Tales of Arise was a game I knew existed, but intentionally stayed away from news as I wanted to go in as blind as possible. I’ve been a fan of the Tales Series for years and it was a matter of when, not if, I was going to play. For the most part, I enjoyed this Action RPG despite some glaring flaws, and shows promise of what the Tales Series can become in the future. I played this on the PC.
The gameplay was fun, a good improvement over the last few games with some new mechanics and Moderate felt like a good difficultly for me this time. If you’re familiar with the series, you will get into this game easy, and I feel while there’s a lot of mechanics to learn, it’s fed in smaller bites that doesn’t make it overwhelming for newcomers. While most of the new features were fun to use and healing being a single, depleting pool makes things fresh and bumps the difficulty up, some of the mechanics could have been cleaned up. Also, we’re back to Symphonia style Over Limits, where it happens automatically after certain factors were met, but they are easy to trigger to the point where they would come up multiple times per battle. Fighting was fun with most of the character, though I gravitated toward Law, the brawler of the group. The battles, while fun, many of them felt like slogs as a good chunk of enemies felt like HP sponges that makes battles drag and you’ll drain your resources so fast that you’ll have to pay high prices to restock and/or go to an inn, and it felt like a way to extend game time. Not to mention the experience being meager, even on boss fights and difficulty spikes in several areas.
The visuals was appealing to the eyes with a mix of cell shading and realism, with vibrant and subdued colors. The environments are visually captivating, the characters were distinct and the art style reminded me of Valkyria Chronicles. While I’m sad they didn’t improve on Vesperia’s colorful cell shaded visuals, I’ll be fine if they went in this direction and improve on this going forward. Motion is fluid, but I wish there was a bit more facial movement and body language, especially in the cutscenes. The music by Motoi Sakuraba was once again were alright, lots of synths and instrumentals and its serviceable with a couple of memorable tracks, the same for the games in the series.
The presentation has taken a step up with a new skit style of comic books that were fun to look at, as well as good dynamic cutscenes, with some anime scenes sprinkled throughout. Some typical Tales Series elements have been removed like post battle victory screens, but the dialogue is there in the chit chat, which is really fun to listen to. While the dungeons aren’t all long hallways, I wish there was something a bit more to them than that, like puzzles, especially the late game dungeons.
I loved the characters and their interactions. Each of the main party had an introduction arc, giving us time to know their motivations. They also were basically introduced in pairs, starting a dynamic that went throughout the game. The interactions always had me smile and I like how each of them learn and grow, and they grew of me. Let’s say I’m not usually a fan of the “everyone gets coupled up” trope, but it comes natural in this case, so I don’t mind. Great voice acting brought it up another knotch.
The plot is engaging, dealing with what happens when a people are dealing with slavery for three centuries and explores the topic rather well from various angles. The first part is basically “go to a new area, do a few things and beat the zone boss”, though things change enough to make each new zone refreshing and not stale. There’s also lots of lore and has a Science Fantasy vibe, which we see more of as the story continues. Of course, there’s the typical Tales plot twist that changes the course of the storyline, but hints are dropped early on. While it deals with dark topics, there’s some levity to balance it out to keep it from getting too dark.
It’s biggest weakness is the pacing in both story and from a player perspective. Carrying over from Berseria, the skits come at you in chunks, and you could be sitting for up to ten minutes at a time watching skits, which ruins the pace when you’re trying to run around and fight enemies. I wish they were more spread out. On the story side, it suffers from the typical Tales third act tumble, where the story quality goes down. Here, it relies on hours of info dumping, and rushing to an unsatisfying ending. It feels like it worse here than in other Tales games as the dip is so dramatic. I found myself confused and mentally exhausted several times during the late game for this reason.
Overall, I really enjoyed it, looking forward to my next session every time I was done. If you like Tales games, or even action RPGs, give this one a look. If you’re not sure, there’s a free demo to get a feel of the game. It’s on PC, PS4, PS5 and Xbox Series X.
Score (out of 10)
Visuals - 8
Audio - 6
Gameplay - 8
Story - 7
Design - 7
Enjoyment - 8
Overall - 8
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