Tales of Arise

So I finally beat Tales of Arise. Time for a little story about my history with the "Tales Of" series. I vividly remember playing Tales of Symphonia on Gamecube on co-op with one of my best friends who lived next door to me at the time. Years later, some friends I would make via conventions, cosplaying via the Final Fantasy fanbase who were JRPG enthusiasts introduced me to the rest of the Tales series which had been continuing for years at that time. Unfortunately, that dear friend who introduced me to such games as Graces and Xillia went their separate ways from me. So due to this negative association with this "friend breakup" I started to fall out of love with the series. I doubt I will ever finish Abyss, Graces or Zestiria. But I know I will always be able to go back to Symphonia and Xillia and I have a feeling I will enjoy Berseria when I get around to that one as well in spite of another, different former friend trying to ruin that game for me too. My love for this series was "reignited" with the announcement of Tales of Arise. Immediately I fell in love with the character designs, they are some of the most aesthetically pleasing designs of any modern JRPG I can recall in recent memory. That accompanied by a more dark fantasy tone for the story instantly made it seem much more appealing that the likes of Zestiria and Graces to me. I played the game a little bit on launch but put it down because I wanted to finish some other games first. But I knew I was going to love this game. I beat the second main story boss (the Light Lord) and crossed this event horizon where I stopped being merely invested in the game and became completely addicted. For the first time in a long time with a JRPG, I genuinely could not put the game down until I had finished it. I played it for a few hours every day for about 2 weeks until I finally finished it. 

So what did I think? It's not only my favorite game in the Tales series, but it might be the best action RPG I have ever played. Beating out Kingdom Hearts 2 from that spot for me. From the beautifully animated anime cutscenes by Ufotable, to the music, to the stunning art design, to the gameplay, to the english voice acting, I LOVED nearly everything about this game. It isn't perfect, no game really is, and I will discuss some problems I had with it. But overall I could not give it a more glowing recommendation. Here is my spoiler free review. 

Visuals:

The art directly literally could not be better. I already gushed about the character designs but the environment designs are beautiful too. There are many varied environments based on different elements, a staple of JRPGs. I spent a non insignificant amount of time in this game just rotating my camera around and gazing at the environment around me, especially when I entered a new area. It reminds me of that feeling of wonder I felt first exploring some of FFXIII's environments. That game really pushed the 7th gen to it's limits with graphical fidelity and I feel like this game does the same for the 8th gen. It along with Dragon Quest XI I feel like are the truest representations of what classic JRPG series should look like in the modern era. (I say that without having played FFXVI) This is a technically demanding game. It does not have a Switch port and I feel like it's visuals and performance benefits from that. It's able to be a cut above games that do have switch ports and have more simplistic visuals like Ys IX, SMT V and the Xenoblade games. This game runs incredibly smooth on PS4 Pro aside from some VERY occasional frame rate stutters in the overworld when there was a lot of particle effects on screen, battles never dipped in performance the entire game. I see no reason to advocate people pick this up on PS5 specifically for performance but I don't doubt it runs even better there. To gush about the characters one final time, the cutscenes have a lot of dynamic character movements and some very expressive eyes and faces. The hair is also wonderfully textured as well, they have some of the most consistently good looking "anime style" characters in a modern game I can think of. 

Gameplay:

The gameplay felt like a huge improvement over the previous Tales games that I have played. The real time combat in the Tales series happens in a pseudo 3D environment where you typically can't move in any direction, you can only move "in and out" towards and away from the enemy so to speak. This was initially to keep it in line with the originally 2D Tales of Phantasia on the SNES. But to be able to move in true 3D here in Tales of Arise is such a welcome change. Allegedly, Arise was made with the idea of breaking series tradition deliberately in mind, which I certainly appreciated. You can command each character and adapt to their unique play style but the game puts a lot of emphasis on playing as Alphen and he is very fun to play as. Being able to chain arts together to air juggle enemies never gets old. In addition, the gameplay progression is paced very well. You understand the basics of combat very thoroughly before the game gives you a full party, once you have each of the game's 6 characters is when the gameplay really opens up and becomes extremely addicting. Shortly after that when you are able to have a second set of equipped arts that you can toggle between allowing for even more diverse and complex combos without having to go into your menu and readjust your setup. It's incredible. I learned MUCH too late into the game that you are also able to disable certain arts that your allies will use as to only leave the remaining ones with the corresponding element that the enemies are weak to. This was very helpful for the final area of the game where Shionne and Rinwell were exploiting every single enemies weaknesses automatically, making some otherwise very hard fights much more trivial. 

I do have some gripes with the gameplay. The game has a weird relationship to money, healing items and boss difficulty. I played this game on the "normal" difficulty and there were moments where I was tempted to change the difficulty down to "story" mode, the easy mode, but I managed to stave off the temptation and see the game through to the end without changing the difficulty. Unlike most JRPGs, I would say about 85% of bosses in this game took me multiple attempts to kill. The second Lord fight, the Light Lord, is a massive skill check and a difficulty curve that may wall your progress in the early game. I got very frustrated at one point because it felt like the same song and dance with every boss: chip away at their OUTRAGEOUS health pool while avoiding attacks that will likely one-shot your characters and pray you have enough healing and revival items to make it through the fight. It speaks back to my general problem with action RPGs in general which is, the moment you add input precision into the equation, it stops being about your level, stats and equipment and starts being about how effectively you can dodge one hit kill attacks. Which still makes for engaging gameplay, but it makes me just want to play a Character-Action game like Devil May Cry and prefer turn based RPGs like Dragon Quest and early Final Fantasy. During the fight against Dohalim, he one-shot three of my 4 characters with a single attack. I just had to pause the game and laugh at the sheer unfairness of the situation. There were also AT LEAST 3 to 4 story bosses where I was completely out of healing and revival items and with only the character I was controlling remaining, chipping away at the boss' health and avoiding instant death attacks. The most hilarious example of this was the wind lord where the only character left alive was Shionne and the boss was in the last 4th of their health (about 25,000 health) and I had to take out the boss by dealing chip damage while she SPAMMED her AOE super attack (which luckily was unable to hit the very edges of the arena so I was safe from damage). It just seemed comical that this boss spammed it's most powerful attack at least 20 times in this final phase while I dealt chip damage to it, unable to be killed but unable to revive any of my party members. It just felt cheap, random and silly. The general grindiness of bosses in this game I feel like can be attributed to a modern RPG design sensibility. So many games these days feel like they need to be a second job for you. Like it's the only game you get to play. So many RPGs brag about how long they are and how much content they have. Games like the Persona series and Xenoblade series boasting about their 80-100 hour play time. I personally do not enjoy this. I know from experience that some of the Persona games can justify their length by virtue of not having any post game content after the final boss, making the final boss the VERY last thing you can do. But I don't have the time to commit to a game that long nowadays and I generally feel like shorter games often have a more tightly crafted experience. SMT Nocturne and Final Fantasy XII the Zodiac Age are two RPGs I have finished in the last few years and they both clock in at around the 35-40 hour mark without side content or post game content. Hell, Soul Hackers, one of my favorite SMT games was only about 15 hours but it was an extremely finely tuned and crafted experience. I will come back to this discussion of length when we get into the story, but suffice it to say, I feel like the "intended" way to play the game is to do as many side quests as are possibly offered to you in an area to gain as much money as possible, blow your entire wallet on healing and revival items just so you can have a chance at surviving the next story boss. Often these side quests are hunts against high level monsters much stronger than you that you either cannot beat right now, or will also take up all of your healing items to beat anyway, rendering them not worth fighting. It's reasons like this that I do not enjoy games like Monster Hunter, I do not enjoy a lot of redundant resource gathering and grindy fights that do not advance the story. I believe the game knows it's too grindy and this arrangement is intentional. The DLC store for the game in addition to offering some additional difficulty levels, BGM and cosmetics for the characters, offers you the ability to purchase a limited amount of level ups and money drops with real world money. So if someone is stuck in the game and doesn't like grinding, they can spend $2 and gain 10 levels and my general disapproval and condemnation of micro transactions and Gacha games really bounced off of this decision. But to be charitable, it was probably something mandated by the publisher. 

However, thankfully, this difficulty issue does appear to drop off in the last quarter of the game. I noticed many of the bosses in the final 25% of the game I was actually able to defeat on the first try. I had a lot more money, access to purchasing better quality CP restoration items as well as better equipment so presumably my characters were able to more easily tank fatal blows. Not to mention the skill that lets a character live a lethal blow on 1 health prevented me from wiping out to as many bosses in the late game. I just feel like in the first 50% of the game bosses are a HUGE chore and you are extremely limited by fewer abilities, l i t t l e  m o n e y, and a more strict supply of good healing items. Although the final area of the game does have it's own share of problems, most of the encounters at that point are reskinned boss type enemies that use the same move sets and are incredibly grindy and time consuming to kill, resulting in me just running past most of them. At some point I plan to re play this game with my wife and our best friend and I wouldn't be opposed to playing the game on the easiest difficulty for that run to just enjoy the story and cut down on grinding. Especially if one of them wants the controller for that group play through, I will absolutely not subject them to the frustration I felt even though I feel like in the end, it was rewarding and extremely worth it to finish the game on that harder, normal mode. 

Story:

Without going into spoilers, the story in this game is incredibly satisfying. With any JRPG, the characters are usually the most defining part of the story. The story doesn't work without compelling characters and the format of a long RPG allows the characters to grow gradually over a long story. It's a story telling format that allows you to very intimately get to know these characters and watch them grow, change and learn new things. This game does of all that spectacularly. The characters behave completely differently by the end of the game than they did when you first met them. They go through an IMMENSE amount of growth over the story, grudges are let go, trauma is healed, lots of forgiveness is had, it's great. It's an unlikely crew of people who always thought they deserved to be alone for one reason or another until they found each other. Alphen is surprisingly emotionally mature for a guy who's lost all of his memories. He's incredibly empathetic and a good listener. He helps people through their problems by asking the right questions and giving them an unbiased, non judgmental point of view. I felt a strong kinship to Alphen that I haven't felt for an RPG protagonist in a very long time. Shionne is one of the most well written Tsundere I have ever seen in fiction. All of her hostility and coldness at the beginning of the story, every single bit of it is justified when you learn about her actual backstory later on. She also grows significantly as a character and unlike most Tsundere you see in anime, doesn't stay bitchy the entire story and allows the events of the story to recontextualize her world view and her experiences. Rinwell, Law and Dohalim also have great character arcs and each start off being pretty unlikable when you first meet them, but all of them have their moment of growth and become immensely more likable once they have had their moment. Kisara I found very endearing. She starts off, like the rest of the cast, with a lot of baggage but I love that she is optimistic without being naive. She's incredibly smart but has such high hopes for the future of this world and holds a conviction to her values. There are a few scenes that are sort of played up for comedy with her, like her being the "mom" of the group by being the only one with life skills like how to cook and do laundry, but after that one scene it's never brought up again and she is allowed to have a personality outside of that. Same thing when the cast accuses her of basically simping for Dohalim, the rest of the cast calls out how she's still being overly protective of him, she acknowledges her behavior and leaves him alone. She treats him like an equal for the rest of the game. This could have easily been played up for laughs or for fan service where Kisara has a crush on the pretty princely lord accompanied by a bunch of "will they, won't they" bullshit. But rather, they allow her character to be about so much more and I really appreciated the way in which she is characterized. 

The plot overall is also very good. It comes dangerously close to saying something profound when it comes to socio cultural and political commentary, but it's very non committal and in my opinion, is too entrenched in it's own fiction to make any meaningful real world social commentary. It comes very close but it's kind of wishy washy about it's message. Obviously things like "Slavery is bad, racism is bad, Caste systems are bad, unjust social hierarchies are bad, humans are all created equal and the things that we fight each other for on the basis of race are technically arbitrary but are deeply rooted in our cultural context based on the actions of the generations that came before us." are things the game's story says loud and clear that we can all get behind. But some of the events in the story pose some interesting questions. Like in the case of Dohalim, do you confront the question of: do you condemn authoritarianism if the authoritarian is a "good person"? or, is there any difference between being a slave and being "free" if you are part of a social hierarchy where access to wealth and power is regulated by those who already have it, thus keeping it in the hands of the few and permanently out of the hands of those who need it? creating a system where the poor and middle class are always the victims of a rigged system and the fruits of their labor and suffering always funnel upwards to those who already have everything. The game doesn't aggressively confront these things and I suppose it doesn't have to. It does a great job at telling a story within the context of it's fictional setting. It's just hard to tell a story that includes things like slavery, racism and caste systems without people making some real world parallels and I'm not confident that the writers were prepared to be confronted with the nature of the subject matter they were introducing into their own story. But I would love to hear what someone has to say who is more politically and historically literate than myself who has played the game multiple times and really analyzed the story and see what they think. Overall the game's message of "people's differences are arbitrary and we should all strive to co exist even if it means forgiving each other for our pre conceived hatred" is a good message and the story's emphasis on friendship and having people close to you that you can trust is very heartwarming.

I do feel like the story does suffer slightly in the 3rd act due to a lot of long exposition dumps that really change the status quo of how we thought this world worked and I'm not completely sold on a lot of the events of the last 3rd but the finale was fantastic. It's a beautiful story and I loved (mostly) every minute of it. Minor spoiler, but the game does sort of a fake out ending at around the 35 hour mark when the game could have easily ended. I was initially not thrilled with the idea that there was an entire other arc of the game after that but most of the content in that last section of the game was good. The characters continued to grow and it was worth it for the actual ending. I finished the game without doing much of the end game side content at around 53 hours and I was level 48 when I cleared the final boss. At some point I will go back and finish the late game optional content which I know will put the game at over 70 hours. So overall I am not disappointed in it's length. If it was closer to 40 hours I would be fine with that too but I was very satisfied with the 53ish hours that I put in and I would only cut out some very minimal stuff from the last arc of the story to make the pace flow better. 

Well, that about concludes my thoughts on Tales of Arise. I love this game to pieces and I don't hesitate putting it somewhere between my top 15- top 20 games of all time. I am actively gathering up assets such as patterns and 3D print files for the characters because I want to make an Alphen cosplay within the next year or so with my wife being Shionne accompanied by any other friends that want in on it too. Thanks everyone for reading, I will see you next time.