Tales of Arise - My Review Score 7/10 (spoilers) - PLATINUMED

I finally completed the game (main story and all non-endgame side quests).

Here is my final review and score.

Score - 7/10

Art/Graphics:

As far as a Tales game goes, the artwork and graphics were extremely well-done, and, IMO, some of the best in the series.

Characters were fairly well-designed, although pretty typical in regards to what you would expect.

The set pieces were fairly beautiful, although I found the final region to be stereotypical and boring/repetitive. It just seemed to be your run of the mill dungeon.

The enemies were really well-designed and looked great. I do think they took some inspiration from a other games, like Dark Souls for the large hammer wielding demons.

Score:

Not terrible, but it is very hard to compete with the previous Tales games in this regard. The main theme was not as good as some of the previous.

Story:

Nothing special. It wasn’t very interesting overall. I started to lose interest as the cartoon villains continued their cartoonish ways. The end game wasn’t expected, but also wasn’t built up at all and the aliens were just sort of dropped in. The “final” boss was bland and unimaginative. Volheim was simply a less interesting, angry, emotional Sephiroth-like character (wants to destroy it all) who is overused.

Characters:

The characters are generic and the game uses them in the same way so many JRPGs use their characters.

They overcome a trial or learn something about themselves after whining for a bit, become stronger, then they start whining again. That was a major issue I had with FF13, in that the characters are ALWAYS bitching and moaning and another character has to address their “feelings”. Really turns me off.

Gameplay:

Initially, the gameplay was a selling point. The battle system is great in the early game. It then becomes increasingly tedious as it continues.

The smaller, mob enemies are fun to fight since you do control the time of the specials by being able to directly control the meter’s buildup. The bosses and larger enemies are simply HP sponges, especially in the later game.

The end game then has a terrible issue with grinding, and not fun grinding.

Overall:

A very pretty but generic game.

Would I recommend it? Sure. It is still a Tales game and I did enjoy it for the most part. It became tedious and long winded near the end, resulting in my skipping of most cutscenes and dropping the difficulty just to speed to the end.