After feeling a bit of burnout from World of Warcraft: Classic I was browsing for new games to play and I found Tales of Arise in the Playstation Plus Game Catalogue. I'm generally not very into JRPGs but I loved Tales of Phantasia as a child so I decided to give this one a go.
What is Tales of Arise?
Tales of Arise is one of a ton of Tales games. I think there's more than 15 of these games in total. As far as I know they're all standalone game and they aren't really connected. Much like the Final Fantasy games. All of them are anime games.
Gameplay wise is has a lot of focus on storytelling through both cutscenes, cinematics and skits where characters talk together in the open world. It has the rather typical linear exploration that most JRPGs has and the combat is also heavily inspired by the classic turn based games, with an attempt to make it more action orientated.
First impressions
I've put a good few hours into the game now. I've defeated two of the five main bosses that the game sets up through the story, although I have a feeling there's going to be a lot more game after that. So far I would say that the game is simply OK. Combat is mostly a flurry of somewhat systematic button mashing, exploration is linear and the story is rather ordinary and predictable.
I'm also struggling a bit to connect with most of the characters. I feel like in anime related franchises you mostly grow to love the characters the most and not necessarily the story. These characters are rather stale, predictable and hardly unique.
I was also quite disappointed in the difficulty of the game. I started the game on hard difficulty which resulted in really long combats. I downgraded to normal and the only different is that combats gets shorter. There's no real change in the difficulty except giving enemies more health. That is quite disappointing.
Will I continue?
At this point I'm not quite sure if I will continue the game. I put it down roughly two weeks ago and I haven't really looked back. I hate dropping games but then again if I'm not having to much fun with a game I would rather find one I can enjoy. Currently that game is the new Lords of the Fallen. I will be writing about that soon.
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.