I just finished the second castle in Tales of Arise and I'm thinking of dropping the game.
All the issues people have with the bad Tales games are still present in this one but the graphics and combat are marginally better. Characters are still designed for cosplayers and still barely talk about anything but plot exposition. The music is still forgettable and towns/dungeons are still static with flavorless NPCs. This series after Vesperia really reminds me of Final Fantasy XIII. Maybe the dev team is made up of those weirdos that constantly comment online about how that game was a misunderstood masterpiece.
I'm going to give it one more session before I drop it, Maybe it gets better. But right now I'm really not understanding the buzz behind this entry.
I think the reasons why you dislike it are the reasons I like it. It really is my comfy game as of late.
- The world/level design is fairly simple
- Most quests don't take too long and take place in the area
- You can just mash some buttons at the right time and cool shit happens
- There's a few systems like creating items from mined ore but you can ignore those
- Doesn't look like enemies scale (at least not in story quests)
You're basically OP in the story from the moment you get that Blazing Sword.
Depending on how deep you want to dive into the systems and how the story progresses I would say this is a 8/10 game at best.
Style over substance mostly.
But when compared to say Xenoblade 2 (which I'm also playing) this is just much more accessible overall.
If you want a game with a seemingless endless combination of items, skills, fighting styles, combo's etc. Xenoblade 2 has that covered in spades.
As well as a world where you can spend 20 minutes moving from one quest marker to the next, figuring out how to work your way through the environment without getting killed by a random lvl 40 monster.
Tales of Arise in comparison is just a very pretty (and it does look very pretty) SNES RPG. Not all that different from the Trials of Mana remake I played a while ago.
I've played very few Tales games but I think the GameCube one had more complex battle systems and world design than this one.
But all that said, this game is very enjoyable and well made for what it is.