOISE of it all. So much of combat just felt like throwing out moves to see what works until you can rack up a finishing move all the while constantly diving out the way of incoming attacks that seem to come randomly from all directions. I actually felt like I got pretty good at it in time but it didn't change the fact that it's hard to even tell what's going on. Despite this, non-boss battles were going by in a flash on normal difficulty, sometimes within about 15 seconds you could rack up a finisher and just end the combat scenario there and then. This meant that all of tales of arise's different attack/party combos, mechanics, skill and item management, abilities from the skill tree and all manner of other things feel pointless. If you can just spam attack and dodge occasionally when needed you can easily finish a fight before you even have time to invest yourself in it, that's how I felt anyway.
Then there's the boss fights and oh boy they're something. Because of how janky the ai feels in this game, they get hit and knocked down constantly. Particularly in the early game, it doesn't matter how well you play with your own player character, your supporting characters feel completely moronic. Even with different battle strategies assigned, I noticed little to no difference in how my fellow party members acted in combat, often standing right in the line of fire and dying. As a result boss fights just felt like dipping in and out of the pause menu to revive them over and over again. Did I mention that using items in this game and switching party members is also really slow and clunky? Yeah, as is targeting the enemy or weak point you actually want to focus. The whole thing feels like a complete nightmare. All that complete with the overwhelming noise of this game crafts something that I would describe as feeling like having hot coffee thrown in my face for 15 minutes straight during boss fights. Sometimes I would put it on 'story' difficulty just to be done with them. To make matters worse, the boss characters SUCK, they are uninteresting caricatures who may as well be saying 'i'm an evil dictator and/or a hideous monster, now kill me!'. The whole time I felt like I was doing something wrong, like am I just this bad at the game? A quick google search showed other people having similar experiences and I felt like I had to really finetune my team, craft the optimal equipment for every fight and grind just to keep them from dying over and over again. I want to enjoy the combat and actually participate in the fight but that's hard when half the time I feel like i'm sifting through my inventory for every healing item I can find. Oh and healing items are really expensive and money is surprisingly scarce, so have fun with that!
The overworld stuff in arise is okay at best. Running around these big, gorgeous environments / areas is nice to an extent. Sure they're marvellous visually, but they're also flat, pretty empty, generally uninteresting and moving around them feels pretty boring. Plus you need to move through them a lot because fast travel and figuring out the map in this game is certainly quite obtuse, plus sections of the game purposefully cut off fast travel entirely so you spend a total of many hours just trudging through familiar territory for no real reason. Still, it's not the worst part of the game and once you figure out the rather confusing map format, travelling around does get easier.
Now onto my biggest woe in this game - the story and characters. Both of these things in Tales of Arise are praised to no end and I do not get it! Compared to say, persona or final fantasy, the narrative and characters just feel like a mess of ideas. The characters are over-designed and yet, somehow, still painfully one dimensional in my opinion and the story comes off like some bad sci fi drama show that doesn't know when to end and takes itself way too seriously. Tales of Arise is absolutely filled with these 'skits', some optional, some not. They're basically short, comic-book like framed scenarios that play out in the game to serve the story and the characters. Only thing is, they honestly do little to serve either? So many of them feel utterly pointless and repetitive to me, going over the same stuff i've literally just seen happen in game or repeating the same lines i've already heard a thousand times about shionne's thorns or alphen's mask or rinwell's owl - I do not care! I just don't care! Please say something new and interesting. When I compare this to, say, the social links/confidants in persona 3-5 the difference is so noticeable. In persona i'm always interested in what's going on and what they have to say but in tales of arise I just want them to stop talking. It's a shame because I want to like it! I like it when games try to actually deepen the story and the characters but in arise it falls completely flat.
Now the game's actual story. It's a mess. What starts off as a pretty harmless, albeit cliche narrative about warring worlds and taking back the main character's home planet devolves into something so mind numbingly stupid that I was racing through dialogue and cutscenes thinking 'what am I even looking at, this makes no sense'. There's so many pointless twists and turns and threads of plotlines that simply aren't necessary. The last 10 hours in particular are so egregious with painful sections of inane dialogue and more macguffins than a star wars film that I so desperately wanted it to be over. The helganquil and the great spirit and the renas alma and all this other completely pointless story rubbish don't need to exist! They bloat out the game, pad out the story and ultimately do not matter even remotely once the final cutscene plays. It feels like the writers just had a field day coming up with things they wanted to include and just stuffed them into the last 10 hours with little to no consideration on how it will all tie together to create something actually impactful! Therefore when the final cutscene played and it was supposed to be all emotional, I felt nothing. Which is such a shame! Because I do think that if you really trimmed this whole experience down it could be better! Not good, but better at least. I mean I like to think that. It's bad, I hate it. I'm sorry people that like this game, I just think the story fucking SUCKS the end hahaha.
Anyway yeah those are my thoughts, sorry there was a lot of ranting but after I put as many hours as I did into the game (with what felt like pure obligation), not to mention having to grind quite a lot, I just needed this for some kind of catharsis and closure. This game made me lose too many braincells, rest in peace my fallen brothers and sisters. But hey i'll give this game credit where it's due for its awesome visuals! That's enough to redeem it right? Right? Ha. Ha...
Why did you play it then? Why did you finish it?
LOL I don't even know, i've been quite hooked on jrpgs since the pandemic started and this won best rpg of the year at the game awards + i'd heard good things I guess. Sometimes you gotta take a risk and sometimes it pays off! Sometimes it does not. As for finishing it, I guess I just felt like I had some kind of obligation. I traded in a lot of games, got a ton of instore credit and so I decided to spend most of it on this. I've also had quite a habit of abandoning games too soon and was determined to get this one done no matter how tedious and mind numbing of an experience it felt.
Now with no offence to people that really enjoyed this game, i'm glad you got something out of it, truly, but to me playing this game felt akin to bumping into someone you used to know (and don't like) in the street. It's awkward, goes on for longer than it should and you want to just dismiss yourself but for some reason you can't. The entire experience from first locking eyes to finally getting away from it are an experience that you would rather just forget about.
Now, with that said, this game does have a few things going for it in my opinion! Visually it's a treat, one of the best looking and detailed anime games on the market - the presentation is stellar with its fluid, gorgeous menus & interface and the game runs and plays with buttery smoothness. Plus there are hints in this games' combat and narrative of something that has the potential to be pretty worthwhile, but unfortunately it all just left me feeling unfulfilled and like i'd wasted 50 hours of my life. Frankly if this game didn't look as good as it does, it would be a full star lower in my ranking I think.
Combat in tales of arise feels quite awkward to me - with so much going on onscreen it often just feels like chaos, with animations going off all over the place and a complete overload of voices, sound effects, blaring music, micromanaging items and skills - and on top of all that the characters love to have entire conversations that you can barely make out over the sheer NOISE of it all. So much of combat just felt like throwing out moves to see what works until you can rack up a finishing move all the while constantly diving out the way of incoming attacks that seem to come randomly from all directions. I actually felt like I got pretty good at it in time but it didn't change the fact that it's hard to even tell what's going on. Despite this, non-boss battles were going by in a flash on normal difficulty, sometimes within about 15 seconds you could rack up a finisher and just end the combat scenario there and then. This meant that all of tales of arise's different attack/party combos, mechanics, skill and item management, abilities from the skill tree and all manner of other things feel pointless. If you can just spam attack and dodge occasionally when needed you can easily finish a fight before you even have time to invest yourself in it, that's how I felt anyway.
Then there's the boss fights and oh boy they're something. Because of how janky the ai feels in this game, they get hit and knocked down constantly. Particularly in the early game, it doesn't matter how well you play with your own player character, your supporting characters feel completely moronic. Even with different battle strategies assigned, I noticed little to no difference in how my fellow party members acted in combat, often standing right in the line of fire and dying. As a result boss fights just felt like dipping in and out of the pause menu to revive them over and over again. Did I mention that using items in this game and switching party members is also really slow and clunky? Yeah, as is targeting the enemy or weak point you actually want to focus. The whole thing feels like a complete nightmare. All that complete with the overwhelming noise of this game crafts something that I would describe as feeling like having hot coffee thrown in my face for 15 minutes straight during boss fights. Sometimes I would put it on 'story' difficulty just to be done with them. To make matters worse, the boss characters SUCK, they are uninteresting caricatures who may as well be saying 'i'm an evil dictator and/or a hideous monster, now kill me!'. The whole time I felt like I was doing something wrong, like am I just this bad at the game? A quick google search showed other people having similar experiences and I felt like I had to really finetune my team, craft the optimal equipment for every fight and grind just to keep them from dying over and over again. I want to enjoy the combat and actually participate in the fight but that's hard when half the time I feel like i'm sifting through my inventory for every healing item I can find. Oh and healing items are really expensive and money is surprisingly scarce, so have fun with that!
The overworld stuff in arise is okay at best. Running around these big, gorgeous environments / areas is nice to an extent. Sure they're marvellous visually, but they're also flat, pretty empty, generally uninteresting and moving around them feels pretty boring. Plus you need to move through them a lot because fast travel and figuring out the map in this game is certainly quite obtuse, plus sections of the game purposefully cut off fast travel entirely so you spend a total of many hours just trudging through familiar territory for no real reason. Still, it's not the worst part of the game and once you figure out the rather confusing map format, travelling around does get easier.
Now onto my biggest woe in this game - the story and characters. Both of these things in Tales of Arise are praised to no end and I do not get it! Compared to say, persona or final fantasy, the narrative and characters just feel like a mess of ideas. The characters are over-designed and yet, somehow, still painfully one dimensional in my opinion and the story comes off like some bad sci fi drama show that doesn't know when to end and takes itself way too seriously. Tales of Arise is absolutely filled with these 'skits', some optional, some not. They're basically short, comic-book like framed scenarios that play out in the game to serve the story and the characters. Only thing is, they honestly do little to serve either? So many of them feel utterly pointless and repetitive to me, going over the same stuff i've literally just seen happen in game or repeating the same lines i've already heard a thousand times about shionne's thorns or alphen's mask or rinwell's owl - I do not care! I just don't care! Please say something new and interesting. When I compare this to, say, the social links/confidants in persona 3-5 the difference is so noticeable. In persona i'm always interested in what's going on and what they have to say but in tales of arise I just want them to stop talking. It's a shame because I want to like it! I like it when games try to actually deepen the story and the characters but in arise it falls completely flat.
Now the game's actual story. It's a mess. What starts off as a pretty harmless, albeit cliche narrative about warring worlds and taking back the main character's home planet devolves into something so mind numbingly stupid that I was racing through dialogue and cutscenes thinking 'what am I even looking at, this makes no sense'. There's so many pointless twists and turns and threads of plotlines that simply aren't necessary. The last 10 hours in particular are so egregious with painful sections of inane dialogue and more macguffins than a star wars film that I so desperately wanted it to be over. The helganquil and the great spirit and the renas alma and all this other completely pointless story rubbish don't need to exist! They bloat out the game, pad out the story and ultimately do not matter even remotely once the final cutscene plays. It feels like the writers just had a field day coming up with things they wanted to include and just stuffed them into the last 10 hours with little to no consideration on how it will all tie together to create something actually impactful! Therefore when the final cutscene played and it was supposed to be all emotional, I felt nothing. Which is such a shame! Because I do think that if you really trimmed this whole experience down it could be better! Not good, but better at least. I mean I like to think that. It's bad, I hate it. I'm sorry people that like this game, I just think the story fucking SUCKS the end hahaha.
Anyway yeah those are my thoughts, sorry there was a lot of ranting but after I put as many hours as I did into the game (with what felt like pure obligation), not to mention having to grind quite a lot, I just needed this for some kind of catharsis and closure. This game made me lose too many braincells, rest in peace my fallen brothers and sisters. But hey i'll give this game credit where it's due for its awesome visuals! That's enough to redeem it right? Right? Ha. Ha...