Anime Tales of Arise - Shounen trying to be deep.

[Alphard]

Damn the second lord was such a shitty mess of a fight. Not really hard, but chaotic as hell and without a proper pattern to learn, because you can only brute force this fight by abusing consumables. About this, good idea to make orange gel unavailable at sellers. Due to a little mistake by me, not changing ai behaviour fromooze boss, my team burned all orange gel by the time i reached the lord. So i had to reload an old file and doing half of cyslodia again. Hope the games gets better balanced and with more good fight like the first boss, because honsetly the second lord didnt give me any joy when i beated, i was mostly dodging randomly in the clusterfuck and spamming items

 

[Ysaye]

I've always been excited about a new tales game and try to play them day one but unfortunately not this time. Anyone play this on PS4? How does it run?

I am currently playing on PS4; seems to be running fine but then I haven't played on PC and I don't think I would really notice screen tearing and the like. Definitely no lag (yet) though (I am about 3-5 hours in I think).

All I can say is it feels like a Tales game in many ways (I feel like I am playing a modern version of Tales of Phantasia) which is somewhat nostalgic but gameplay-wise it is a come-down from something like Souls games or Ys combat or even Tokyo Xanadu. I have been trying to get good at dodge but it just feels really weird and I just find myself mashing buttons way too much (which again is maybe a traditional tales thing). Maybe once I get the spellcasting readhead I will just sit back and spam Artes rather than trying to be a melee masher?

It looks pretty and has world-view soundtrack like Skyrim, but the battle music is better. I have to say that Shionne at this early stage is giving me Lunar Eternal Blue vibes but yes don't know what the plot twist is yet. Again the cut-out comics is a callback to older Tales games but it really feels a bit wierd as a design choice, as is the phasing to battles.

 

[HoboForEternity]

The game kind of falter off towards the second half due to recycled enemies. (There are seriously like 10 regular enemy types they keep using over and over. The wolf, the boar, the jelly fish thing, the bat, the lobster, the bird, the gorilla, slime, etc)

Mini bosses and bosses are still entertaining but regular combat is hurt by lack of variety. The fact isnt just the pallete swap but each enemy of the same type share the same 90% movesets with the bigger one. Only sometimes the higher lv enemy have stronger artes, but their movesets are still mostly the same.

The actual combat is actually more fun at high level as you finally can chain some crazy combos and all the characrers are well balanced, but the lack of regular enemy variety really hurts the overall experience.

As for the story i am still mildly entertained by it, they does dip a little into some interesting theme but the writers haven't the ability or purposely avoid to delve deeply into one aspect.

Still overall a good game, but ys8 is still undisputed king of ARPG in recent times.

 

[Reinhardt]

I see game is really popular in the west...

 

[Ontopoly]

Just finished the first half of the game. Enjoying it, although I'll always say that they need to bring side scrolling tp combat back.

Combat is pretty fun so far, although the reskinned enemies are a little much. Same enemies but stronger repeated over and over, but when you get to a unique boss or mini boss it plays a lot better. Breaking cores, dodging, using character specials to counter them, setting off your long charge moves once they're knocked down and hoping you finish before they get back up; all feels fun and great. I've had a lot of close runs with bosses where I barely beat them and they feel satisfying when you do. All the lords are really good boss battles, even though I couldn't meet the dps check on the second guy and had to lower the difficulty to moderate. Having CP and orange gels serve as a resource management was a cool idea that I feel works well. CP really does make it so you have to always pay some amount of attention so that you're not running out of resources quickly since I don't want to go back to town several times to restock it and I don't have enough money for orange gels. It serves a similar function to TP which the last few games got rid of but haven't replaced with a new mechanic until now.

So far the story feels fine but rushed. Like it's hopping from story beat to story beat without doing all the work in between. Towns in tales games have also gotten really stale. Hallways that you barely spend any time in rather than the old square-ish towns where you can go into the houses and talk to random npcs for throw away dialogue. I'm missing the towns that actually served as hubs and you would go back to them a couple times in between going through a dungeon or series of events.

Good game.

 

[Rean]

The FOV needs a slider, pronto.

 

[Rean]

Kisara still looks so fuckin' mean, lol

 

[Ontopoly]

Kisara still looks so fuckin' mean, lol

Is that one of the paid extra costumes?

 

[Rean]

Is that one of the paid extra costumes?

Premium costume pack, yes.
I don't recall where the flower is from.

 

[Rafidur]

The FOV needs a slider, pronto.

There's a cheat table for it IIRC, but it spazzes out when the camera pans on something and causes random crashes.

 

[Ontopoly]

Premium costume pack, yes.
I don't recall where the flower is from.

You really are a weeb...
The flower is from an owl. I put it on her too.

 

[Rafidur]

I put it on her too.

Who didn't?

 

[Rean]

There's a cheat table for it IIRC, but it spazzes out when the camera pans on something and causes random crashes.

You can also mess with it with Flawless Widescreen, but it breaks menus. Maybe the Arise SDK guy can manage a proper fix soon.

You really are a weeb...
The flower is from an owl. I put it on her too.

I hadn't even noticed it was an owl, cause most of the time I play this drunk. Cool.

 

[Rean]

So, I've seen a few people claim they dislike the lategame. I don't agree, as I'm certainly getting more and more immersed the longer the game keeps going, especially with the revelations about Alphen and the whole history of the conflict. It's an interesting approach, giving the player context and information in such a limited piecemeal way, you either have the patience for it or you don't. In the beginning, all you get is disconnected pieces of different environments that feel empty and lazily made, I was repeatedly on the edge of dropping the game because of how bad and without context earlygame seemed.
And it took me dozens of hours, but I finally understand combat fairly well, at this point, too, which makes everything much better. Don't think it was meant to be too hard, but I breezed through the ship with Shionne.
Not as avant-garde as Berseria, but I'm finally having fun with Arise now.

 

[Rean]

I still have a few nagging bits that just feel too 'gamey' to ignore, but maybe (hopefully) they are addressed later, although I doubt it. I don't like how the environments dictate enemy scalability and strength.

Spoiler

Why is the first lord on the journey the weakest one and the last one the strongest? And why couldn't they create a more complex story without tying everything to elements?

 

[Ysaye]

I still have a few nagging bits that just feel too 'gamey' to ignore, but maybe (hopefully) they are addressed later, although I doubt it. I don't like how the environments dictate enemy scalability and strength.

Spoiler

Why is the first lord on the journey the weakest one and the last one the strongest? And why couldn't they create a more complex story without tying everything to elements?

Be prepared to be disappointed - there are a few significant plot twists still to come from (I am presuming that you are just before Vohlron, for which there is a bit of immediate explanation to the second comment of your spoiler in the new future?) but some of them just scream "plot twist for game development reasons!".

Maybe I am spoiled by Kiseki games but the world felt so wooden, and plot wise the characters NEVER let up talking about themselves and others being slaves of one form/situation or another and needing to fight for freedom to the point where you will just want to scream that they have existentially defined themselves as such and they should just get over it and accept they are never going to be free.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Man I have no clue what I'm doing but I still get by.

 

[Black Angel]

Most of my losses so far have come from turning around to notice my AI companions are all dead from a bosses' super move as they were too dumb to dodge it. I just realized there's a FFXII-style gambit system, so tweaking that would probably lead to better results, but I haven't messed with it so far.

I didn't realize this even though I was tuning in to some streamers playing the game.

I'm in.

 

[Rean]

Be prepared to be disappointed - there are a few significant plot twists still to come from (I am presuming that you are just before Vohlron, for which there is a bit of immediate explanation to the second comment of your spoiler in the new future?) but some of them just scream "plot twist for game development reasons!".

Maybe I am spoiled by Kiseki games but the world felt so wooden, and plot wise the characters NEVER let up talking about themselves and others being slaves of one form/situation or another and needing to fight for freedom to the point where you will just want to scream that they have existentially defined themselves as such and they should just get over it and accept they are never going to be free.

I try not to think of Kiseki while playing other games, cause, yeah, once you've played Kiseki nothing compares.
The worst thing is how empty and shallow the NPCs are. The main cast get development, but no one else does, they're just throwaways with meaningless flavor text or maybe a quest. That makes it hard to find the motivation to care about what's happening in the world and adds to the disconnect between the cast of heroes and the rest of Dahna.

 

[Correct_Carlo]

Does this game suck?

 

[Rean]

Arise's story is 1/10th of what Berseria's was. Despite that, combat is awesome. Boost attacks are out-of-this-world cool.

 

[Ontopoly]

Berseria's story is 1/10th of what Abyss' was. Despite that, combat is awesome.

 

[Correct_Carlo]

Berseria is a lame turn based game, correct?

 

[Rean]

Berseria's story is 1/10th of what Abyss' was. Despite that, combat is awesome.

Velvet > Luke, ok?

Berseria is a lame turn based game, correct?

Not turn based. You're booted off my thread, fuck off!

 

[Ontopoly]

Velvet > Luke, ok?

Absolutely not. Luke goes through much more personal growth and changes drastically based off of what goes on in his journey. Luke doesn't just deal with betrayal like Velvet, he has to deal with guilt too. That drives him in a much more satisfying way than Velvet running around yelling ARTORIAS! You're telling me the Luke Asch 1v1 near the end isn't the greatest tales of scene?