Tales of Arise
/Gameplay & Combat
It kind of feels like normal attacks are a bit of a trap, at least at the very beginning of the game
They do way more damage, and if you’re dodging in and out of enemies, they regenerate pretty naturally
This may just be a function of not having any meter initially, because the more valuable long combo strings are, the more valuable normal attacks are going to be
I do like how the tighter camera angle makes the game feel a bit more like an action game, but it also comes with the consequence of more things hitting you from offscreen with no way of telling it’s coming
It seems like enemies have armor until you ‘break’ them, but I can’t seem to tell when a ‘break’ will happen, which makes it kind of hard to plan out your combo around
Also, Break lasts for like less than a second, to the point where it’s actually really common for enemies to exit Break DURING your combo
You can literally be in the middle of your combo, the enemy wakes up, and counter-hits you, if they have enough resistance, it’s maddening
Boost attacks are a huge boon to the flow of combat. I never really appreciated it properly in the demo, but with it properly tutorialised and laid out in a progression of mechanics, it makes a lot more sense how to properly use it
It’s really nice even just to use it as a combo reset, you can almost use it like a V-Trigger or Roman Cancel
I do wonder if it’s use as a combo reset won’t be overly centralising though, because these abilities are also meant to each have their own unique function
We shall see once we have a full party I suppose
I like the Boost Strikes act as a sort of cap on how long random battles can take
It’s a bit unpredictable when you’ll be able to trigger one, but it’s based on enemy health and your combo length
If you’re comboing a single enemy well, you’re going to be able to finish them off really quickly and avoid prolonged fights where you’re 30 hits into a combo, the only one hitting the enemy while up in the air, for slivers of health each attack
They could really use a better name to better differentiate them from Boost Attacks (or whatever the ‘real’ names are)
Overall- the combat feels quite good early game
But historically Tales battles become less coherent as battle and party sizes scale up, so we’ll see where it goes
I think the probably ultimately comes down to, the game wants you to be doing sick combos, but the battlefield becomes so hectic, and there are so many things that want to stop you from doing sick combos
35 hours in, it definitely seems like this is starting to be the case, battles are particle madness, and the new camera angle makes it a lot easier for enemies to attack from off-screen
For the most part I like manual mode over semi-auto, but against small / agile enemies, it definitely feels like there could be a bit more attack magnetism
It also feels kind of bad when using some directional moves that you would expect to track onto the enemy, like Demon Fang, Hurricane Thrust, etc
I particularly like that, in manual mode, you kind of don’t need to worry about what enemy you’re actually targeting
I don’t really get the point of Alphen’s blazing sword mechanic
The blazing sword hurts you, in a game where healing is more limited than ever
Unlike Berseria, Alphen doesn’t seem to have any passive way to heal himself, so any time you use the blazing sword, you’re just shrinking your CP pool
We can never use an inferno arte until after using another normal arte first, so it’s hard to actually use Inferno Artes during the small window an enemy is downed (which is when they do extra damage)
Damage and frame data both seem pretty mediocre, at least at the start of the game
Perhaps we just need more skills / better inferno artes
They definitely become a lot more usable later in the game, when you get a few upgrades and some better inferno artes - they become a nice way to extend combos without using AG
It never stops being a pain that you have to be careful about charging your Interno Artes though, it’s really easy to accidentally charge too long and use up ⅓ of your health when you didn’t mean to
Ok nevermind, I take it all back, it’s actually kind of a thrill late-game to dump your whole health bar and just absolutely shred an enemy (and then instantly get it all back with a single healing spell)
It doesn’t seem to ever get old, to finish a battle with a special arte, and it just cuts to black (boost artes, mystic artes, etc)
To note, this is only really possible because of the more streamlined victory screen they have in this game, would not be possible with a more traditional Tales style victory screen where the party all poses and says their lines
I had a ton of trouble with the second boss, and it’s hard to tell if I was just doing it wrong, or if it’s supposed to be really scrappy
This is why I hate fights where you can’t break enemies; you’re left with very little way to control the chaos, so you kind of have to hope your allies aren’t morons
I really don't like the way Tales games design their levels these days (it’s been true for the last several games, at least since Xillia, though the issues were less pronounced back then)
Lots of small areas and hard-to-track connections
It makes everything feel disconnected
It's harder to distinguish a field vs a town vs a dungeon, because they're all weird little blob maps
The duration of Overlimit feels so short, and so far I haven’t seen any skills that extend the duration of it
Specifically, it feels like the point of overlimit is to do some crazy stuff with infinite artes, and then finish with a Mystic Arte, but it doesn’t really feel like you have time to do anything cool
If you need to fix your positioning, maybe you need to get up into the air, your Overlimit will be half done before you even start attacking
Most of the time it feels like I can only just get in a couple hits and then try and trigger the Mystic Arte for the real big damage
It doesn’t help that triggering the Mystic Arte feels so finicky, and I can’t tell why
It feels like you need to be standing on the ground to trigger a Mystic Arte, which would be very strange for a game that so blatantly encourages you to be airborne
Plus, infinite artes often isn’t as cool as it sounds, because the enemy is just going to fall out after the second or third arte anyways
I think it would be more useful if it was just reduced damage and some armor, honestly
The duration does improve later in the game, but it doesn’t count for a ton, because you also need to string more attacks together to use the higher level Mystic Artes, so it’s a bit of a wash
In the end, it still feels like why bother using arts longer than you need to to hit the mystic arte
I imagine the Mystic Arte does more damage the longer your combo, like in other Tales games, but the longer your combo the better the chance your enemy will fall out of it / randomly stop being broken, and then you just don’t get a Mystic Arte at all
25 hours in, and I still wish I had some kind of self-sustain
There are some fun food abilities that help a lot, but the problem isn’t actually that you die and need a lot of healing
The actual problem is that, the food you get is just passive regen, when what we really want, is a little bonus that rewards us for playing well or playing around a certain condition/objective
Eg. +5 CP whenever you kill an enemy with a boost strike, something like that
At about 35 hours we FINALLY get an accessory that can heal 5% when you kill an enemy, which definitely helps, but is really really small (and by now, a basic healing spell is a much smaller % of the overall CP pool)
This game focuses a lot of knocking down enemies, that’s the entire purpose of boost skills, but interacting with a knocked down enemy isn’t actually that fun
You want to combo enemies normally, but comboing enemies is basically a waste of time, normal attacks are weak, and you can’t break a downed enemy
But in the case of a downed enemy, you’re a lot better off using slow laggy moves that hit hard, and ignoring combos altogether, which is in turn forsaking other mechanics that are encouraging you to get high combo counts
The result is that, it feels like you can kind of ignore the combo system in a lot of random battles if you use boost skills > reigning slash exclusively
A huge number of the things you can counterattack are multi-hit combos, hitboxes that are very active, etc etc etc, and so you end up getting hit out of your counterattack surprisingly often
This feels especially weird because of the warp component, it feels pretty bad to warp to your opponent, and then just get hit out of your own attack
Or say, warp into a damage field / spell cast in progress, ie. things that you have very limited ability to even recognise you’re warping into, because you’re not over there to see it… that’s why you’re warping
I’m not sure why they wouldn’t just put armor on this attack. I don’t really care if I take the damage, but armor would at least allow me to connect my own attack
It feels particularly bad because a counterattack is supposed to represent a reversal of sorts, but sometimes your advantage state just completely fizzles out
The bosses are honestly so trash, especially small/humanoid bosses
Every rule stops applying against bosses, and you’re left just whacking a giant health pool with your little noodle weapons, all the while the boss can turn around and do some annoying bullshit with no counterplay
And of course we KNOW the bosses are the ones that are truly going to wield some bullshit
With no ability to true combo bosses, 90% of your arsenal becomes useless, and normal attacks kind of do to (we’re talking like 0.05% of the bosses health per attack)
And let's not even get started on Inferno Artes, their damage is ok, but their frame data is so abysmal - they work normally by tacking them onto the end of combos, so you can use the enemy’s frame disadvantage to land them, but of course, that is not possible against bosses
So bosses feel like something to get through, there’s no joy in them, they aren’t testing your skills, just your patience
I don’t know who decided there should be spells that just track you / have no ground targeting effect / stunlock you for several hits, it’s insanely bad and there is no counterplay, so screw you I guess?
This game has a really hard time scaling up the difficulty without just making things less fair, which leads to it being really frustrating
Attacks without counterplay that stunlock you and/or murder your party relentlessly
Huge masses of enemies that stunlock you and/or murder your party relentlessly
Damage sponging never really felt like a big issue until the end of the game, where even normal enemies are damage sponges, which is great when you are fighting 8-10 of them in a single encounter
Damage sponges are especially damaging to the game’s fun because, it disincentives aggressive play
If an enemy dies fast, even if they are dangerous, it can feel right to go in because you can win with good play
The spongier an enemy is, the more likely you’re going to get clipped by something stupid, that you probaly had no ability to account for, so I hope you like spamming Demon Fang from a distance
Your enemies get way more deadly, but your allies do not get more intelligent, so it can feel like there’s no in-between, either you’re sitting there praying for your allies to cast some heals, or you’re sitting there watching your allies get demolished and spam-healing their way through your whole CP pool
Super cool awesome reward for skillfully dodging and comboing your enemies - take 0 damage, and yet have 0CP left when you DO get hit because your party members are morons
It’s pretty annoying how intrusive Mystic Artes are, especially when it’s one of your allies doing it
You can tell them not to use Mystic Artes, but like, obviously you do want them to use Mystic Artes, it’s just annoying that it comes with so many downsides
It completely resets the battlefield, so any casts or combos, or ground targeting, or active AoE effects will be completely lost
If you’re in the middle of a combo, there is no way to salvage it through a mystic arte
Against some enemies, this can actively work against you, Mystic Artes are great, but a broken enemy who is being combo’d is not a threat, whereas if you hit it with a Mystic Arte, if it survives, you have to break it again, which means you just completely lose your advantage state, and a reset to neutral gives the enemy more chances to do bad things to you
If you are spending HP to use the Blazing Sword, that HP can be completely lost if the Mystic Arte interrupts your attack after you start it
This is especially true of long multi-hit attacks, like Explosive Ring
Systems & Progression
It feels like a good message to teach players early on to not fight EVERY enemy (because the way these Tales games are set up, that would take AGES)
And additionally, combine this with teaching players to rest early and often, this seems like it would be a good way to set players up for success, given the way that cure points work
It feels weird to reduce your survivability down into a single pool of points, but I think it makes sense
It allows them to give people cool spells and abilities that don’t cost MP, without having to apply the same rules to both offensive spells and restorative / support spells
I don’t really get why field actions consume your healing pool, I’m not sure why they would want to tie survival and exploration to the same resource
It feels like the game throttles how much exp you get pretty aggressively, and they don’t introduce a lot of new enemies within a given area, so it feels like I pretty quickly run out of enemies that can really give me good exp
Arguably, the game just doesn’t want me to get overlevelled, but I kind of DO want to get just a bit overlevelled
I’m personally a big fan (as a player) of overindulging in combat just a bit (at least when it’s fin), fight everything, force a few extra encounters, and just stay a bit ahead of the curve
It feels like the game is pretty resolute in not wanting me to get ahead of the curve, however
It’s kind of interesting that they decided to be extra tight with money in this game
It’s certainly not a coincidence that it’s in the same game where they strictly limit how much healing you can do
Or in the same game where they jack the price of healing items way up
Overall I think I’m a fan, but it REALLY sucks if you get caught in a situation where you end up blowing all your healing items
You end up feeling like you just have to deal long-term with that loss of resources, because you can’t just farm up infinite money any time cash is tight
I like the feeling of your resource management having consequences, but it sucks to feel like ”you barely eked out a victory, but maybe it would have been better if you hadn’t won”
Also, it does kind of suck that you don’t really get much from winning battles as a result (other than XP and stuff of course)
Most item drops are kind of indistinguishable from each other, I don’t really care what I get from a specific battle
It’s always cool to be able to complete a sidequest before even picking it up, especially when the game acknowledges it
BUT, this game finds itself down that path too often if you ask me
It’s pretty lame to roll up to a new town, see half a dozen side quests, and realise you’ve done them all already
It’s cool to be able to just collect a whole bunch of rewards, but on some level, I think we hope that accepting new quests will give us new things to do
When you roll up to a new town, you kind of want to come away with a bunch of exciting new tasks
This is clearly a choice by the devs, these could easily be ‘kill x enemies’ quests instead of ‘collect x of y’ quests
I think you definitely want some of these quests, but there should clearly be a balance
A lot of the ‘loot with random affixes’ stuff has been moved over to accessories exclusively, rather than having it proliferate all of the gear in the game
I like how this lets you continue to min-max hard for one piece, but you don’t need to do it quite so thoroughly
If you get a sexy new sword, it’s a sexy new sword right away, no need to worry about what skills it has on it
Now accessory materials need to be consumed to level up your accessories, so you have a natural sink for the random garbage you constantly find, rather than just selling it to clear space
Although notably, you kind of stop being able to reliably get low level ores, which is a bit odd
As a result you end up having to use higher level ores to upgrade your accessories, which they are at least worth more charge, but it feels weird to be consuming level 3 and 4 ores for this purpose
You kind of want to be able to rapidly chug level 1 ores because you know there’s a 0% chance you need them
The battle chain system was changed in this game so that at a certain point, it will give you a burst or maximum bonus, and then rapidly deplete
I don’t really like this, because it makes the system more about maximizing the gauge, than rapidly chaining battles together
The strategy now becomes, rapidly chain battles AFTER the gauge is maxed, and if you hit the max when there are no enemies in the immediate vicinity, then you are just doing it wrong and you should not have fought that enemy
It feels very strange for the optimal strategy to maximize your battle chain being “I should not fight this enemy, I should go explore until I find a bigger pack”
It’s actually really really easy to chain battles, and in fact you’re almost guaranteed to get to the highest chain level, the hard part is popping it at the right time, which just feels strange
When the time doesn’t line up right, it feels bad, but also you don’t really feel like you have a lot of control over that, because the chain is just naturally building without you having to do much
It’s kind of interesting that when you go back to old areas, everything is the same level as you left it - except for the the ores specifically
It’s definitely nice for the ores specifically, but a bit inconsistent
Granted, I’m not sure I’d actually want stronger enemies, anyways
99% of armor in this game is just a straight upgrade to all 3 of your defensive stats, with nothing to consider beyond that, which is just really boring, it’s something you have to upgrade, but it’s definitely not exciting to upgrade
The ability to get a ‘free counterattack’ after you kill an enemy is a great way to hasten the pace of battle, it adds a ton of momentum in random battles
You get a reasonably big hit as a result of it, and you get to enjoy what the feels like even if you’re not someone that routinely goes for counterattacks
You warp to the target, which looks and feels cool, as well as greatly reducing downtime in combat because you don’t need to run across the field to your next target
You instantly break the target, meaning you can instantly launch into a sick combo
This also provides you with a great way to easily open up some of the enemies that are tougher to break, like armadillos or werewolves, you just focus on the weaker enemies first to get an easy kill, and then chain that into a free break on something bigger and scarier
I don’t really get why the Owl Forest is cut off from Fast Travel when the rest of the world is
You certainly don’t stop finding owls, so instead you just have to hear “hey we should check out the forest” every single owl you find, because you CAN’T go back there
If it’s an issue of your ability to leave the forest… They should be able to just turn off the entrance portal if fast travel is disabled, or something
UI/UX
It feels a little weird not having the map connected to the rest of the menu.
That’s not to say that it’s bad necessarily, but it’s what every game does now (and this is a game that in particular, is trying to modernise)
It’s interesting having a little check mark inside the dialogue icon, to indicate if you’ve talked to them yet (although, an extremely small gain)
It seems like the checkmark doesn’t always appear when it seems like it should, though, so it might be a bit of a mixed blessing
I LOVE pairing a description of the item with the item acquisition message
The immediate thought is always “oh cool, I wonder what that does”, so immediately answering that question is A+ in my book
Big fan of the gray arrow on the minimap indicating where you were standing (and facing) when entering the zone
It’s a little difficult to tell exactly what it’s communicating to me, but having that reference is real nice (refer to: Quest 64 camera issues)
I wish the subtitles came with speaker names and optional backgrounds
But at least the text is very large and clear
The gold marker isn’t quite as easy to find as I would like, if you haven’t already discovered the area it’s in, it just doesn’t show up
Berseria had this problem too
Even if it does appear on the maps, if it’s in another zone, it can be hard to find in all the map layers
It feels odd needing to click R3 to zoom in the Skill Panel, especially since the map doesn’t work that way
This is probably because the map can scale linearly but the Skill Panel only has 2 distinct sizes
I still would have preferred R-stick up to zoom in, R-stick down to zoom out, just to stay consistent
The yellow main quest star and the green side quest star look way too similar to each other
I’d have liked to have seen side quests use a diamond or something
Search areas are pretty hard to see on the map, and they are especially inscrutable because when one is present, there just isn’t a star anywhere
There is a surprising amount of teeny-tiny text in this game, which is pretty unreadable from across the room
For example, most of the important text in the Skill Panel
I really wish I had a better way to zoom out, see how zones connect, and in particular see region and world maps. They don’t need to have much functionality
Without a zoomed out view of how regions connect, it’s really hard to contextualise the area, and how each screen connects to it
Each area, and even each major region, feels small and disconnected from the world as a whole
I have a really hard time conceptualising the scope of the areas, and of the world
It’s a bit difficult to tell what skills are left to purchase on the Skill Panel
Even when you’re zoomed in, you can’t easily tell purchase icons apart from unpurchased icons
This means you need to hover over a title to see if any of the skills have prices listed still
It also makes it a bit tricky to tell which titles are completed or not
There isn’t any actual indication on the title’s hovercard, it indicates what the completion bonus is, but not if it’s been acquired or not
The only way to tell is to hover over the title, and see if there are any skills left unpurchased
It doesn’t even list the bonuses under the ‘Learned Skill List’
Battles are very hectic, and I find I often can’t tell when a spell is being cast to move out of the way
I also can’t really tell when a spell graphic is friendly or not - who knows if the tornado is friendly
This is especially problematic when you consider Rinwell’s Boost Skill, which allows her to cast the enemy’s spells - now you can’t even tell by what the spell is, if it’s friendly or not, because it could be cast by Rinwell
It would be really nice if you could buffer L1 inputs when entering battle - if you’re holding L1, so you can change which enemy you’re targeting quickly
Instead, you have to try and time it with the actual start of battle, which is a second after loading in or something
The problem is that, if you press too early, your input is just eaten, and so you spend a second standing around like an idiot
It’s nice that the game lets you have a tracked sidequest alongside the main quest, which is always tracked
Though, I wish the currently tracked sidequest had a different icon on the map, especially if you have a bunch of sidequests (either accepted or yet to be accepted), there isn’t really a way to tell the 2 apart
If your party wipes, you have to choose between retrying the battle, or returning to the title screen, so if you just DON’T want to redo the fight, it feels a little bit awkward
Normally you can just run from fights, but there are some instances where you don’t have that option (even outside of boss fights in some cases)
The type of monster you can’t run from is probably the most likely type of monster you’re not going to just run away from (because they are serious business, so you may not stand a chance)
You can’t see what loot you get if you also have an sp notification on screen - which doesn’t happen constantly, but it’s surprisingly frequent
I can kind of understand why they might restrict one’s ability to open the inventory menu while swimming, but I don’t get why you can’t open the map
I guess, let’s hope you never need directions when in the water, cause screw you is why
Narrative & Misc
It feels like they didn’t really try that hard to match lip flex, and while I usually don’t care about that very much, it is very distracting with how prominent the models’ mouths are
I find myself getting pretty tired of Shionne’s character pretty quickly, at least at the start, she is very repetitive and one-note
Having skits take the form of a sort of motion comic (with talking animations and all), really adds a lot of life to these scenes
And it’s neat that skits are good enough quality now that, they feel comfortable using the same tech for normal in-game scenes
It’s nice that we can now see skits we missed from the campfire, but it’s also the case that, not watching the skits when they first pop up can remove a lot of important context, so they can come off as kind of awkward sometimes
It kind of feels like every scene / dialogue is longer than it needs to be, like there is just a bit too much text, and the cutscenes are just a bit too long
I guess to be more specific, if I’m say, turning in a sidequest, I expect like maybe 1 or 2 back and forths with the quest giver when I turn it in, not like 3-7
It feels like a lot of the voice tracks are weirdly low quality, I don’t really have the language to describe it, but it sounds like it’s overly compressed or something
It kind of feels like there isn’t a lot pushing the story forward
The world doesn’t feel particularly strong, so I don’t have much desire to see what new areas might be like
And realistically, there isn’t a lot to each area beyond a generic fantasy veneer
I want to learn more about Alphen and Shionne, but instead the only interesting plot thread is immediately dropped for what feels like infinite side plots
It feels like the only driving force is Shionne’s desire to ‘defeat all the lords’, but we don’t even know why. Alphen is basically just along for the journey because he doesn’t have anywhere else to be
I think this doesn’t feel as good as other generic “do the thing” stories, because we don’t really know anything about the slaves, the challenges in the way, even the world as a whole, and nobody is really forthcoming with this information
We never really have a solid throughline between areas other than “I guess we go to this area now”
It kind of feels like we’re wandering about defeating lieutenants, without ever being told who the general is, or why we are defeating lieutenants
Obviously we have the stated motivation of ‘freeing all the slaves from Renans’ or whatever, but that’s so paper-thin as to be insulting; we all know that’s not what this game is about
I think part of the problem is that we aren’t rolling up in town and solving everyone’s problems like in most JRPGs
If anything, it feels like we are the ones causing conflict to occur, and more to the point, it’s only happening because something needs to happen to drive the plot forward
Maybe this isn’t the case for every chapter, but the fact remains that, we don’t really have a good reason to show up in each individual town other than “that’s the next area”
Which I guess is pretty normal, but I feel like normally we would at least get some sort of side-reason to go to a town, “we have a contact there”, SOMETHING, but no we’re just showing up in town and seeing what happens
There are some voice lines that are really repetitive, and played so often even when they don’t really need to play that often, or just have no alt lines
It kind of feels like the subject matter is trying to be way deeper and more mature, but it doesn’t really handle the topics well, so it comes of feeling like they haven’t ‘earned’ using such heavy themes
It kind of feels like they have these very heavy themes and plot devices, and the characters act very dramatic about it, and yet it all feels like just a thin veneer of theme overtop of a very generic anime plot
I think one of the issues the plot faces is that, it’s all about this systemic oppression of Dahnans and the fallout of societal imbalances - but the game doesn’t do a very good job of showing you those societal issues after the first area
Instead, the plot focuses very intently on the party, who are clearly the most important people in existence, and not the societies that are actually suffering, which is supposed to be the driving incentive for all of this
You don’t really meet or talk to very many people, and the ones you do, you rarely see more than once or twice, so it’s hard to connect with the issues of the people
You do get a sense of the issues happening in each area, but they are very different, and they feel like external problems, like the quirky thing you need to fix in an RPG town before you can move on to the next place, moreso than centuries of systemic oppression
It also feels like each area is very disconnected. Like nobody knows anything about the world outside their own realm, and the people that do, don’t really seem to care that much, which doesn’t really help the plot throughline at all
The plot really does go somewhere, but not until the literal end of the game, and then they have a huge, prolonged plot dump
It’s pretty chock full of plot holes though, they dedicated so much time and effort to this grand plot reveal, you can kind of see how easy it is to gloss over this thing or that thing, which really doesn’t hold up when you scrutinise it
If we are to call this a 60 hour game, then the plot is good around hor 50-55, everything else is pretty dumb. Stylish, dramatic, but friggen dumb
But all the same, after 60 hours with a cast that has admittedly grown quite a bit, it’s hard not to feel anything, even if the goings-on of the story are so dumb