Board 8 > I've played the first 90 minutes of Tales of Arise

(+) Yeah! (+)

And I swear this is just Anime Red Rising

I'm feeling attacked.

just wait for someone to surgically acquire shining eyes

this is the first time in a long time that i've met a tales game where it is rather than thinking about it as a crappy version of another game. i wouldn't be upset if there was twice as much enemy variety. but the combat is fun and not terribly mashy (at least yet) because it's easy to put together a good combo when i'm being intentional.

shionne insisting on going to get that magical girl dress is such a vibe. she is clearly the main character and iron mask is just along for the ride (and for doing combat because i haven't figured out how to switch yet). and he clearly adores her, as he should

about to fight the first big boss guy (mr. fire), we'll see how that goes

Tales of Arise is decent. I enjoyed the Mr. Fire arc.

Tales of Arise starts okay and then keeps getting worse and worse as the game goes on (like most Tales games).

I think it actually gets better and better and THEN it gets worse. I wouldn't say it's ever actually bad though.....awkward maybe.

It's a good game! It's no Berseria or Abyss, but it's solid. Gameplay core is great even if it's pretty broken the stronger you get.

i cannot remember this character's real name

it is alphinaud

They stick with the pacing-killing skits they've been doing since like Xillia. I really hate that

Tales Skits are one of the best things about the franchise, and it's a big part of why it's party member dynamics are better than a majority of it's competition most of the time.

When they're short and funny like the old games, sure. When they're incredibily long, being used as a replacement for cutscenes or as a repeat of what we just saw, and they give you several back to back, it is a problem.

I'll give this game credit cus at least you can choose to not interrupt the gameplay flow and watch them at a campfire.

obvious future party member eren yeager has arrived

i'm just skipping the voice acting in skits that feel like a repeat of things that we already know

I do agree that the way recent Tales games handle skits is a little annoying, where you end up getting like five at once because you've met some unknown criteria.

Skits also need to have the hand-drawn art too.

colliding posted...

where you end up getting like five at once because you've met some unknown criteria

these i'm also just doing one battle whenever i get a skit out of nowhere so that i can pretend that battle was the context

how dumb of an idea would it be to take all the stat boosters that the "deluxe pack" that i apparently bought gives me (looks like +75 to each stat), split them between Alvis and Shionne (so I'd do like +50 to one and +25 to the other depending on who seems like they should get the stat more), then raise the difficulty to Unknown?

if it matters, I've already done this with one third of the items and am playing on Hard <_<

well i died to Ooze Hive

can this be a spoilers topic now

i'm making it one

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oh the reason i originally came to post that

obviously zephyr is annoying and has 5000 death flags

but i did not expect him to be publicly executed. if they actually do that, this game really escalates

they did it, and eren yeager is very good at screaming, surprise surprise

is this game actually about real life? is the man really keeping us this far down without us realizing it? is doing my day job actually just feeding the belly of some Ganabelt Valkyris out there? will the history books look back on me as a normal person or a mindless drone? is one of the lords of a later domain just going to be named something totally outlandish like Elon Musk? it's kinda gross...

anyway, are these the lessons you're meant to take from this game?

i'm attempting to play as law. the bottom of his shoes are red, that's a look

(shionne and rinwell were clearly not meant for that, which is too bad. it's absolutely criminal that you can't play this game by like, picking shionne as the main character at the beginning. i get that her internal monologue is all spoilers but still)

i'm worried we will never find out why part of zephyr's ear was missing

actually law is kind of lame. this guy needs a costume upgrade quick. i made him wear glasses so that i will remember this is an issue

i have to stop there, we just entered the tower, more tomorrow maybe

skullbone posted...

Tales of Arise starts okay and then keeps getting worse and worse as the game goes on (like most Tales games).

Yeah Tales games never really hit the landing at the end do they?

I loved Arise, has some weak points, but the gameplay is super fun and engaging, if a bit broken at higher levels. Top 5 Tales game.

catesdb posted...

shionne and rinwell were clearly not meant for that

Shionne is enormously held back by the cowardice of this game not having an artes ball (key item from previous games that lets you hold a trigger to use different artes, effectively doubling the number of attacks you can map) but she's still okay when used certain ways. Rinwell is in the running for best playable Tales mage - she's absolutely bonkers once you get some of her key artes.

Sorozone posted...

Yeah Tales games never really hit the landing at the end do they?

Berseria made it all the way to the final dungeon!

And even then, that was just an issue with the dungeon itself being a fucking atrocity.

UshiromiyaEva posted...

Berseria made it all the way to the final dungeon!

I was gonna mention Berseria as the sole exception, but yeah that final dungeon is uhh yuck.

I've "beaten" Berseria 4 times now, by which I mean I've beaten it once, and then I've played it 3 times all the way to the final dungeon and stopped.

Berseria declines in the last 1/4 overall, but it's not that much and still has some very good scenes and plot beats. Symphonia didn't decline at all I think. No small wonder they're the two best games in the series.

Abyss is in the unique position of starting iffy (well, not for me, but I get it), and just getting better and better all the way to the end!

God I love that fucking game.

I liked Graces f all the way through and into the postgame but I think that's not a commonly held opinion

UshiromiyaEva posted...

Tales Skits are one of the best things about the franchise, and it's a big part of why it's party member dynamics are better than a majority of it's competition most of the time.

I would love skits in games with actually interesting characters

Symphonia and Abyss are really the only ones in the series that didn't lose steam, and they happen to be the first two I played, so it's hard to gauge if that's a legitimate belief or not. I didn't really enjoy Berseria's combat on the whole, so it was never a driving force, but the story takes a pretty egregious hit in it's final act, failing to capitalize on the deconstructed revenge fantasy it had been pulling off exceptionally well until that point. It's something I definitely want to put into words, but can't really accomplish in a message board post, so I probably shouldn't have even typed this out.

On the subject of Arise, however, I really hate it. I wrote about it at length before and don't think it'd make sense to repost that, but I hope TC enjoys it more than I did. I think I'm in the minority at least.

ganabelt beated. that was tough. i had to lower it from hard to moderate. that made him summon his clones one less time and it was way easier, but i still got negative GRADE or whatever for the battle. i'm definitely not good at this game yet

(imma call it GRADE. for the record, i think symphonia is the only one of these games i've beaten. i think i got 70% of the way through abyss, 20 hours of vesperia, and 40 hours of berseria)

this arc has really only raised "what does rinwell know" as a new question, and it has basically not answered any of my old questions at all. i really just want to skip to the part where alfin and shionne are nice to each other

i hope in one of the five realms they've realized they can compensate the dahnan workers with some useful thing that they have on rena and things are pretty chill there

yeah ganabelt was kind of unfair from what I remember. think I had to lower it too.

I want to say Ganabelt's mechanics are literally broken if you're playing on the highest difficulty - like I'm pretty sure it's actually impossible to defeat all his clones and cancel his mystic arte if you're playing in anything remotely resembling a natural way. Maybe I'm wrong but I dug pretty deep into this game's systems so I'm at least confident in saying it's really badly tuned.

oh right i didn't care about Mystery Guy Who Killed Some Zoogles at all, forgot that happened

sidebar did anyone else think zeugle was another word for dragon at first... i get that it's just another word for monster now

the movement slowdown when entering and exiting water is absolutely killing me

i wonder what this elde menancia place is going to be like, it doesn't have the inherent bleakness of the first two realms

am i meant to believe that rinwell has a crush on law or something? "oh no he doesn't understand me"

honestly i do enjoy their discussions of fashion choices. i agree with rinwell that law's shoulder wolf is dumb.

did this man just really strap some rocks to his sword to do "weight training"? i acknowledge that i may have misread it but i'm fine with that

just got to Traslida Highway which has 4 different exit points on the map labeled ??? that are far enough away to potentially each go to different zones. i'm down for the green area to be big. we'll see where this goes later

shionne's little sighs every time someone is like "the renans do bad stuff here" have gone on for a little too long. she either needs to speak up or someone needs to call her on it, the sooner the better honestly. i'm ready for some non-law character development