Xenoblade at home
This is the first Tales game I've actually finished, and boy howdy, am I glad I got to play this for "free" through PS Plus, because Arise does not set a good impression of the series, god damn. I would have been even more sour on this had I paid money for it. This game exemplifies and doubles down on everything I don't like about most action JRPGs, along with adding its own clunk and jank that makes the whole game progressively more unfun to play the further it drags on. Couple that with a story that feels like it goes out of its way to be the bluntest, by-the-books rebellion story about racism and slavery being bad (woah, really? i never would have guessed), while also being complete jargony nonsense, both at the same time, and you have a recipe for pure melatonin.
I've found that most action JRPGs tend to fall into what I like to call "The Rhythm" the further they continue. Every single encounter, no matter what enemy or boss you're facing, plays out exactly the same, with you rinsing and repeating the exact same attack pattern ad nauseam until the enemies are down, every single time. Without exception. Final Fantasy XVI, NEO: The World Ends with You, Persona 5 Strikers, Scarlet Nexus, and so on. All of those do this. The feel of the patterns can make a difference between enjoyment and not; Scarlet Nexus, for example, I feel has excellent-feeling and very satisfying combat, even in spite of how repetitive it is. Tales of Arise, on the other hand, I don't like. Like the others, Tales of Arise is no different in following "The Rhythm," except it adds on its own BS to make it even less fun that it already would have been otherwise. For one, this game is grindy as hell, regularly requiring you to farm regular encounters to keep up with the rapidly increasing level of the enemies, as they give proportionally little EXP to compensate. This extremely repetitive process of going in and out of battles with the same enemies, over and over again, made me painfully sick of performing the same motions in each and every battle. There was no sense of progression, it was just the same thing, each and every time. What made it even worse, however, is how constraining the game's economy is. Because enemy encounters, and especially boss fights, tend to drag on for eons at a time, I often found myself running low on the all-too-necessary recovery items, as the ally AI tended to waste all of the party's CP the second they could use a supportive arte. With how little money there is going around, and how expensive items tend to be, I found myself barely scraping by the further the game went on. I skipped out on a lot of the lategame encounters just to save my recovery items and CP, which, in turn, put me even further behind on EXP, making the boss encounters and required encounters that much more difficult to sit through. It's multiple negative feedback loops that coalesce into a giant ouroboros of pain. The only saving grace is that the animations of the finishers are really cool and flashy, I love them. Hearing ASTRAL ENERGY! | SAY NO MORE! over and over never got old.
The story is way too plain, and not even in a fun way, like Fire Emblem Engage or Just Cause 3 or something. It's just plain to the point of being boring and forgettable. How they managed that, I have no idea. There are hints of something more interesting under the surface, like with the major theme of loneliness and how it can affect someone's state of mind and growth as a person; a theme that isn't explored much, if at all, in JRPGs; but all of that is overshadowed by just how bland the rest of the game's story is. This game, and especially its extremely jargony dialogue, is more blunt than a wrecking ball with its themes and message, focuses way too much on the stuff that it really shouldn't have, and overstays its welcome about 10 hours longer than it should have.
This is the first Tales game I've actually finished, and boy howdy, am I glad I got to play this for "free" through PS Plus, because Arise does not set a good impression of the series, god damn. I would have been even more sour on this had I paid money for it. This game exemplifies and doubles down on everything I don't like about most action JRPGs, along with adding its own clunk and jank that makes the whole game progressively more unfun to play the further it drags on. Couple that with a story that feels like it goes out of its way to be the bluntest, by-the-books rebellion story about racism and slavery being bad (woah, really? i never would have guessed), while also being complete jargony nonsense, both at the same time, and you have a recipe for pure melatonin.
I've found that most action JRPGs tend to fall into what I like to call "The Rhythm" the further they continue. Every single encounter, no matter what enemy or boss you're facing, plays out exactly the same, with you rinsing and repeating the exact same attack pattern ad nauseam until the enemies are down, every single time. Without exception. Final Fantasy XVI, NEO: The World Ends with You, Persona 5 Strikers, Scarlet Nexus, and so on. All of those do this. The feel of the patterns can make a difference between enjoyment and not; Scarlet Nexus, for example, I feel has excellent-feeling and very satisfying combat, even in spite of how repetitive it is. Tales of Arise, on the other hand, I don't like. Like the others, Tales of Arise is no different in following "The Rhythm," except it adds on its own BS to make it even less fun that it already would have been otherwise. For one, this game is grindy as hell, regularly requiring you to farm regular encounters to keep up with the rapidly increasing level of the enemies, as they give proportionally little EXP to compensate. This extremely repetitive process of going in and out of battles with the same enemies, over and over again, made me painfully sick of performing the same motions in each and every battle. There was no sense of progression, it was just the same thing, each and every time. What made it even worse, however, is how constraining the game's economy is. Because enemy encounters, and especially boss fights, tend to drag on for eons at a time, I often found myself running low on the all-too-necessary recovery items, as the ally AI tended to waste all of the party's CP the second they could use a supportive arte. With how little money there is going around, and how expensive items tend to be, I found myself barely scraping by the further the game went on. I skipped out on a lot of the lategame encounters just to save my recovery items and CP, which, in turn, put me even further behind on EXP, making the boss encounters and required encounters that much more difficult to sit through. It's multiple negative feedback loops that coalesce into a giant ouroboros of pain. The only saving grace is that the animations of the finishers are really cool and flashy, I love them. Hearing ASTRAL ENERGY! | SAY NO MORE! over and over never got old.
The story is way too plain, and not even in a fun way, like Fire Emblem Engage or Just Cause 3 or something. It's just plain to the point of being boring and forgettable. How they managed that, I have no idea. There are hints of something more interesting under the surface, like with the major theme of loneliness and how it can affect someone's state of mind and growth as a person; a theme that isn't explored much, if at all, in JRPGs; but all of that is overshadowed by just how bland the rest of the game's story is. This game, and especially its extremely jargony dialogue, is more blunt than a wrecking ball with its themes and message, focuses way too much on the stuff that it really shouldn't have, and overstays its welcome about 10 hours longer than it should have.