I was a big fan of the first Tales game that I played way back on the Nintendo Gamecube. Turn-based RPG's were how I got my start and that game, called Tales of Symphonia was a lot like the Final Fantasy games I had grown accustomed to with some level of real-time moving around in the battlefield that was meant to give you some sort of dodge advantage. I don't know if it did actually accomplish that, but that was the idea anyway. Like in many of the other Tales games, you had the option of allowing the computer to control all of your characters entirely in order to turn it back into a turn-based sort of game.
I haven't tried a "Tales" game since then, and since I am done with Tunic which I absolutely loved, the search for a new game has begun. Tales of Arise seemed like a wonderful place to start because of my fond memories of the GC game, but well, it didn't take me very long to walk away from this one.
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I'm going to make this writeup in a different style to make it a bit easier to read for people. Mostly, I have problems with the game but let's start out with the things that I don't hate.
The good
- The music other than the English attempts at J-Pop songs, is pretty damn good and changes frequently. This keeps things interesting
- The combat mechanics are simple enough that you can get into it right away but it CAN be really complex if you want it to be. If you just want to dodge and whack whack whack with your basic attack you can go for it, you will win most fights using nothing else, it is just going to take longer. However, if you want to, you can figure out combos with devastating damage output and play around with that.
- The cinematic sequences are animated wonderfully. Well, if you like anime and I do
- The ability to avoid most enemies if you choose to do so is a nice touch. I get bored with fighting the same foe type over and over again
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after your 28th two armadillo encounter, you don't really want to do them anymore
that's unfortunately all I have for the good, now let's get to what you expect from me
The Bad
- I like a good story, but not one that is CONSTANTLY interrupting gameplay. Of all the story-based RPG's I have played in recent years I have never encountered a game that interrupts as frequently as Tales of Arise does. Seriously, in any single hour of gameplay you will be lucky to be controlling what is going on for 15 minutes of it. This leads me to skipping almost all dialogue, even though some of it is actually quite crucial to the story
- You are forced to re-enter the same areas over and over and over and OVER again. I don't know why they would do this. Were they too lazy to make new levels? It's not like these are graphically complex environments and the enemies for the most part remain the same so what's going on here? I hated backtracking through entire areas simply to return to the area I was just in after gathering a box of medicine in an adjacent map
- frequent disabling of fast travel: This is normally combined with what I just said above this one. You have fast-travel as an option but more often than not when you are required to return to a certain area, this travel has been deactivated. I would understand if there was some sort of sub-boss that by fast traveling you would skip over, but this has not been the case with me yet, they just force you to walk for the sake of forcing you to walk.
- Long load times: This always irritates me and the conspiracy theorist in me makes me think that this is done intentionally by Sony to attempt to force me to upgrade to a PS5
- Do we have to talk all the time? There is so much talking that is done in this game and a lot of it is just trivial drivel with no real bearing on the overall story. Thankfully, you can skip most of it and it's a shame that they overuse it, because the comic-book / anime book method they use of presenting some of the dialogue interruptions is actually really cool
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- invisible walls are everywhere. The guy that just did a running strike in battle and then hung in the air for 3 seconds to aerial strike a bird several times can't climb over a box. Sure Jan.
now let's get to the one thing that irritated me the most about this game, and is a big part of why I am going to stop playing although honestly, the constant interruptions was enough
The Ugly
Something that happens in games with convoluted maps with multiple tiers that I think most of us have gotten used to over time is that there will be some sort of floating indicator that tells you where you are supposed to go. In TOA it is a star with a countdown that indicates how far away you are.
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In TOA this happens as well but ONLY if you are on the same map area as where the objective is. It can be confusing as hell to determine how the hell you are actually meant to get to this area though and since the fast travel is mostly deactivated when you have an active quest in that direction, you have to muddle around and walk probably in the wrong direction in your search for the next part of the quest. Much of this walking around is done in friendly territories so it is just senseless walking and it is boring AF. Some quests just tell you the name of an area that you must travel to but since you haven't discovered that area yet you don't even know what map subsection it could possibly be contained in. This information was probably given to you in one of the 8 billion lines of dialogue that this game contains but if you are like me you got tired of the constant yammering a long time ago and now just want to get on with it.
I spent about 6 hours playing this game and I think at least 2 of them was me being completely lost and having no idea where to go. I'm not sure how they could have improved this but I can't really think of many ways in which they could have done it worse.
I expect long-winded stories from JRPG's and this is why I don't play a great deal of them. I have made it past the first boss - which was actually really tough and went on to the next area only to discover that the next area is being handled exactly the same as the first one. I'm just not interested in spending 30+ hours on something that never changes. BORING!!
and i'm out!