Tales of Arise

[DisturbedSwan]

 

[DisturbedSwan]

 

[Maryokutai]

Sweet, so I can see how this runs on base Xbox One.

[Maryokutai]

Anyone tried the demo yet? I gave it a shot for 30 minutes yesterday (just to get a feel for the game) and I'm rather impressed. It really looks and feels extremely high quality, a massive step for the franchise as a whole that makes it hard to find an equally impressive evolution in the gaming space to compare it to. You'd probably have to go back when generational leaps were still a thing and look at OoT -> TP to get a feel for what they've accomplished here.

 

Of course the jury's still out on whether the actual game is good as well, but the signs are all here for this to be something special. It has a very western feel to how your presence in the world is portrayed. The camera is closer, the world seems more like a place than a backdrop. The music, which is excellent by the way, is more subtle, less Yoko Shimomura, more Jeremy Soule, which gives it the kind of ambience you'd expect from a game like Oblivion or Witcher and not a colourful JRPG. Speaking of colours, it thankfully doesn't go the FFXV route of drowning everything in muted greens and greys to mimic western RPG but still retains its identity and only borrows ideas where they fit.

 

I'm not 100% convinced about the combat, but that area has always been the serie's weak spot for me. In this case there's a certain amount of hit feedback that's lacking and if multiple characters start using their arts it's really difficult to see what's going on. I picked the female knight character who can't dodge, so maybe that's on me for making the initial impression a bit more complicated than it should be. It also maps normal attack to a shoulder button by default, which at this point almost feels like a desperate cry to give off the impression that you have a big boy fighting system. Thankfully you can freely remap the buttons.

 

So while I still have yet to be convinced by the fighting, everything else is almost exactly the right direction to evolve the JRPG into unless of course you're going for a nostalgia vibe as in Octopath or Bravely Default. I skipped most dialogue so I can't say much about that but the little I saw/heard was the usual expositionary stuff, meaning unlike the rest of the game, it's kind of standing still on the writing side of things (where are the FFXII writers when you need them?).

 

I'm not going to play it right away because as good as it looks on Xbox One, the fade-ins and pop-ups feel a bit jarring. I'm also not sure if the Skyward Sword esque watercolour effect (see below) is only on last-gen to hide draw distance issues. I will however buy it right away and then play whenever I have a Series X because I think this is the right direction for the franchise. Certainly haven't been as excited for a Tales game since Symphonia. Now it just needs to turn out better than that.

 

[DisturbedSwan]

Sounds good, I have downloaded but not tried the demo yet, probably won't find the time until the weekend. Positive impressions though, game is looking excellent, can't wait to give it a go.

[bellow]

I've managed a quick five minutes. Hopefully I'll do the whole demo tonight. I liked what I saw, though.

 

You've got to be wary the optional dialogue in these games. They're hit and miss to say the least. It's easy to feel you might be missing out, as they can cover some character back story. 80% of the time, though, they're just low grade attempts at humour. They absolutely wore me out in Vesperia.

[Maryokutai]

You can rewatch all of them when you set camp. 

[DisturbedSwan]

Reviews are in:

 

Metacritic (PS5 Version)

 

OpenCritic

 

 

[bellow]

That's gone down well. Can't say I liked the combat in the demo.

 

I had the feeling that, like in Vesperia, you have loads of options and combos but there's one that's more effective than anything else so you just end up doing the same thing in every battle.

[Maryokutai]

That's uncharacteristically high for a non-FF/DQ JRPG. I was sold off the demo already but hopefully this means more people give it a shot.

[bellow]

Just tried to find out about a switch version. Seems there's no plans.

 

Do they just hate money at Bandai Namco? 

 

 

[Maryokutai]

It already runs less than ideal on PS4 and Xbox One, it'd probably be a total eyesore on Switch.

 

They hinted at more ports for older Tales games recently, I think that's their approach to get to the Switch audience instead. Makes more sense also, since Tales kind of stagnated on PS3 level graphics for the longest time.

[radiofloyd]

https://www.gematsu.com/2023/09/tales-of-arise-expansion-beyond-the-dawn-announced
 

20 hour expansion. Out November 9th.

[DANGERMAN]

I still need to start the main game 

[DisturbedSwan]

Same, always looked cool but never got round to it. Expansion looks cool too.

[mfnick]

Same again. Bought it ages ago and not even started yet. 

[Maryokutai]

I wish I could say the same.

 

I wonder what drove Bandai Namco to greenlight this DLC. Arise has completely fallen out of any discussion happening about current RPGs, most likely because it's just a very average game with an almost painfully bad narrative and dialogue. It's the kind of game you sort of accept early on in a generation because it's pretty, but deep down you know you wouldn't have played it if there were better alternatives around.